Romana Jakobsona poetyka w świetle semiotyki

Abstract

In his treatise Poetics in the Light of Linguistics, Roman Jakobson argues that the main task of the theory of poetry is to define the essence of poetic art which is possible only in terms of linguistics since poetry is the "art of words”. It diliers from other uses of language because ol its aim which in this case is its aesthetic function. This task connects poetry and other branches of art, while the argument inspires Jakobson to look for various relations between poetry and other branches of art. Thus in Poeticsą, as in his other structuralist and semiotic writings, he argues that the foundation of the kinship of arts is the structural construction of their works in which he sees the same tricks as those used in poetry, as well as the employment oi signs. The dual construction of every work - and every artistic sign - analogical to the construction of the linguistic sign, in de Saussures terms, presupposing the existence of "the signifier” and "the signified”, lets us conclude that intersemiotic transłation is possible between arts, essentially similar to interlinguistic translation. On the other hand, the realization that a poem is also an artistic sign provides poetics with new instruments of description, borrowed from the general theory of signs, ie. from semiotics. In this way Jakobson explains how meaning comes into being in a poetic work. Contrary to the still popular argument that meaning is the result oi the referential function of poetic language, Jakobson claims that the meaning of a poem comes into being due to the presence of artistic tricks of which the most significant is parallelism. Drawing the readers attention to the features of repeated elements, it reveals not only their formal, but also semantic similarity. Furthermore, it suggests a relation of meanings, "multiplies" the senses and leads to ambiguity unattainable in non-poetic utierances, an ambiguity possible only in art - because only in its certain branches it is possible to observe the co-existence of introvertic semiosis, characteristic for music and non-representational plastic arts, and extravertic semiosis, characteristic for messages in which the referential function dominates, as in literature and representational plastic arts.