Article

Name: Emile Benveniste as Theorist of Poetic Discourse

Authors: V. V. Feshchenko

Institute of Linguistics RAS

Abstract: The article is devoted to the recently discovered materials of the eminent French linguist Emile Benveniste concerning the analysis of the poetic language. They represent the remaining manuscripts of the last conscious years of the life of the French language theorist, with an analysis of Charles Baudelaire’s poetic work and sketches of a theory of poetic discourse that was pioneering for that time. The linguist analyzed Baudelaire and lectured about him in the second half of the 1960s, but due to a serious illness, he did not manage to finish the research. Benveniste’s attempt to create an original theory of poetic utterance was ahead of time, and in some ways, it outlined aspects of the language of poetry that are not yet realized in linguistic poetics. These drafts are not just articles, but a full treatise on the structure of poetic language, the nature of poetic discourse and the linguistic method of studying poetry. Neither the article nor the treatise had time to see the light. It seems that if this happened, the development of linguistic poetics might have gone in other ways. In any case, theoretical ideas about poetic communication and concrete empirical findings about Baudelaire’s language made on these four hundred sheets partly anticipate some subsequent theories of poetic language, and in part set tasks that have not yet been solved in linguistics. In particular, these are areas of poetic phonetics, poetic syntax, poetic grammar, poetic lexicology, which are announced in the manuscript, but also implicitly planned tasks of describing poetic pragmatics, poetic semiosis, and poetic corpora. The main result of the pioneering but unfinished Benveniste’s project is an outline of the conception of poetic discourse, which had no analogues at the time of its formulation. The French theoretician's conviction that it is necessary to revise the entire linguistic apparatus with respect to the study of poetic language and to developing its definitions in this area is extremely important today. The Baudelaire manuscript shows that the approach to the literary corpus of a poet is not just one of the applications of linguistic theory, but should be a complex challenge to linguistics concerning the status of poetic discourse and a particular poetic work, which, in turn, questions the accepted categories of linguistic analysis. This is a critical approach to such concepts as communication, reference, utterance, message, sign, etc. in their projection on the poetic discourse in its specificity and anthropocentric setting.

Keywords: poetic discourse, E. Benveniste, language of poetry

Bibliography:

Benveniste E. Baudelaire. Paris, 2011.

Benveniste E. Problèmes de linguistique générale. Paris, 1980, t. 2.

Delas D. Saussure, Benveniste et la littérature. Langages, 2005, no. 159.

Feshchenko V. V. O vneshnikh i vnutrennikh gorizontakh semiotiki. Critique & Semiotics, 2005, no. 8. (in Russ.)

Laplantine C. Émile Benveniste, l'inconscient et le poème. Paris, 2011.

Laplantine C. Emile Benveniste : poétique de la théorie. Publication et transcription des manuscrits inédits d’une poétique de Baudelaire. Paris, 2008.

Martin S. (dir.) Émile Benveniste, pour vivre langage. Mont de Laval, 2009.

Stepanov Yu. S. Émile Benveniste i lingvistika na puti preobrazovaniy. In: Benveniste E. Obshchaya lingvistika. Moscow, 1974. (in Russ.)