Sentido y ámbito. Una apostilla a la teoría literaria de Eugenio Coseriu

cycle «Littératures en traduction»

Jorge Wiesse :  “Sentido y ámbito. Una apostilla a la teoría literaria de Eugenio Coseriu” (en espagnol)

Without becoming a systematic body, Literary Theory is a topic of permanent interest for Romanian linguist Eugenio Coseriu. It is particularly relevant to the creation of his book Text Linguistics, as he understands that linguistic discipline as an hermeneutics of meaning. Indeed Coseriu’s book Text Linguistics deals extensively with literary matters.

In criticizing the Jakobsonian notion of “poetic function” as a key element of poeticity of a text, Eugenio Coseriu refers to metre with a simile. He says that this and all the phenomena that old Rhetorics grouped under the term numerus fulfills, in Poetry, the same function as a picture frame. While accepting Coseriu’s criticism to the ideas of Roman Jakobson, Jorge Wiesse argues that Coseriu’s comparison is inappropriate to explain the status of the sound level in Poetry. This clarification is usefull to specify the function of this level in the Poetry’s construction of meaning and to clarify the idea of the aesthetic sign, set out by Louis Hjelmslev and Sven Johansen’s Glossematics, and adopted, with modifications, by Eugenio Coseriu and Jürgen Trabant.

In relation to this last topic, he entertains the possibility of vinculating the concept of sense into that of atmosphere or environment (“ámbito”, in Spanish), advanced by Spanish philosopher Alfonso López Quintás using Shiller’s, Heidegger’s, Marcel’s and other’s ideas. In this way, Wiesse thinks the interpretative process activated by the sound level of poetry could be explained in a dynamic and creative way.