EMOTIONS THROUGH THE PRISM OF ARTISTIC COMPARISON (BASED ON D. SCHWANITZ’S «DER CAMPUS»)

Abstract

This paper presents revealing the semantics of emotions in modern German through artistic comparison as a stylisticdevice. Human life without emotions is not possible, they supply the mental energy of the body, mediate the innerand outer world, participate in cognitive processes, motivate people to work and achieve useful results, etc. Thedefinition of emotion is nationally and scientifically colored. In the German emotion has broad and narrow meanings.Emotion in the broad interpretation reflects emotional experiences; in the narrow sense it is identical to the instinctivemanifestations of the psyche. There are positive and negative emotions. This classification is conditional becausethe sign of emotion correlates with its consequences for the body. If emotions contribute to the survival, adaptationof the individual in objective reality, they are considered positive, if not – negative (K. Izard). Positive emotions includeinterest, surprise, joy, love, shame, guilt, negative – grief, anger, fear, pain/suffering, immediately, contempt. Eachof these emotions is experienced and manifested in different ways. Detection of emotions against the backgroundof the “norm” can be excessive, intense, moderate and weak. In the empirical material, emotions are characterized byimagery, the mechanism of which is metaphor. Metaphor captures the identity of comparative objects or phenomenaon the basis of a feature that reveals their essence. There are two types of images: real and imaginary. Real imagesare formally differentiated on the basis of eloquence into two semantic subgroups: 1) high (elevated) and 2) medium (temperate). High images are manifested by educational institutions (university), medium ones are associated witha sad joke, a steam current, hugs, a teacher, a speech, an exam. Imaginary images focus on confirmation, the rulesof the game «Purulent Beetle», an outraged driver, a foreign man. The semantics of emotions and their variants appealsto the «norm» (calm), positive (joy, happiness, surprise, interest), negativity (anger, rage, resentment, grief, sadness,pain, fear, apprehension, fear, horror, disappointment, contempt).