The Issue of Indirect Meaning: On the Rhetorical Modifications in Fine Arts

Abstract

The article proposes to adapt the experience of rhetorical understanding of the text to the aesthetic issues of trope in the fine arts. Differentiating the rhetoric of figures and the rhetoric of the text as a whole, author proves the determination of the rhetorical (poetic) function in the fine arts as a means of self-detection of work’s artistic language involved in creation of meaning and as a set of operations leading to the semantic changes and to the integration of text semantics. Significance of metalogism as a type of rhetorical transformation in the fine arts has been revealed. A thesis that the category of visual metalogisms includes operations associated with the deviations from visual perceptual and logical codes present in a work, which is the specificity of the fine art systems of the modern art, has been put forward. Regarding the analysis of metalogisms, author concludes that the refusal from the principles of mimesis, the reduction of the optical illusion and the beginning of scene, which were typical for the art of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are the ways to realize poetic (rhetorical) function of language in the fine arts. The article reveals the functional heterogeneity of the various types of intertextual relations, suggested by the rhetoric of text. It has been accented that one of the sources, that generate indirect meanings in art, is a communicative situation, given by the presence of the centers of semantic uncertainty in a work and leading to activation of autocommunication acts. Taking into account the distinguishing between linguistic and extralinguistic symbolism, the proposed model can become a methodological basis for the differentiation of historical types of symbolism in art, including non-classic specific for art.