A „nyelvi arc” mint műfaji probléma: Bahtyin kontra Paul de Man

Kérdésfelvetés Weöres Sándor Psychéje kapcsán

Absztrakt

‘Linguistic Face’ as a Problem of Genre: Bakhtin versus Paul de Man

Questions Raised by the Sándor Weöres’ Psyché

This paper attempts to compare the concept of ‘linguistic face’ in the works of Mikhail Bakhtin and of Paul de Man. What justifies this comparison is that for both thinkers, the literary technique used to create a human face is a genre marker. For Bakhtin it helps distinguish between poetic and prose discourses within the novel, whereas for Paul the Man, between lyrical poetry and autobiography. The genre-ambiguity and heterogeneity of Sándor Weöres’s book, Psyché – which, together with other features, has provoked debates ever since the work’s first publication – makes it a singularly fitting example to test the two approaches. The purpose of the paper is to make a distinction between the different layers of the work, examining the different ways of providing characters with faces, and showing how and to what extent these techniques function as genre markers. Psyché, with its intertextuality and elements of stylistic parody, also raises questions concerning the monological character of lyrical discourse, (Bakhtin) as well as de Man’s approach to the interpretation of lyrical poetry. It is this inquiry that enables us, then, to analyse the difference between the two thinkers’ concepts of lyrical poetry, which, in turn, makes it possible to describe the difference between de Man’s and Bakhtin’s philosophy of language.