Visual metaphor in cinematographic prose by Dmitry Danilov

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of visual metaphor as one of the means of literary cinematography in Russian prose of the 21st century. The purpose of the article is to analyze the visual metaphor in the prose by Dmitry Danilov and determine its role in the structure of literary text. The research methodology includes structural, component and contextual analysis of visual metaphor. Linguistic analysis is based on the theory of metaphor developed by N. D. Arutyunova, and the typology of metaphors by Yu. N. Karaulov. As a result of the study, it was established that visual metaphors in Dmitry Danilov’s cinematic novel “Sasha, Hello!” can be classified according to formal expression into two types: pictorial metaphors and graphic metaphors. Both metaphors are based on an image in which visual metaphors should be considered as non-binary mental structures involved in the generation of figurative meanings. As the analysis of the material has shown, in Dmitry Danilov’s prose visual metaphors are one of the important elements that organize the writer’s idiomatic style. The key metaphor of Danilov’s work is “the world as cinema” and the subsequent metaphor “text as cinema”, which define a set of corresponding means of artistic expression that form the visual image. In the modern world, in which visual culture and, in particular, cinema occupy a dominant position, visual metaphor in writers’ texts becomes not only an expression of the author’s position or worldview, but also a refl ection of the linguistic culture of modern Russian speakers.