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Semantic parameters of the plot of a literary work

Podkovyrin Yurii Vladimirovich

ORCID: 0000-0002-9306-4331

PhD in Philology

Associate Professor, Department of Theoretical and Historical Poetics, Russian State University for the Humanities; Associate Professor, Department of Russian Language and Literature, Moscow Financial and Industrial University "Synergy"

141446, Russia, Moscow, Miusskaya Square, 6

mail1981@list.ru
Other publications by this author
 

 

DOI:

10.25136/2409-8698.2023.6.40933

EDN:

HVPHTH

Received:

31-05-2023


Published:

07-06-2023


Abstract: The subject of research in this article is the plot organization of a literary work, considered from a hermeneutic perspective, namely as one of the aspects of actualizing the meaning of a literary work. In the work, based on the material of a number of works related to the epic kind of literature, the semantic parameters of the plot-event organization of the work are investigated. The article identifies and describes the differences between the vital ethical way of understanding the plot, associated with the value position of the characters, and the aesthetic way of understanding the plot, associated with the values of the author and recipient. In the latter case, the plot is understood as a dynamic aspect of the incarnation (embodiment) of artistic meaning.   The scientific novelty of the article is determined by the fact that for the first time the plot-event organization of a literary work is considered in connection with a specific way of actualizing the artistic meaning, defined in this work as an incarnation. The incarnation of meaning in the article is understood as its "transformation" into the being (life) of the hero as a whole. If in the life context of comprehension, the sequence of events (the "plot" of life) is correlated by the character with the private and incomplete horizon of the semantic future, then in the aesthetic context of comprehension, the plot acts as an articulation of the integral meaning of the hero's being, as his "fate". As a result of the interpretation of the text of the Grimm brothers' fairy tale "Hansel and Gretel", as well as E. A. Poe's novella "The Mask of the Red Death", the author of the article shows that through plot articulation in the aesthetic semantic "dimension" of the work, heterogeneous moments of meaning are collected, linked into a consistent unity.


Keywords:

meaning, plot, event, character, author, epic, artistry, hermeneutics, incarnation, interpretation

This article is automatically translated.

In the proposed article, the category of the plot is considered in connection with the problem of the specifics of the meaning of a literary work. It should be noted that in literary studies there are a huge number of works devoted to the semantics of any particular plot or group of plots or plot as such (from Aristotle [1] to M.M. Bakhtin [2, pp. 284-286, 304-305], O.M. Freudenberg [3], M. Bal [4, pp. 154-187] and However, in these works, the plot is in the foreground, and not the meaning of a literary work in its specifics (this is also characteristic of those studies in the title of which the words plot and meaning are combined, for example, in the book by I.V. Silantiev "Plot and Meaning" [5]). The leading position among the works in which the category of the plot is considered from the standpoint of hermeneutics is occupied by Paul Riker's book "Time and the Story" [6] (a detailed analysis of the concept of Riker presented in this book is given, in particular, in the work of E.I. Lyapushkina [7]). However, in Riker's research, the features of plot construction in the "fictional story" (Volume 2 of the book) are not directly linked to the specifics of the artistic meaning, with the question of how this meaning differs from other types of meaning. The lack of clarity of the role that the plot plays in the actualization of the meaning of a literary work, in our opinion, is due to the fact that the specifics of the artistic meaning remains, in many respects, unclear. Thus, the purpose of our research in this article is to identify and describe the parameters of the conditionality of the plot organization of a literary work by the specifics of the existence of artistic meaning. To achieve this goal, it is necessary, in our opinion, to solve the following tasks: 1) to clarify the specifics of the category of an event in the aesthetic-hermeneutic perspective; 2) to identify differences in the ways of correlation of plot and meaning in the vital ("vital-ethical" in Bakhtin's terminology) and artistic semantic "dimensions" of a literary work. The appeal to the epic material is due to the fact that it is in the texts of this kind of artistic literature that the plot principle manifests itself most directly, and its identification does not require special reservations. In the following works, we plan to consider the semantic parameters of the plot based on the material of lyrical and dramatic texts.

In this work, we define the specifics of the artistic meaning through the concept of incarnation (embodiment) [8, p. 93; 9; 10]. Since this concept (and phenomenon) it has already been considered in detail by us in other works [11; 12; 13], then in this article we will limit ourselves only to a brief definition. The incarnation of meaning is a special way of its actualization in the act of aesthetic communication between the author, the hero and the recipient of a literary work of art, which is the "transformation" of meaning into the being (life) of the hero as a whole. This meaningful being is inherent not only in the spatial-temporal location [13, pp. 139-156], but also in the eventfulness. In this case, this concept (various approaches to the concepts and phenomena of events and eventfulness are presented, in particular, in the following publications: [14; 15, pp. 7-15; 16]) describes life in its dynamics, in the aspect of the transition of possibilities into reality.

The event, considered in a hermeneutic perspective, represents the realization into reality of a certain semantic possibility, leading to an irreversible transformation of the entire semantic whole of a person's being. At the same time, from within the life semantic context (from the perspective of the characters), the event (and the plot – as a chain of events) is a semantic transformation that relates to a part of life and is not final (that is, it does not relate to the existence of the individual as a whole). In the transition from the life to the aesthetic perspective of understanding the eventfulness, the semantic context changes. The "non-accessibility" (Bakhtin) of the comprehending positions of the author and the reader to the comprehended "life world" of the characters makes it possible for participants in aesthetic communication to interpret this world, including the events taking place in it, as a whole. Thus, in the aesthetic perspective of comprehension, the event (or sequence of events) is interpreted not as a particular semantic transformation (or a series of transformations) of the life of the characters, but the moment of the incarnation of the meaning of their life as a whole. And the whole is not static, but dynamic. In the light of what has been said, it seems to us significant to turn to the reflections of O.M. Freudenberg about the "pre-literary" period of the plot development. The researcher, in particular, writes: "the hero does only what he semantically means" [3, p. 223], thus, plot motives act as an "effective form of the character" [3, p. 223]. This provision is accepted in the works on historical poetics [17, p. 58] as quite accurately describing the nature of the plot at the syncretic stage of the development of literature. However, in our opinion, this position of the scientist can be attributed not only to the works of the archaic era, but also to fiction in general.  What the hero "does" is comprehended by himself and, in part, by the reader, in relation to the particular semantic context of the situation. Actually, the actions of the hero generate, to a greater or lesser extent, this context. In the aesthetic semantic context, the actions of the hero are projected onto the meaning of the whole (on what the hero "semantically means himself"), act as moments of the incarnation of the meaning of this whole.

The category of the plot is connected, as already defined above, with the dynamic aspect of the incarnation of meaning. Incarnation presupposes not only that the meaning is concretized in some way – through a spatio-temporal arrangement [18]. The meaning in the act of incarnation also appears as an accomplishment. The individual semantic moments (poles) in the work relate to each other in a certain way, are hierarchically ordered precisely through the event (the plot as an event whole). It is through the event that the meaning of c-happens, is realized. Let's consider the features of the dynamic aspect of the incarnation of meaning on the material of the text, the genre of which (fairy tale) puts the plot-event aspect of poetics to the fore, namely, "Hansel and Gretel" from the collection of fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm (Brothers Grimm. Hansel and Gretel // The Brothers Grimm. Fairy tales. Translated from German by G. Petnikov. M.: Pravda, 1987. pp. 61-67. Further, the text is quoted from this edition with the indication of pages). The elements of the incarnated meaning of the story can be described with the help of this series of oppositions:

 

life – death

father (and mother) – stepmother

the child (children) is an old woman

habitable space – (wild) forest

body – bone

bread crumbs – pebbles (stones)

home native – trap house (coffin, grave)

kitty, dove – chimney

the sound produced by a person is the sound produced by an object

fullness – thinness

sagacity, mind – myopia, blindness

food – hunger (leftovers),

wealth (treasures) – poverty

etc.

 

The highlighted "milestones" of artistic meaning in the incarnated semantic plan of the work are represented by certain figurative-chronotopic elements of the artistic world. It should be noted at once that the attribution of certain semantic elements to a certain series or pole, as long as we rely only on the figurative-chronotopic "plan" of incarnation, is preliminary, refers rather to cultural and linguistic tradition. It is the event that correlates the individual elements of meaning with each other in the only way characteristic of this particular work, attaching them to the being of a person. Thus, in "Hansel and Gretel", the selected figurative and semantic elements somehow represent the semantic opposition of life and death, the living and the dead, universal for the story. However, out of connection with the event, this opposition (like all others related to it) has a rather vague, preliminary character. It is the event that asserts which number of semantic elements turns out to be value-marked, is brought to the fore. So, to understand the meaning of "Hansel and Gretel", it is significant not only that death is figuratively chronotopically compared with life (this is indicated by the fact that the heroes of the fairy tale live on the border of worlds - on the "edge" of the forest), but also that in the fairy tale there is a victory of life over death. The bringing to the fore of the first of the (left) series of figurative and semantic elements indicated by us is carried out in the work precisely by means of an event. At the same time, a necessary element of the dynamic semantic whole of the work are events that demonstrate the claim of death to conquer life. The first such event (doubled) is, in fact, the parents' decision to kill their own children – to take them into the forest thicket and leave them there alone. In this event, children (representing the ascending life) are unnaturally sacrificed for the sake of adults (the descending life). Death in this event seems to take the rightful place of life. It is characteristic that the initiator of the murder is the "stepmother" – the character is also a "substitute": a negative replacement for the mother. A meeting in the forest with an old woman luring children into her house and feeding on them, in fact, is an enhanced semantic "doublet" of the initial event. And here we are faced with death, devouring life, unnaturally claiming victory over it. It should be noted that the dead, in order to defeat the living, takes the forms of the latter in the fairy tale. So, the stepmother tells the children that they will go to the forest to chop wood (apparently, for the stove, the hearth – the source of vital, productive activity in the house). In fact, as the reader knows, and Hansel and Gretel themselves, the purpose of this walk is death. An old woman in the forest (the embodiment of death) lures her child victims with food (the substance of life). Her hut is "made (...) of bread, the roof on it is made of gingerbread" (p. 64), inside the hut children are greeted by "delicious food" (p. 65) on the table. So, firstly, death in a fairy tale does not just coexist with life, but also claims to take its place. Secondly, this claim is connected with the fact that death takes the form of life, its individual significant attributes (that is, again, it takes the place of life). The victory of life over death, apparently, makes sense only if death as an existential aspect reveals itself, invades the "territory" of life.

At the same time, a number of events directly correlated with the victory of life over death are connected with the fact that life enters the "territory" of death and, in turn, is in some way likened to it. Let's compare two walks of the heroes in the forest. The first one ends well for the children, as Hansel scattered "pebbles" (stones) along the road, along which the heroes managed to find their way home. However, during the second walk, Hansel, as we remember, throws crumbs on the road. The birds picked up the crumbs, and the children could not find their way to the house. A stone is a dead object, whereas bread crumbs are parts of food related to life. The fact that birds peck crumbs is quite natural, corresponds to the logic of life. When children act according to this logic, they are approaching death. The same approach to death takes place in the episode with the eating of the "edible" hut of the old witch. And here the heroes act according to the logic of life – and find themselves trapped by death. However, when something corresponding to death appears in the appearance and behavior of children, it leads them to salvation. So, Hansel pushes an old woman through the bars of the cage with a "bone" (p. 66) (an attribute of death) instead of fingers – and the old woman postpones the meal, since Hansel "still does not get fat" (ibid.). Gretel kills the old woman in the same way that the old woman wanted to kill the girl herself – "baked" in the oven. Victory over death is carried out as its actual killing. At the same time, the hearth is used as a tool (already for its intended purpose) – one of the key, as already noted, attributes of life, its productive forces.

When the children return home happily, they are greeted by their father, and the stepmother, as it turns out, has already died. The very fact of the stepmother's death in the fairy tale is not explained in any way. However, in the context of the artistic whole, this death looks inevitable – it "rhymes" with the death of an old woman: both heroines are the incarnation of the "mortal" plane of the semantic whole. The victory of life over death as a plot-approved moment of the incarnated meaning also determines the death of the stepmother. At the same time, in the fairy tale, it is not so much death as such that is defeated, destroyed (for example, the forest as an area close to the "pole" of death continues to exist), as the unreasonable claim of death to victory over life. In order for such a meaning of a fairy tale to be artistically established, "come true", it is necessary that its eventful whole includes moments (individual events) demonstrating an unnatural attempt of death to "absorb" (in the case of an old woman – literally) life, to take its place. Thus, in the dynamic semantic whole of the work, as we have tried to show, the elements of the incarnated meaning (represented by various aspects of aesthetic being) are interlocked with each other, mutually "weighed" and arranged relative to each other. 

Life and death, the living and the dead form the semantic poles of many other works, including E.A. Poe's novellas "The Mask of the Red Death" (According to E.A. The Mask of the Red Death. Translated from the English by R. Pomerantseva. URL: http://www.lib.ru/INOFANT/POE/maska.txt). The comparison of the living and the dead is expressed in the novel primarily chronotopically: The Red Death seizes all the possessions of Prince Prospero, except for the monastery, in which the prince takes refuge with a thousand of his entourage. The boundaries of the monastery are very solid ("The building (...) was surrounded by a strong and high wall with iron gates"): they mark the limit between the realms of death and life. However, the juxtaposition of the spheres of life and death is also reinforced by the atmosphere inside the monastery: the prince and his companions spend their time in pleasure, instead of indulging in grief and reflection. However, the boundary between life and death also runs inside the monastery. In the seventh room of those that make up the prince's chambers, "there was a giant ebony clock." This clock strikes every hour, reminding the merry courtiers of the movement of time and, consequently, of death. When the clock struck, "waltzing couples involuntarily stopped spinning, (...) the faces of even the most dissolute turned pale," and those who were older and more prudent involuntarily passed their hand over their forehead, driving away some vague thought." When "the chiming of the clock stopped, (...) immediately cheerful laughter filled the rooms; the musicians looked at each other with a smile, as if laughing at their ridiculous fright, and each quietly swore to the other that next time he would not give in to embarrassment at these sounds." In the presented description of the reaction of the prince's companions to the striking of the clock, movement, cheerful laughter, smile as attributes of life, are contrasted with immobility, pallor as attributes of death. Values such as thought and reason are also correlated with these representations of death. The boundary between life and death here is no longer spatial, but behavioral and psychological.

Thus, the novel highlights semantic moments (they are also parts of aesthetic reality) related to the pole of death and the pole of life. The value-hierarchical relationship between these poles, as in "Hansel and Gretel", is established by an event, more precisely, by a plot as an event whole. However, in Poe's novella, unlike the fairy tale from the collection of the brothers Grimm, the event correlating these semantic poles is, apparently, the victory of death over life. Indeed, in the finale of the novella, the Red Death in the image of a mummers penetrates the walls of the monastery, where the prince and his companions take refuge, after which all the characters die, and the Red Death gains full power over the artistic world ("Darkness, Doom and Red Death reigned supreme over everything").

At the same time, the dynamic aspect of the incarnation of meaning in Poe's novel can only be described very roughly using the above "formula" (the victory of death over life) and requires a more detailed analysis. The final event in the work (the death of all the characters and the reign of the Red Death) is preceded by a number of others: 1) the prince's decision to take refuge in the walls of the monastery and the strengthening of the walls and gates; 2) Prince Prospero convokes his companions to a "masquerade ball, the most magnificent of which has not yet been seen"; 3) the description of the seventh (black and red) room and the ebony clock is an event at the level of "the telling itself"; 4) the appearance of the "new mask", accompanied by twelve strokes of the clock; 5) the death of the prince in the black room from the "gaze" of the mummers; 6) the exposure of the "new mask".

Let's focus on the first two events. By strengthening the walls of the monastery, the prince is literally fenced off from death. But he is fenced off from it not only spatially, but also behaviorally: indulging in various "pleasures" in his shelter. Thus, the boundary between life and death in the world of the novel is represented not just existing, but established by the will of man, artificially. The living distance themselves from death, exclude it not only from their everyday experience, but also from thoughts.

The next event is the prince's organization of a masquerade ball – ontological asserts new semantic correspondences in the text. The monastery – the space of life – appears as a world of illusion, sleep, delirium. The semantics of life is ontologically correlated with the semantics of illusion, "masquerade". The description of the arrangement of the rooms for the ball, designed with the participation of Prince Prospero himself, further strengthens and, at the same time, semantically "alienates" the opposition of life and death. Let's pay attention to just a few important points. Arranging the seventh (westernmost) room, the prince clearly organizes it as a space of death ("only in this room the windows differed from the upholstery: they were bright crimson - the color of blood", "on the gallery surrounding the suite, against each window stood a massive tripod with a flaming brazier", "in the western, black, the light streaming through the blood-red glass and falling on the dark curtains seemed especially mysterious in the room and distorted the faces of those present so wildly that only a few of the guests dared to cross its threshold"). An ebony clock is placed in the same room, which, as we have already noted, reminds the prince's companions of time and death. It turns out that the prince himself places the attributes of death inside his shelter. However, death appears here as a decoration. The prince opposes himself to death, giving it an illusory, theatrical appearance. However, life, as already noted above, is given the character of an illusion in the monastery. By decorating death, the prince tries to distance himself from it, but, in fact, by dramatizing life, he abolishes the boundary between these values.

The next event of the novel is the appearance of a "new mask" resembling the Red Death. The eventfulness of this action (in principle, there is nothing eventful in the appearance of a "mask" at a masquerade) is given by the reaction of the prince and his companions. What causes them "fear, horror and indignation"? It can be assumed that the mask represents death as something concrete (namely the Red Death!) and the real ("The mask (...) reproduced the frozen features of the corpse so accurately that even the most attentive and picky look would hardly have detected the deception"), and not the symbolic and theatrical. If life in the monastery space is an illusion, then death is declared to this masquerade as an unexpected truth. It is characteristic that the meeting of the "mask" with the prince, ending with the death of the latter, takes place in a black, western room, which is a "decorated" incarnation of death.

The event of the "unmasking" of the mask contains, among other things, a certain strangeness. It is when the prince's companions discover that there is nothing under the "creepy mask", they cease to doubt that the Red Death has penetrated the "masquerade". Why is this happening? Both in the horizons of the characters and in the aesthetic context of comprehension, the semantics of death, through the event of exposing the "mask", correlates with the semantics of emptiness. At the same time, phenomenologically, the mask-death (this connection is emphasized in the title of the novel) is similar to the "masquerade" of life. The plot of the novel shows how recoiling from the horror of death, moving away from its truth into an illusion, life is ontologically likened to death.

The description of the final event – the complete triumph of the Red Death in the world of the novella – is accompanied by two characteristic details. Firstly, the "revellers" in the "banquet halls" die "in the very poses in which their death overtook them." This detail indicates the similarity, at least externally, of their lifetime and posthumous existence. Secondly, along with the prince and his companions, the "decorations" of death (and life) in his chambers also die: "the life of the ebony clock has faded, the flame in the braziers has gone out."

 Thus, Poe's novella really depicts the event of the victory of death over life, but over an imaginary, illusory life. In the semantic whole of the work, the victory of death correlates with the ontological assertion of truth and the denial of illusion.  Such a correlation of semantic moments (poles) in the novel is established by means of an event (more precisely, the plot as an event whole).

The sequence of events depicted in the text also has hermeneutical significance, since it determines the trajectory of the incarnation of meaning, the direction of its implementation. So, in "Hansel and Gretel", the initial event is an attempt by the parents (more precisely, the stepmother, the father plays a passive role in this event) to get rid of the children as "extra mouths". Interpreting the meaning of this event somewhat generically, we can say that it denotes the claim of death (the dead aspect of being) to take the place of the living. The first attempt, thanks to the ingenuity of Hansel, who scattered stones on the road, turns out to be unsuccessful. However, the second one was crowned with success: the birds ate the crumbs scattered by Hansel and the children got lost in the forest. This event makes possible the following – a meeting with an old witch. Thus, as we have already noted above, in order for the semantics of the victory of life over death (more precisely, over the unfounded claims of the dead to take the place of the living) to be realized, it is necessary for death to reveal itself, to enter the "territory of life". In turn, in order to defeat death, life (in the form of children) must enter its territory, directly meet with death. The victory that children win over the old witch begins with defeat. An old woman lures children into a trap house through food (an attribute of life). Death here again attacks life, becoming like it. Deception, illusion, and in the situation of luring children into the forest, and at the moment of meeting with the old witch, reveal themselves as attributes of death. However, children (the incarnation of the semantics of life) defeat death (the semantic plan of which is embodied in the images of a stepmother and an old woman), as already noted, by becoming like her. So, the old woman tries to lure Gretel into the oven, but she herself is deceived and burned. Death is defeated by being put to death or dying like a stepmother (we wrote above about the connection between the events of the death of an old woman and a stepmother). The fairy tale reveals the tautology of the phrase "victory of life over death". Life does not gain the upper hand by chance, it is essentially victorious. Whereas the ontological place of death is the bottom, defeat. The vector of the incarnation of meaning, expressed in the plot, goes from the denied semantic pole (death) to the affirmed one (life). And this vector, the orientation (syntagmatics) of the incarnation has an ontologized, necessary (and not accidental-probabilistic) character. In the context of incarnation, each event acts not just as a cause of subsequent or a consequence of previous ones, but represents a necessary moment of the semantic whole. The very sequence of events forms the dynamic aspect of the incarnation and determines the trajectory of interpretation. Since the semantics of the whole in the fairy tale of the brothers Grimm is connected precisely with the victory of life over death, revealing the hierarchy of these values in the artistic world, the initial events had to bring death to the fore, present its claim to significance, domination over life.

In the novel "The Mask of the Red Death", the opposition of life and death leads to another, equally significant opposition for the text – truth and illusion. The triumph of death as truth over an illusory, "decorative" life in the finale of the novel again assumes that the initial events denote the semantic "weight" of the illusion. At the same time, if at the beginning we observe the contradiction of life and death, then in the final (with the event of the unmasking of the "mask"), an ontological similarity of imaginary life and death is revealed (this unifying quality is emptiness, reducing the completeness of personal being to an external aspect). Life in Poe's novel is not randomly and unhappily defeated by death. Being illusory, it is likened to death, reveals "mortal" features in itself (it is not by chance that the "Mask of the Red Death" mysteriously and not explained in the text turns out to be immediately inside the monastery where the prince and his companions are hiding) and thereby overthrows itself. In the finale, the semantics of death (as truth) it is event-based, while the semantics of life (as an illusion) is value-negated.

In connection with the considered aspect of the connection between the incarnation of meaning and plot, it seems important to us to turn to the justification of fate as an aesthetic category in the work about the author and the hero of M. M. Bakhtin. The scientist contrasts the "life" of the hero (the inner orientation of his actions to the upcoming meanings; "life is regulated by goals from within himself" [8, p. 235]) and "fate" (created by the "author-viewer" from the position of non-necessity "the certainty of his being, his face in being" [8, p. 235]). Fate is the meaning of the hero's life that has come true, "postponed" [8, p. 235], the hero's life as a meaningful whole: "Fate is not the hero's self–for-myself, but his being, what he was given, what he turned out to be" [8, p. 236]. In the "dimension" of fate, individual actions of the hero are comprehended not from the inside – by goals, desires, needs, but from the outside (from the position of the author and the reader) – by the context of the whole. It is in the context of fate that it becomes obvious that the hero "does so because he is so" [8, p. 237] (cf. with the earlier judgment of O.M. Freudenberg about the relationship of the hero and his actions). Bakhtin refers to the category of "fate" within the framework of reflections on the "classical" type of character [8, p. 235], but his ideas, as it seems to us, have a wider scope of application. We believe that the category of fate, in Bakhtin's understanding of it, forms the semantic foundation of the literary category of the plot. Fate as the "judgment of being" [19, p. 35] is a dynamic aspect of the incarnation of meaning.

In the semantic plan generated by the activity of the author and the reader, the sequence of events, semantic segments is the realization (incarnation) of the integral meaning of the hero's life in the aspect of his syntagmatics. The meaning is always incarnated in a literary work as something heterogeneous ("polarization" is inherent in it – L.Y. Fuchson [20, p. 292]), but this heterogeneity of meaning is expressed in the work in two ways. On the one hand, meaning unfolds as a "world" – a certain arrangement of values (spatio-temporal), "semantic fields", their visible diversity (at the syncretic stage of the evolution of poetics, only formal). This aspect of incarnation can be called centrifugal (in the direction of the diversity of semantics). On the other hand, these heterogeneous values are collected, linked into a coherent whole by the acting hero, who, crossing the boundaries of semantic fields, connects various semantic planes. This aspect of incarnation can be defined as centripetal (in the direction of wholeness). That is how, by doing things, the hero gradually realizes what "he means", namely, the whole of the plot–fate as a syntagmatically expanded incarnation of meaning.

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The article "Semantic parameters of the plot of a literary work" submitted for consideration, proposed for publication in the journal "Litera", is undoubtedly relevant, due to the consideration of the theoretical foundations of literary criticism, namely the semantic parameters of the plot. In the proposed article, the category of the plot is considered in connection with the problem of the specificity of the meaning of a literary work. It should be noted that in literary studies there is a huge number of works devoted to the semantics of any particular plot or group of plots or plot as such, however, in these works the plot appears in the foreground, and not the meaning of a literary work in its specifics, thus, this work is one of the first in which such a problem is considered. The purpose of the work is to identify and describe the parameters of the conditionality of the plot organization of a literary work by the specifics of the existence of artistic meaning. The article presents a research methodology, the choice of which is quite adequate to the goals and objectives of the work. The author turns, among other things, to various methods to confirm the hypothesis put forward. The following research methods are used: logical-semantic analysis, hermeneutical and comparative methods. This work was done professionally, in compliance with the basic canons of scientific research. The study was carried out in line with modern scientific approaches, the work consists of an introduction containing the formulation of the problem, the main part, traditionally beginning with a review of theoretical sources and scientific directions, a research and final one, which presents the conclusions obtained by the author. In conclusion, the results of the study and its prospects are presented. However, it should be emphasized that the conclusion does not fully reflect the tasks set by the author, is not the quintessence of the work carried out, but rather represents a continuation of the main part of the narrative. It should be noted that the author does not indicate the scope and principles of sampling the practical research material. The bibliography of the article includes 20 sources, among which scientific works are presented both in Russian and in a foreign language. Unfortunately, the article does not contain references to fundamental works such as PhD and doctoral dissertations. In some cases, the requirements of GOST for the design of the list of references were violated, in terms of non-compliance with the generally accepted alphabetical arrangement of cited works, as well as the displacement of works in Russian and foreign languages. In general, it should be noted that the article is written in a simple, understandable language for the reader. Typos, spelling and syntactic errors, inaccuracies in the text of the work were not found. The comments made are not significant and do not detract from the overall positive impression of the reviewed work. The work is innovative, representing the author's vision of solving the issue under consideration and may have a logical continuation in further research. The practical significance of the research lies in the possibility of using its results in the process of teaching university courses in literary theory. The article will undoubtedly be useful to a wide range of people, philologists, undergraduates and graduate students of specialized universities. The article "Semantic parameters of the plot of a literary work" can be recommended for publication in a scientific journal.