About what is a prose work,it is customary to speak only on the background of its difference from the text of the poetic, however, oddly enough, when it seems obvious that the poetic text is different from the prose text, to formulate what exactly this difference is, what are the specifics of poetry and prose, why do these two kinds of speech , pretty hard.
Modern literary studies, studying the difference between a poem and a prose, poses the following interesting questions:
Writer and literary critic Jan Parandovsky,while reflecting on what a prose work is, he once remarked that there is no scientific evidence that humankind first spoke in verse, not prose, but in the sources of literature in different countries it is the verse and not the prose. This happened due to the fact that it was the first verse that rose above everyday speech and the poetic speech reached its perfection long before the first attempts at prose appeared.
Ian Parandovsky is a bit crafty, becauseIn fact, there is a considerable number of scientific hypotheses, which are based on the assumption that human speech was originally poetic. Both J.Vico and G.Gadamer and M.Shapir spoke about this. But Parandovsky definitely noted one thing: world literatures really begin with poems, and not with prose. Genres of prose works emerged later than the poetic genres.
Why exactly arose a poetic speech, whilenot exactly known. Perhaps this is due to the idea of the general rhythmization of the human body and the world around man, perhaps with the initial rhythm of children's speech (which, in turn, also awaits an explanation).
Famous poetry Mikhail Gasparov saw the differencepoems from the prose work that the poetic text feels like a text of heightened importance and is designed for repetition and memorization. The poem text, in addition to being divided into sentences and parts of sentences, is also divided into such parts that are very easily grasped by consciousness.
This observation is inherently very deep, butit is not instrumental, since it does not imply clear criteria for the distinction between verse and prose. After all, prose can also be of increased importance and can also be designed for memorization.
Formal signs of difference are short fragments.proposals - also can not be considered a sufficient reason. A. G. Mashevsky notes that in fact even an article from a newspaper can be turned into verses, simply by dividing its sentences into fragments of different lengths and writing down each of them from a new line.
However, it will be too noticeable that the sentences are divided conditionally, no additional meaning is attached to the text, unless it is a humorous or ironic sound.
Таким образом, различия прозы и стихов are not in any one sign, but suggest some deep differences. To understand what a prosaic work is, you need to know that the prosaic and poetic texts obey the different laws of the organization of the text and the ordering of its elements.
It so happened that traditionally prose is determined by its difference from verse. It is often accepted to speak not about the distinctive features of prose in comparison with a verse, but on the contrary - about the difference between verses and prose.
So, about the word in verse Russian literary U.N. Tynianov said that it is more closely connected with other words in the work than in prose, more closely and its connection with the construction as a whole, he called it “the law of unity and closeness of the verse series”, and this concept is still relevant for literary criticism .
Modern science made many attempts.to formulate what a prose work is in contrast to a poetic work, and in these attempts one can quite clearly distinguish two tendencies. A number of philologists believe that the most important criterion is the specificity of the sound of the text. This approach can be called phonetic. In the course of such a tradition of understanding prose and verse, V. M. Zhirmunsky also expressed his opinion, according to which the difference in poetic speech lies in the “regular orderliness of the sound form”. However, unfortunately or fortunately, not all prose and poetic works clearly differ phonetically from each other.
In contrast to this tradition, the graphicthe theory insists on the primacy of the character of the writing of the work. If a record is ordered as a verse (written “in a column,” then the work is poetic, if the text is written in a line, then it is prosaic). In the course of this hypothesis, the modern scholar Yu. B. Orlytsky works. However, this criterion is not enough. As mentioned above, a newspaper text written in a “column” does not make it poetic. Pushkin's prose works, recorded as poems, will not be poetic from this.
Thus, it is necessary to recognize that external,There are no formal criteria for distinguishing between prosaic and poetic texts. These differences are deep and relate to the sound, and grammatical, and intonational, and genre nature of the work.
