The Concept and Problem of Code in Modern Literary Studies

With increasing popularity in literary studies, linguistics, cultural studies, and anthropology, the concept of code remains undefined, which automatically translates a significant part of the results of these works into a polemical plane. Literary studies has already become accustomed to a similar situation in the field of research on mythopoetics, the author’s myth, having developed a certain immunity (M. Zuienko, O. Kobzar, etc.). The plurality of proposed interpretations of the code term in literary studies, which are sometimes mutually contradictory, on the one hand, and the large body of studies based on this term, on the other hand, determine the relevance and perspective of our article. The purpose of this article is to clarify the semantics of the concept of code in literary studies, based on a significant number of its interpretations in the most notable humanitarian and actually special studies of the end of the XX – the first decades of the XXI century. In this case, we see the main tasks as a) to highlight the general tendencies in the interpretation of the concept of code in current research with the identification of advantages and disadvantages by means of comparison; b) identify semantic clusters at different levels of the organization of an artistic work, which can function as elements of a semantic code. Proceeding from the outlined semantics of the code in the content plane of the artistic work and relying on the practice of studies related to this problem, we can talk about the code (of various degrees of structuring) at the different levels. This is the level of a) intention, imperative, archetypality in Ukrainian literature; the code of demythologizing, westernization, postcolonial or gender, eschatological, etc.); b) the level of thematic dominants of the intertextual content of the artistic work (mythological, in particular biblical, ancient, etc.; autobiographical; zoomorphic, plant; invariant of the matrix work in relation to its mash-up version, etc.); c) the level of expression of the environment where events take place or are associated with it (rural, urban, in particular Kyiv, London, etc.; Gothic; cemetery; industrial; otherworldly; parallel world, etc.), as well as d) code-canon, including occasional (codes by T. Shevchenko, G.G. Byron and other national authors in the texts of successors, code by J.R.R. Tolkien, Narnian code by C.S. Lewis – in fantasy, etc.). Code in the sense of intertextual content can appear as a formal expression of intentional or imperative (in cases of, say, gender, post-colonial coding of the artistic work). In particular, investigating the peculiarities of the national myth-making code of Ukrainian fantasy 2000–2020s in a multinational context, we take into account the spectrum of mythopoetic characteristics of the named prose, including accompanying ones. The correct interpretation of fantasy, as well as any other myth-making – its artistic genesis, ideological orientation, structural organization, etc., involves the analysis of the construction, functioning and reception of a system of variable semantic components (more often – legendary and mythological images, motifs, symbols, mythologems, general cultural signs or other elements in the corresponding occasional functionality); these components are the key for the fantasy modeling of this or that work or group of works of art. According to the degree and potential of reinterpretation, conceptual load, configuration, chronotopic orientation of the work, etc., the named components in a certain way program, encode the artistic text, are able to serve as identifiers of its mythopoetic paradigm, and as a result we speak of its myth-making code. The definition of the concept of code in literary studies that we have given can be considered optimal and a compromise at the same time, because it takes into account numerous attempts to define this concept by specialists – representatives of various fields of research. In this case, myth- making is naturally chosen as an important indicator, because it is in myth- making that the principle of the code can be realized most fully. The proposed provisions can be clarified in the process of practical work with specific artistic material and, in general, can serve as an element of correction and unification of complex comparative studies on the problems of the development of Ukrainian and foreign literature, particularly in the XXI century.