Subjectification Strategy of Author’s Statement in English Literary Xeno-Narrative

Abstract

Literary xeno-narrative is a text illustrating the experience of interaction with cultural otherness that focuses on contrasting the in-group/out-group categories, with adaptation stress minimization and mental experience transfer as xeno-narrative functions. The author of the xeno-narrative forms the idea of the perfect reader through the implementation of strategies aimed at the recipient. The subjectification strategy of the author’s statement in literary communication is aimed at the reader’s personal acceptance of the author’s meanings in the text and the reader’s emotional involvement and empathy. This process is represented through the lexical and emotionally connotative language tools in xeno-narrative texts and also readers’ reviews corpus. The results of the study indicate the difference in the process of subjectification, understanding of content and the author’s emotional intentions among the readers with different national worldviews. The study is based on the materials of the electronic corpus of English and Russian readers’ reviews of the analysed narrative text. English-speaking readers recorded thematic units typical for the xeno-narrative and showed a high level of empathy to the immigrants’ experience associated with the personal experience of overcoming otherness. Russian-speaking readers drew on the thematic unit associated with intercultural interaction to a lesser extent, focusing on the timeline of growing up.