Authors

Olga Sokolova¹;  ¹ Personal capacity, Russian Federation

Discussion

According to Karl Bühler’s linguistic conception, the term “deixis” refers to the ways in which language encodes contextual information into its grammatical system. This approach is relevant to investigate contemporary poetry since the deictic center, or “origo”, represents the change of poetic subject position and, consequently, the ways of visualizing deixis in new media formats. I will trace the ways personal and spatial deixis, as well as discourse and text deixis, manifest themselves visually both on the book page and in web interfaces, “on & off the page” (Perloff 1998). The study addresses the texts by contemporary Ukrainian and Russian poets devoted to the anti-war agenda, such as Lyudmila Khersonskaya, Olga Bragina, Danyil Zadorozhnyi, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, Alexandr Skidan and Igor Novikov. The specific functioning of deixis in anti-war poetry is expressed, firstly, in its metatextual function, when war moves from the remote category to the point here-and-now of the subject, becoming part of his personal communicative space - here. Secondly, discursive and spatial deixis serve as a trigger to involve the addressee in the interaction, which is carried out due to shifts between the categories of verbal and visual, personal and technological, abstract and concrete, empirical and metatextual, affirmative and negative.