VII. The category of continuum (непрерывность) is achieved through cohesion and integrity and the unity of place, time and events. Continuum does not admit of any interruptions. If the narration is interrupted by the author’s digressions or meditations we speak of discontinuum. Discontinuum is typical of fiction, written in the so-called ‘stream of consciousness’ method.
VIII. The category of prospectiveness is created by forward (поступательный) and consecutive development of the information conveyed by the text without any retrospective digressions. If the author makes a step back in narration to supply the reader with all the foregoing facts and events which are necessary for understanding the events described in a text we speak of retrospectiveness.
1.3. An outline of a belles-lettres text analysis. In order to comprehend the global purport of a belles-lettres text and to assess its aesthetic impact upon the reader the integrated analysis of a belles-lettres text should be carried out in accordance with the following requirements:
present the text taking into account its genre, the type of narration, the place where the scene is laid, the time of an action, and the main characters;
formulate the main concern of the text and segment its factual information into logically connected/complete parts, briefly summarize each of them;
identify and comment on facts of socio-historic and/or philological character relevant in terms of the category of presupposition;
formulate the conceptual information of the text explicating the author’s artistic message;
compress the conceptual information into a certain number of conceptual cores embracing the most important points of the author’s artistic message;
identify the dominant stylistic devices in each conceptual core and comment on their stylistic implications;
comment on all other stylistically relevant language means and their stylistic functions;
pick out the main key-words and explain in what way their recurrence contribute to the logico-semantic and artistic integrity of the text;
analyse all other means of lexical cohesion of the text conducive to the semantic and artistic wholeness of the text;
compose and write a coherent essay summing up your observations on the linguostylistic and textlinguistic peculiarities of the belles-lettres text under study.
1.4. SPEECH PATTERNS AND CLICHÉS TO BE USED IN THE COURSE OF A BELLES-LETTRES TEXT ANALYSIS