The imaginative epistolary and the mode of its formulation in Christina Nöstlinger’s book “Werter Nachwuchs!”

Abstract

The article examines the mode of text formulation in the book written by the popular Austrian children’s writer Christina Nöstlinger in their correlative relations with the most essential elements of the subject and content of the work. The analyzed text belongs to a fairly rare literary genre “imaginative epistolary”, since it is a series of letters of a fictitious addresser — an elderly woman, Emma K. to her offspring. The originality of the text lies in the fact that the letters are not written but inwardly “spoken” by a fictional author. This creates an imaginary communicative situation of extensive mental-verbal “dialogue” between the real author and the fictitious addresser of letters; between the fictitious author and her imaginary addressees; between the author and the text recipients. The study of the characteristic linguo-stylistic features of such a dialogue is preceded in this article by a historical overview of the evolution of “writing” as a type of the text, as well as the definition of the prototypical characteristics of “imaginative epistolary”. The background of the research is the analysis of similarities and differences of this text type compared with other epistolary genres, such as the (non-fictional) autobiographical epistolary and the novel or story in letters. The author interprets cases of contamination of narrative and reflective discourses, as well as linguo-stylistic markers of a substantial “dialogue” between a real and a fictitious author. The textual representation of the theme of language is considered as an important component of a potential dialogue between the real and fictitious author of an imaginative epistolary. The analysis is based on the idea that the real author is an immanent speech “subject” of the whole text, figuratively embodied, including the mode of formulation, in which there is a deep-structural isomorphism or functional-pragmatic uniformity of all its compositional and architectonic components aimed at implementing the intention of the author of the text.