Jan Mukařovský und die literarische Onomastik. Versuch einer Grundlegung
Jan Mukařovský and the Principles of Literary Onomastics

Summary/Abstract: Though Jan Mukařovský has never written anything about names in literature, his theories can serve as a starting point for formulating the principles of literary onomastics. In order to do so, the literary text is seen as a system in which the proper names form a subsystem of their own. By applying Mukařovský’s concept of the aesthetic sphere as the sphere where the linguistic sign reveals its inherent aesthetic and semantic values, it follows that the communicative functions of the proper name in literary texts are reverse to their order in everyday communication: Not the identifying function of the proper name is dominant in literary texts, but rather it is all the other semantic and phonic values which in real-world communication are not realized that become predominant in the system of the literary work of art.

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