The dissertation is devoted to the linguistic and poetic study of the Middle Ages discourse reproduced in the literary texts of the XX century German medieval prose. The literary text as one of the artistic communication components provides a deep insight into the multi-vector twists and turns of the medieval outlook and attitude, has an aesthetic experience, a final basis and makes it possible to understand its poetics, despite the fact that centuries have passed between the moment of its creation and the reception of the reader-client. The starting point of the analysis is the Middle Ages discourse understanding and its textual representation in novels by G. Hesse, L. Feuchtwanger, L. Rinzer.
The Middle Ages discourse appears as a certain social and linguocultural universe of a series of texts. At the same time, its textual base combines elements of narrativeness and analyticity, includes representation, interpretation and evaluation of historical or historiosophical primary sources, highlights the ideological and thematic similarity to medieval aesthetics, is a component of the general and integral cultural and philosophical complex of mentality back then, as well as reproduces the medieval spiritual atmosphere of scholastic age, concentration of problems around spiritual conflicts, Christian faith and feelings.
The dissertation describes the ways and methods of linguopoetic arrangement of the German-language picture of the world in the Middle Ages discourse using lexical and semantic means, including the most significant layer of confessional (Christian) vocabulary. A special place is given to the use of vocabulary related to the existence of the monastery and its inhabitants, in such a way emphasizing how important for the linguopoetic reproduction of the language picture of the Christian Middle Ages world is toponymy, which performs nominative-identifying function, contains auxiliary characteristics of agents of discourse, locality, historical events, and so on. Serving as a means of identifying geographical objects of the Middle Ages, toponymic vocabulary is under a deep impact of large-scale philosophical and aesthetic problems.
Phraseological units are represented by time-spatial, religious-spiritual, and bodily cultural codes. They complement and enrich the nominative inventory of discourse with evaluative and expressive means, reveal new semantic shades that contribute to the figurative denomination of objects and phenomena of reality. The most common phraseological units of its artistic space are efficient, mortal, somatic and confessional. The author's modifications of established phraseological units expand the functional field of such expressions, taking into account compositional and stylistic features, serve as expressive representatives of folk elements in a work of art, and reproduce the age coloring.
The conceptual representation of the world in the Middle Ages discourse by the XX century German literary prose is based on reproducing conceptual, perceptual-figurative and associative-evaluative reflections of linguoculture, which should be stored in memory and mentally represent the Middle Ages among its carriers.
The leading discourse-forming concept of the Middle Ages discourse is the macroconcept CHRISTENTUM which reflects the spirit and writing of medieval socio-and linguoculture and thereby «conquers» all other mental units of discourse. Appearing in the reproduced discourse of the Middle Ages as a concept of the highest level of generalization, CHRISTENTUM seems to absorb all the other mental units of this discourse. Among them, at least three discursively relevant areas are linguopoetically emphasized: theosophical (ideologemes GLAUBE, GOTT, MUTTER GOTTES), teleonomic (RITTERTUM, GEBET, LIEBE) and aesthetic (SCHÖNHEIT, HÄSSLICHKEIT). They are conditioned by the dominant Christian-clerical ideology of the pre-Renaissance period, and all three serve as dominant conceptual markers of the Middle Ages discourse.
So, the Middle Ages discourse is a phenomenon of historical order, characterized by the world community and «built» by its agents during its deployment, should be perceived by their clients adequately and in full accordance with the author's idea due to a masterfully reproduced language and conceptual picture of the world.
In the context of the proposed work, further research related to its subject and object seems promising. In the first case, linguosemiotics, linguopragmatics, linguosynergetics, hermeneutics, textology, etc. are scientifically relevant and based on the material of various natural languages. In the second case, other discursive formations of the past – antiquity, enlightenment, Renaissance, romanticism, realism, etc. may be of significant philological interest.
