Assoc. Prof. Kata Kulavkova, Ph.D.
Department od General and Comparative Literatute
Faculty of Philology: "Sts. Cyril and Methodius" University
Skopje, Republic of Macedonia

FROM SIMPLIFICATION TO PARONOMASIA
(Resemantization of the paradigm of the Turk in Macedonian literature)

The Macedonian oral literature is not a unique zone in the discourse in which the anthropological figure of the Turk is sketched. The first paradigm constructed therein integrates two aspects: the archetype and the pragmatic one. The archetypal aspectactualizes the archaic symbols of the evil (personified in devil/karagjoz, the Black Arab), whereas the pragmatic one reference to the social, religious and human relations (polarizing the powerful and rich Turks against the weak and poorlabor, Islam against Christianity, love, nostalgia, disharmony between the Eros and praxis, confessional and ethnical transfer of taboos). The second paradigm has been constituted in the literature between the two world wars, in the social drama, and it continues in the early novel production after the war, with historical and rural topic. It simplifies the picture of the Turk in black and white contrasts, in exhausted stylistic and semantic atmosphere, in which the aversion/inversion principle dominates. The third paradigm has been constructed in the new Macedonian literature, especially in the short story and the novel, and thereafter in the drama and poetry. It is initiated with the vision of the Turk in the Abadziev's stories, which promotes general human values and resemantizes the paradigm of Turk. It exceed the usual semantic limits/prejudices, offering new imagologic and epistemological approaches: the right of the Turk to start equally in the labyrinth of the artistic characters is given back to him; he can be a friend, generous, ethical... This paradigm includes many aspects of the phenomenon and the chronotope of the "Turkish" (time, space, mentality, cultural code, literary intertextuality). It functions on the basis of paronomastic principles (aesthetization of the latent phonosemantical structure).

© Katica Kulavkova, 2001-2007.
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