Lecture
The event of the life of the text,
that is, its authentic essence,
always unfolds a t t h e b o u n d a r y o f t w o c o n s c i o u s n e s s e s,
t w o s u b j e c t s.
M.M. Bakhtin
The text has always been recognized as an object of philology. Philology itself arose out of the need to read, understand, and
preserve ancient texts. At the time of philology's origin, the texts considered ancient were, for example, those of Homer (in the West, in
Ancient Greece) and the «Rigveda» (in the East, in Ancient India).
These same tasks are in fact addressed by contemporary philology as well, when it studies ancient and old texts. Thus, when
examining, for example, the chronicle texts about the campaign of Ermak
Timofeevich (?—1585), researchers take into account that these texts were created no earlier than 45—50 years after the event. That is why the chronicle sources on Ermak's campaign are studied in the context of other chronicles and documents. Only in this way, — as
E.K. Romodanovskaya notes, citing one of the specialists of the first half of the 20th century, — is it possible to solve the task of «re-working an old subject that, with the passage of time, has become covered over with a layer of epic
embellishment and idle polemics»1
.
In contemporary philology the range of tasks in the study of text has changed substantially.
At the center of its attention lies the task of comprehending the life of
the text. The text is examined in its relations to man, reality, other texts — in short, in the milieu of its existence.
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For example, according to data from the French scholar J. Kristeva
(b. 1941), the text of a poem by the 19th-century French writer
Lautréamont stands in various relations with the texts
of predecessor authors (their names are given below in parentheses),
including:
a) the source text preserves its general logical content but
acquires a new meaning. Cf.:
l source text (La Rochefoucauld): Not to notice how our friends' feelings of friendship cool — is proof of a lack of friendship;
l Lautréamont's text: The ability not to notice how
our friends' feelings of friendship grow — is proof of friendship;
b) one of the parts of the source text is subjected to negation.
Cf.:
l source text (Pascal): We gladly part with
life, provided that people talk about it;
l Lautréamont's text: We gladly part with life,
provided that people do not talk about it2
.
At the present stage of social development, the world of texts
has filled the whole space of human life: texts — in
books, the media, the Internet, in the sphere of business life, of administration...
It is not for nothing that among some journalists there is a widespread view that
in the world only what is reported in the media actually happens. The diversity of the world of texts is evident: it contains both original
works by literary classics and scholarly works, and books
of the type «100 Best Essays», «1000 Papers on Economics»; works of literature and numerous
theatrical, film, and television versions of these works
(or versions «based on» them); texts of genuine historical
documents and texts of journalistic, artistic, memoiristic, and other interpretations of historical events... The diversity of the world of texts and of the relations among them increases
the significance of the text as an object of philology, creating the preconditions for the formation, within philology, of a number of directions studying
different types and kinds of texts in their relations. (See, in the
readings given below, fragments of a book by the contemporary
Russian philosopher I.T. Kasavin.)
The complexity and diversity of the world of texts is also determined by changes in the texture (Lat. factura — working,
structure) of the text.
Until the mid-to-late 20th century, philology dealt predominantly with texts that were written, printed, or oral.
The English philosopher M. McLuhan declared in the mid-20th century:
«the medium is the message». Taking this
judgment into account, one can understand that the material and instruments used to create
a text — stone and scraper, parchment and stylus, paper and pen or
pencil, writing paper and a typesetting-writing device, the human speech apparatus — each have their own possibilities and limitations
in conveying the message. The reason is that, as M. McLuhan observes, the «message» of any medium of communication is «the change of scale, pace, or pattern that it introduces into human affairs»3
. Compare in this respect, for example,
a letter sent by ordinary post and a letter
sent by e-mail.
At the end of the 20th — beginning of the 21st century, yet another type of textual texture arises — the electronic one. The emergence and development of electronic
communication has led to the fact that a person creating a text
actually experiences the very process of producing the text, since he has the opportunity to vary the text being created, to introduce into it
fragments of previously created text, his own or someone else's, to receive
a reply to the message sent, and, in direct communication (online), to make changes to the text, to «place»
it within hypertextual space. The text acquires the contours
of a living «organism» — it exists in the act of communication. In this
way, the advantages of the «traditional» textures of text — oral, written, and printed — are combined here with the advantages of the electronic one: scale, pace, and pattern.
Finally, the world of texts is distinguished by a kind of many-facedness. In contemporary culture the text appears as a source, a
monument, a work, a message.
All the sciences that make up philology deal with the text
as a source. Research in both linguistics and literary studies presupposes recourse to the text. Whether one studies a
106 107
For example, according to data from the French scholar J. Kristeva
(b. 1941), the text of a poem by the 19th-century French writer
Lautréamont stands in various relations with the texts
of predecessor authors (their names are given below in parentheses),
including:
a) the source text preserves its general logical content but
acquires a new meaning. Cf.:
l source text (La Rochefoucauld): Not to notice how our friends' feelings of friendship cool — is proof of a lack of friendship;
l Lautréamont's text: The ability not to notice how
our friends' feelings of friendship grow — is proof of friendship;
b) one of the parts of the source text is subjected to negation.
Cf.:
l source text (Pascal): We gladly part with
life, provided that people talk about it;
l Lautréamont's text: We gladly part with life,
provided that people do not talk about it2
.
At the present stage of social development, the world of texts
has filled the whole space of human life: texts — in
books, the media, the Internet, in the sphere of business life, of administration...
It is not for nothing that among some journalists there is a widespread view that
in the world only what is reported in the media actually happens. The diversity of the world of texts is evident: it contains both original
works by literary classics and scholarly works, and books
of the type «100 Best Essays», «1000 Papers on Economics»; works of literature and numerous
theatrical, film, and television versions of these works
(or versions «based on» them); texts of genuine historical
documents and texts of journalistic, artistic, memoiristic, and other interpretations of historical events... The diversity of the world of texts and of the relations among them increases
the significance of the text as an object of philology, creating the preconditions for the formation, within philology, of a number of directions studying
different types and kinds of texts in their relations. (See, in the
readings given below, fragments of a book by the contemporary
Russian philosopher I.T. Kasavin.)
The complexity and diversity of the world of texts is also determined by changes in the texture (Lat. factura — working,
structure) of the text.
Until the mid-to-late 20th century, philology dealt predominantly with texts that were written, printed, or oral.
The English philosopher M. McLuhan declared in the mid-20th century:
«the medium is the message». Taking this
judgment into account, one can understand that the material and instruments used to create
a text — stone and scraper, parchment and stylus, paper and pen or
pencil, writing paper and a typesetting-writing device, the human speech apparatus — each have their own possibilities and limitations
in conveying the message. The reason is that, as M. McLuhan observes, the «message» of any medium of communication is «the change of scale, pace, or pattern that it introduces into human affairs»3
. Compare in this respect, for example,
a letter sent by ordinary post and a letter
sent by e-mail.
At the end of the 20th — beginning of the 21st century, yet another type of textual texture arises — the electronic one. The emergence and development of electronic
communication has led to the fact that a person creating a text
actually experiences the very process of producing the text, since he has the opportunity to vary the text being created, to introduce into it
fragments of previously created text, his own or someone else's, to receive
a reply to the message sent, and, in direct communication (online), to make changes to the text, to «place»
it within hypertextual space. The text acquires the contours
of a living «organism» — it exists in the act of communication. In this
way, the advantages of the «traditional» textures of text — oral, written, and printed — are combined here with the advantages of the electronic one: scale, pace, and pattern.
Finally, the world of texts is distinguished by a kind of many-facedness. In contemporary culture the text appears as a source,
a monument, a work, a message.
All the sciences that make up philology deal with the text
as a source. Research in both linguistics and literary studies presupposes recourse to the text. Whether one studies a
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note as a speech genre, forms of address, for example, in student
circles, the spiritual crisis or upsurge of writer NN, the inner
world of a novel, the transformation of a writer's story into a film script
and further into a motion picture, the subject matter of contemporary jokes, ways of achieving success in business negotiations, philological
differences between blogging and Twitter, the persuasive power of the
word of a university lecturer... — in all these cases the material
for research is found in texts. The text is the source of factual material in philology. These are written and printed texts, tape or dictaphone recordings, texts
of radio and television programs, Internet texts, and so on.
At the same time, the text is a monument. Such is the purpose of
ancient texts, belonging to the past. Among the monuments of writing are various works: inscriptions
on coins, seals, coats of arms, stones, icons, texts on papyrus,
parchment, paper, manuscripts, books, charters, and others. All of these have value as evidence, as an embodiment of the history and culture
both of an individual person, and of a particular people, and of humanity as a
whole, at certain stages of development. Let us name a number of monuments of the oral folk-poetic creativity of the peoples of Russia:
the Altai «Maadai-Kara», the Bashkir «Ural-Batyr», the Ossetian «Nart» sagas, the Yakut «Yakut olonkho», and others.
The notion of the text as a work is used mainly
in literary studies. The question of distinguishing text and
work is one of the difficult ones in philology. Text and work are distinguished when a work of verbal art is considered in different aspects. In such a case the text
is the term for the work considered in its speech aspect
(Yu.M. Lotman: text is «one of the components of a work of art»). The work, considered in its other
aspects: the objective-figurative (the world of the work) and the ideational-semantic (the artistic content)4
, constitutes a literary work in the narrow sense of the term.
However, the notions of text and work are not distinguished by all
specialists. (See, in the readings, fragments of an article
by R. Barthes.)
The notion of the text as a message arises when
the text is considered from the point of view of its communicative nature. Having in
mind any phenomena of culture, including linguistic texts,
G.O. Vinokur calls a message «not only a word, a document,
or various kinds of things that we not merely use in practice
but which «speak» to us of something». And further:
the ideal message is a written text5
. In this characterization, text is considered as an utterance, i.e., in its
movement from the speaker (writer) to the listener (reader).
Thus, all the philological sciences deal with the text. This
allows us to conclude that the text is an object (more precisely, one of the objects) of contemporary philology. The role of the text in
philology, at all stages of its development, leads a number of specialists to the idea that the text is the sole object of philology
(S.S. Averintsev, Yu.V. Rozhdestvensky, Yu.S. Stepanov, and others).
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