Specific features of proxemic informative text structure in The Portrait of a Lady by H. James

Abstract

 The article deals with the English text space. The purpose of the study is to identify the specific features of the proxemic informative text structure of H. James’s The Portrait of a Lady. A new concept of “proxemic informative text structure” is introduced into text theory as a segment of text architectonics that describes the spatial parameters nominated by proxemes. Proxemes are considered as nominations of spatial parameters of the text. The typology of textual proxemes is specified and the existing proxemes-spacenаmes, proxemes-verbs of movement, proxemes-placenames, proxemes-landscape units are supplemented with such types of proxemes as a metaphorical landscape unit, an interior proxeme and a distant proxeme. The metaphorical landscape unit means a metaphorically marked proxeme that nominates a landscape description in the text. An interior proxeme is understood as a nomination of the interior decoration of a house. The interior proxeme revealed in the novel is a socio-cultural interior proxeme, interpreted as a socio-cultural informative construct in which two societies intersect: French, namely Parisian, and Spanish. A distant proxeme, i.e. a distant literary placename is understood as a proxeme that nominates a plot-textual reference to a location in which the described events do not occur at the moment when they are mentioned. Socio-cultural toponym-landscape unit is understood as a landscape nomination refl ecting the socio-cultural aspect of the location. For the first time, bi-kernel proxemes were identified, which are constructs of a set of kernels of the same type and constructs of a set of kernels of diff erent types. The bi-kernel feature of proxemes is one of the parameters of the specific features of the proxeme informative text structure in the work of H. James. Socio-culturally marked proxemic units, aligning various European cultural markers in the plot-thematic matrix of a work of fiction, are revealed in the proxemic informative text structure of H. James’s The Portrait of a Lady.  

Keywords

• english text space
• proxemic informative text structure
• metaphorical landscape unit
• interior proxeme
• distant literary placename