Article

Name: Communicative Situation in Artistic Discourse as the Subject of Media Translation: Silence on the Page and on the Screen

Authors: Anna V. Shvets

Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russian Federation

Abstract:

The author draws on John Searle’s postulate that artistic discourse represents “as if” real speech acts and communicative situations. The communicative situation becomes a metaphorical signifier (a “mega-metaphor”). The signified consists of a complex interplay of textual “clues” and a recipient’s idiosyncratic associations and background knowledge. As a specific case study, the author examines Robert Bresson’s film adaptation of Dostoevsky’s novella White Nights (1848), titled Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971). The author proposes viewing film adaptation as a process of transmitting the experience of reading rather than conveying the internal structure of the text. The analysis focuses on silence as a communicative situation employed to model the director’s receptive experience.

Keywords: pragmatics, pragmapoetics, film adaptation, transmedia translation, Bresson, Dostoevsky

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