Место издания:Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences
Первая страница:263
Последняя страница:274
Аннотация:This paper is aimed at analyzing the prosody of the so-called poetic reading. The poetic reading is exemplified by Joseph Brodsky’s reading of his own verse and the writings of other authors. Poetic reading is viewed in comparison with the ordinary sounding speech where the prosody designates a variety of meanings that form sentences as speech acts and texts ― as connected units of discourse. When Brodsky recites poetry, he does not use any prosodic strategies developed in the Russian language for marking the structure either of a sentence or of discourse. Brodsky rather aims at designating some individual, non-linguistic, meanings, while most poets preserve in their reading ― either in full, or in part ― the prosodies characteristic of the natural spoken speech. Brodsky in his verse reading does not appeal to any prosodic means existing in language: the corresponding meanings in his reciting just remain unexpressed. The notion of a minimal poetic unit (in the terms of Brodsky) is introduced in this paper to argue that the unique prosodic strategy of Brodsky is aimed at dividing a piece of poetry into relevant items of poetic discourse. The boundaries of a minimal poetic unit are set by the author; they are marked prosodically by a very simple system of cues. From the viewpoint of content, a minimal poetic unit can by represented either by a short lyric poem or by an indivisible (or construed as such) fragment of a poetic text. The paper is illustrated throughout with the frequency tracings of the sounding records. The software program Praat is used in the process of analyzing the sounding data.