Bondaruk L. The Role of a Symbol in the Structure of a Symbolist Narrative (a Case Study of Works by Marcel Proust and Maurice Maeterlinck).

The dissertation deals with the structure-forming role and peculiarities of the functioning of a symbol as a universal means of the literary polysystem at all textual levels of a symbolist narrative. A case study of Marcel Proust’s and Maurice Maeterlinck’s works shows how a symbol, as a dominant image in the hierarchy of means, creates an eponymous style, affecting an entire figurative system of a text. A multidisciplinary approach to a symbol study has been used. The combination of methods (a mythocritical analysis and a method of synchronic-diachronic separation of an image, narratological, archetypical, and hermeneutic analyses, a method of psychoanalysis and a theory of receptive aesthetics) has made it possible to decode symbols at the level of insightful discourses. The expediency of the symbolic analysis of big prose works and small dramaturgical ones is shown on the basis of Marcel Proust’s epic «In Search of Lost Time» and dramas by Maurice Maeterlinck. The concept of a symbol as a dominant element of a symbolic speech which manifests itself at the poetic, linguistic, mythological and archetypical levels has been suggested. The relationship between a symbolic speech and the simulation of a monomyth has been determined. The author’s definition of a symbolist narrative has been introduced. The works by Marcel Proust and Maurice Maeterlinck were examined in terms of the concept of a symbol. The structures of a «symbolist novel» and «symbolist drama» have been outlined and characterized.