Главная страница
russian   english
<< back

Title of Article

SPECIFICS OF THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE TITLE OF A LITERARY PRETEXT IN THE REPERTORY OF RUSSIAN THEATERS (SEASON 2020-2021)


Issue
1
Date
2021

Section
VERIFYING HARMONY WITH ALGEBRA

Article type
scientific article
UDC
82.2+792.09
Pages
74-91
Keywords
заголовок, претекст, пьеса, театр, трансформация названия, title, pretext, play, theater, title transformation


Authors
Proschin Evgeniy Evgenevich
Natsionalnyy issledovatelskiy Nizhegorodskiy gosudarstvennyy universitet im. N.I. Lobachevskogo


Abstract
This research was conducted at the junction of literary studies, sociology, and statistics. The study focuses on the cases when a literary work that served as the basis for theatrical interpretation was renamed. This almost always happens to epic and dramatic works since cases of not even the transformation of the title but merely a reference to lyrical or epic genres in the theater are extremely rare in productions staged on the basis of a single work. The author nwas able to discover several hundred cases of transformation of the title of a pretext and proposed three principles for analyzing the mechanisms of such a transformation. The first has to do wi th the formal aspects: to what extent - partially or completely - the verbal formula of the original is changed, how this can be traced on different linguistic levels. The second dimension is conceptual, that is, it reflects the connection between the title of the play and the text, namely the orientation of the updated title towards the text of the play implemented in a number of original ways: from genre markers to an allusive-associative imagery series. The third aspect is the receptive specificity of the title, that is, its connection with the viewer's "horizon of expectations?. Observations show that radical experiments with the title are not something totally common. Statistically, "cosmetic" title edits successfully compete with bolder, more distant variants of the original's verbal formula. This in itself indicates that the audience's receptive horizon is presented to theaters as quite trivial. If we recall that among the leaders of renaming - by name and work - are the texts included in the school reading list (that is, Russian literature of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries), then we can assume that the transformed title should not alter or even slightly modify the usual reading procedure, but rather gently shift the usual accents, preventing the appearance of coddled associations that arise automatically when works from school reading list are mentioned.

File (in Russian)