The synergetic character of sense-making in the artistic discourse of Hermann Hesse (based on the novel ‘The Glass Bead Game’)

Abstract

The article substantiates the relevance of the linguistic and cognitive approach to the study of literary discourse. The research procedure is described using the methodology of analysing the cognitive-conceptual parameters of discourse, characteristics that reveal the peculiarities of the event representation in the author’s cognitive model and the influence of his discourse on the addressee’s socio-cultural ideas. The features of Hesse’s literary discourse as a complete model and its interpretive potential as an open process of modelling are analysed. The specifics of the individual style are studied on the basis of Hesse’s novel ‘The Glass Bead Game’. It is found that discursive meaning functions as an element of a multilevel cognitive formation, which is formed in a unique combination of the cognitive model of the world with the individual author’s rethinking of the nominated reality. The multiplicity of approaches and interpretations makes it possible to consider artistic discourse from different perspectives, including the value-sense approach to the study of the linguistic and cognitive basis of speech activity. In this perspective, linguocognitive mechanisms are identified. They reveal the peculiarities of the discursive interpretation of the surrounding reality by a linguistic personality. In the context of literary discourse, being realised in the discursive units of a literary text, the concept of ‘The Glass Bead Game’ receives semiotic expression in discursive signs that are key in H. Hesse’s individual style. The study has shown that the process of sense-making in literary discourse is a synergistic phenomenon; pictorial and expressive means stimulate the formation of certain images in the reader’s mind, involve him/her in the author’s artistic world. It is in the discursive context that semantic additions to lexical semantics make the semantic space as open as possible. The process of sense-making is determined by the subjectivity of individual understanding, since in the conditions of artistic communication the meaning of a word is not constant, and, functioning in the discursive context, the meaning of a lexical unit is ‘guessed’ by communicators.