UDC

Authors

Abstract

Palimpsest is one of the most important principles of text structure in modern English prose. A literary text’s complicated structure exacerbates the problem of understanding the meaning of the text as a whole. Having analyzed Gregory Norminton’s novel The Ship of Fools, the author expands on the notion of hermeneutic circle, which is understood by modern critics as a “circle of part and the whole”. It is this circle that initial difficulty of text hermeneutics proceeds from. This notion has been expanded and now includes a variety of contemporary knowledge. The process of decoding the knowledge embodied in the language is likened to palimpsest. Complex “palimpsests of human consciousness”, reflected in the novel, offer new opportunities for modern prose, especially the ability of palimpsest – as intertextual memory of the text – to “generate the model of life”. Theorists see this as an emergence of “hermeneutic model”. This way literary texts assume a more conventional and symbolic character. Modern textual palimpsests are formed not only by the high level of intertextuality, intermediality and interdiscoursivity, but also by way of storytelling. Their variety creates a text event in the reader’s mind. This event consists of a range of stories correlated with each other within the text as a whole. Each single story in Gregory Norminton’s novel The Ship of Fools corresponds with its history. The novelty of the text arises from a great number of reflected and rewritten character-based works of world art and literature and from a variety of polydicoursive texts closing the hermeneutic circle in the art work as a whole.

Keywords

References

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