| From the beginning of 1960s,Lotman's poetics theory had gone through rather a long progress,which can be clearly reflected by his essays and works at different stages.But text was always the core of his consideration.Early Lotman introduced in biological theory and information science to his textual research.He tried to figure out what kind of vitality the artistic text preserve as living organism,since vitality is their most unique function.The answer is vitality of the artistic text show itself in how its language contains a great amount of information within limited length,and enable the artistic text to be an endless source of information.Such is the appeal of artistic text which no other type of texts can parallel.[1]Try to compare short stories by Chekhov and a psychological textbook:A 200-thousand-wordtextbook of any subject can only conveylimited information within a specific scope and time,even the most classic textbookwill be replaced bynew ones.While an excellent short story,such as those by Chekhov'and Gogol,can provide endless information to readers within several thousand words.Its artistic charm survives the time,and its unique aesthetic value can never be replaced!Information is namely meaning,the more information a book contains,the richerits meaning is,and the higher its aesthetic value is,and vice versa.Therefore,beauty is exactly the information.[2]Lotman always considers the text as a structure,and bases his theories on structuralism,regardless of his early literary text theoryand next cultural text theory.He believes the artistic text is a hierarchical system in which one certain element can be meaningful only in connection with others.The amount of information contained in the overall artistic text is far greater than the total sum of elements at each levels.To this end,Lotman focuses on the relationship between the text and outer text structures,and then explores the construction process of the whole literary works.He points out that research on any one text should be done in a certain background,art can be better understood by readers in the comparison with the non artistic phenomenon.The main source of the aesthetic value of the artistic text lies in its connection with the external text.Once removed,the text will be meaningless.Here the external text refers to the social and cultural context of the literary works,namely,political,economic,religious,cultural,and other factors."Lotman's research involves analysis of the internal structure of literary texts as well as the external relations between text and society,that is,the cultural environment.He has taken a solid step to fill the gap between the internal and external researches in literature and art by avoiding the drawback of individual study,linking both the internal mechanisms of literature and external objective reality,making it into theory.This is indeed a Copernicus revolutionary in literature research."[3]The reconstruction of new literary theories and methods has aroused widespread concern in the field of international literature and SemioticsIn practicing his theory of literary texts,Lotman mainly employs the research methods of structural linguistics.language is divided intothe first and second mode system.The formerrefers to natural language and artificial language including the language of science andconventional signal;the latter refers to the communication symbol system which base on natural language but more complex than it.Art belongs to the second mode system.Lotman pointed out that art language itself is as important as the information it conveys,since language elements such as phonetics and rhymes also carry independence aesthetic information.To prove this,he puts forward"aesthetics of opposites"and"the same aesthetic”theory,and uses the principle of"aesthetics of opposites"to analyze the meaning and structure of poetic texts,then points out that the poetictext is the generator of meanings.In addition,Lotman lays great importance to the initiative of the text.He believes that the text is not a passive container,but a generator.The text itself does not reflect the meaning,but generates the meaning.However,the generative process involves not only the extension of the structure,but also the interaction of various structures to a large extent.Text is home of symbols,where different languages interact with each other,penetrate,and carry out multi-level combination,which gives the text a huge potential for semantic proliferation.Readers receive different information from the text owing to their different focus.Therefore,text is always richer than languageWith the development and maturity of Lotman's academic thoughts,his theory of text poetics has been enriched and developed too.Later,the concept of text developed from the early meaning oriented to the function oriented.Lotman defines the text as"the text is the carrier of complete meaning and function which confirms text as the key element of culture."[4]In addition,Lotman pointed out that the text has the function of transmitting,generating and memory information.Theinformation transmitting function means the sender delivers information to the recipient.In this process,due to the differences in their cultural backgroundand personality factors of the recipient,text encoding and decoding of the reader is not exactly the same,thus information proliferation is inevitable.Theinformation generating function refers to the text is composed of a variety of language,and dialogue andgamesare carried out between different sub-structures within the system,whose complex relations between each other constitute the mechanism of information generating.Thetext memory function refers to the ability of the text to accumulate information and preserve the historical and cultural context.It can be seen that the cultural definition of information can enlighten us to regard the whole historical and cultural phenomenon as an open text,so as to make a research by means of semiotics.Obviously,compared with the previous period,Lotman's theory has been greatly enriched and expanded,and the concept of the text turned from the previous meaning orientedinto function oriented.After twentieth Century,the study on literary language has become the most prominent and hot topicin western literary and aesthetic fields.Since 80s,literary critics began to recognize that human history is not just records by language,behind language there is the cultural backgroundclosely related to power discourse and ideology.Therefore,what comes first to a text is culture.If the western literary circle benefited from the"linguistic turn"in the first half of the twentieth Century,then in the late twentieth Century it began to turn"cultural philosophy".While studying structural linguistics,Lotmanhas never stopped his research on semiotics.As early as the end of60s and the beginning of the 70s,Lotman gradually shifted his focus from literary to cultural texts.He tries to grasp the literary phenomenon through exploring the whole cultural context system.His theory of cultural semiotics covers not only the theoretical issues of literary texts and artistic expression,but also issues of social history,real life and cultural phenomena.The purpose of his research is to reveal the features of certain function through the study of the related systems of various functions.Therefore,Lotman's"cultural turn"is actually a turn from the analysis of language to the analysis of cultural context.A comprehensive survey of the main western text theorists shows most of them conduct their research in no more than 3 or 5 years,while Lotman devoted his life to the exploration and research of text theory.His interest is extremely wide,absorbing the core knowledge of linguistics,Russian formalism,structuralism,deconstruction,the Marx doctrine,psychoanalysis,postmodernism,integrating system theory,control theory,information theory,biology,mathematics,topology,literature and art,aesthetics,culture,history and sociology as a whole.Lotman believes that the"text",of course,not only refers to the workswritten by natural language written works,but also any object endowed with full meanings.For example,a painting,a play,a ritual,a symbol,or even an oral message can be called a text.Culture itself is a text,and the whole world can also be regarded as a text.The shiftfrom literary texts to cultural texts has reflected Lotman's profound knowledge and creative thinking... |
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