Summary
Jurij M. Lotman: Structure of an artistic text
The basic task of Lotman's book Structure of an artistic text could be defined as a very branched, multifaceted examination of the way in which a literary text is organized on the basis of language and in a language text (I always take language and language in the sense of natural language whenever the usage is not indicated otherwise). But it also deals with the ways in which it functions in culture and society. This is, probably, the most complete undertaking so far to single out, through very fine theoretical demarcations and numerous analyses, the internal mechanism that makes every successful literary text the bearer of extraordinarily complex, multi-layered and variable information. The ambiguous literary text is subjected here to a strict, thoughtful, systematized and methodologically almost flawless analysis. The text is analyzed layer by layer, i.e. alternately from several aspects, but at no time does it lose sight of the whole, nor the complex system of correlations that exist in the hierarchically organized text itself (as intratextual) or outside it (as extratextual).
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