Representation of Religiously Marked Allusion as a Literary Concept in the English Literary Text

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Religiously marked allusions (henceforth RMA) being commonly employed intertextual means in literary texts, are conspicuous as literary concepts in stylistics, text linguistics, cognitive linguistics, theolinguistics and literary studies. RMAs verbalize literary concepts and their correct interpretation explicates deep semantic layer of the text in its relation to the preceding religious source (Fayzullayeva 2024).

Of huge significance is to define the notion of “literary concept”. As is known widely and well, there are cognitive and cultural approaches towards the study of the notion of concept. Cognitive approach regards concept as a mental unit, comprised of knowledge structures that are accumulated in the human’s mind on the basis of his/her lifelong experience, meanwhile cultural approach considers concept to be a cultural unit, which conveys culture specific information related to a particular ethnic community. In recent years, the scrutiny over the notion of “concept” has taken a radical turn and is now investigated from the perspective of literary approach. According to S.A. Askoldov-Alekseev, literary concept “causes in the mind of the perceiver predominantly images (i.e., the same representations), and not understandings, and they produce an emotional effect” (Askoldov-Alekseev 1997: 267). Unlike cognitive approach to the study of “concepts”, the literary approach delineates that literary concepts are concepts of art and they are based on imagery (Askoldov 1928: 37). In other words, the cognitive concept is devoid of the impact of feelings, but the literary concept is the assemblage of feelings and emotions (Askoldov-Alekseev 1997: 267).

L.V. Miller defines a literary concept as “a complex mental formation that belongs not only to individual consciousness, but also (as an intentional component of aesthetic experience) to the psycho-mental sphere of a certain ethno-cultural community”, as “universal artistic experience fixed in cultural memory and able to act as a substance in the formation of new literary meanings” (Miller 2004: 4). To decode the deep semantic layer of the literary concept, the reader is supposed to have not only linguistic, but also general cultural knowledge structures as well.

O.E. Bespalova understands literary concept as “a unit of consciousness of a poet or writer, which receives its representation in a work of art or a set of works and expresses the author's understanding over the essence of objects or phenomena” (Bespalova 2002:18). The inferences deduced from the definitions above imply that literary concepts constitute a set of characteristic features that specifically make them distinct. Generalizations of the main implications showcase the following assets peculiar to literary concepts:

1. Literary concepts impose conceptual significance onto the literary text. The primary function outperformed by concepts is conveying and transmitting a particular sense. Sense differs from meaning as it interweaves with value and does not exist without “reciprocal understanding bearing evaluation” (Ogneva 2009). V.V. Kolesov assures that literary concept should not be understood as conceptus (in the meaning of ‘notion’), but conceptum – ‘embryo, seed’, that is a primary meaning, from which all other meaningful forms grow in the process of communication (Kolesov 1999). S. Askoldov agrees and claims that sometimes the chain of these images gets directed to the extents, where the denotative meaning of words and their syntactic connections would not lead (cited in Fayzullayeva 2024).

In our study, we adhere to the idea that literary concepts generate new conceptual senses in the literary text. In linguistics, the process of creating new senses is theoretically delineated as emergence. D.U. Ashurova defines the notion of emergence as the formation of new senses that are not priorly inherent in the constituent components of the system (Ashurova 2022). Emergence occurs at all levels of language and is equated to such notions as meaning construction, transformation and modification. As a matter of fact, meaning construction determined by literary concepts takes place in two conditions, when (1) totally new meanings that have initially been undiscoverable “in the mental structures” of the literary concept are recreated and when (2) totally new senses are obtained “as a result of the focusing and defocusing processes” (Ashurova 2022). So literary concepts load new implicit conceptual sense onto the literary text which may either be the regeneration of the old meanings (as a result of focusing and defocusing processes) or generation of previously unknown, new connotations.

2. Literary concepts create the conceptosphere of the literary text. E.A. Ogneva asserts that literary concept is a constituent of the conceptosphere of the literary text, including mental images that are reflected in the minds of the people and are cognitively and pragmatically significant within the framework of the plot set by the author (Ogneva 2009).

In general, conceptosphere is the totality of human's all mental images about the surrounding world which construct the fundament of his/her conceptual world picture. Conceptosphere is comprised of a complete set of concepts existing in the form of representations, mental images, schemes, concepts, frames, scenarios, gestalts, generalizing a variety of signs of the outside world (Likhachev 1997). V.I. Karasik defines the term conceptosphere as a “concept keeper” of a particular culture (Karasik 2001). It is assumed to be a complex of needful, culturally significant knowledge or conceptualization of any ethnic community which assists to depict the national mentality of that very linguoculture. Z.D. Popova and I.A. Sternin believe the conceptosphere to be the information base of a particular culture (Popova, Sternin 2001). As a consequence, it is summoned that the richer the culture of a nation, its folklore, literature, science, fine arts, historical experience, religion are, the richer the conceptosphere of the linguistic world picture is (Likhachev 1997). The concepts that form conceptosphere enter into systematic relations of similarity, difference and hierarchy with other concepts and co-function in the literary text.

3. Literary concepts presuppose dialogic mental processes in the literary text interpretration. According to R. Barth, a reader may find himself/herself in a situation of a ‘dialogue’ in relation to the literary work: having a certain cultural outlook, a system of cultural coordinates and, depending on the context, the reader may infer and interpret such aspects of meaning that intentionally might not have been focalized by the author (Barth 1989). To phrase it in another way, the decipherment of the implicit meaning conveyed by concepts is a two-way interconnected communicative situation: the reader’s interpretation of literary concept created by the writer who is, in fact, distant from the reader in time and space, may obtain new senses reproduced in the process of the reader’s engagement with the piece of work. Thus the literary concept created by the writer can conditionally be called “primary new generation of literary concept” (Askoldov 1928). If a literary work is translated into other languages, then the perception and translation of literary concepts by the translator may tentatively be assumed as “secondary new regeneration of the literary concept”, and the reader’s perception and interpretation of the literary concepts may be “tertiary new regeneration of the literary concept” (Askoldov 1928). To explicate, literary concepts are characterized by compendious inclusiveness owing to the fact that beyond the author’s implications about the world, it condenses the translator’s perspectives in the externalization of both factual and subtextual information of the text and after all, literary concepts may obtain other shades of sense put in by the reader too (Fayzullayeva 2024).

4. Literary concepts are characterized by reinterpretability. The reinterpretability feature of literary concepts entails that literary concepts obtain additional or totally new senses in the dialogic mental processes of their being perceived, processed and decoded by the reader (Askoldov 1928). According to M.R. Proskuryakov, the process of perceiving the realities of the world has individual characteristics for each person (Proskuryakov 2000). Literary concepts may be interpreted differently depending on the scope of the individual conceptual world picture and intellect of the reader or translator, which may highly be affected and determined by the contexts. As has been discussed above, a particular sense imposed on the literary concept in one way from the perspectives of the author may be the subject to partial or complete reinterpretation from the side of the reader (Fayzullayeva 2024).

5. Literary concepts are emotionally charged mental units (Shakhovsky 1996). Emotiveness entails a string of emotions experienced or being experienced either by the author or personages of the literary text, and that are arisen or awaken as a result of the reader's interaction with the literary text. Emotiveness is delineated as the expression and transfer of emotions and feelings in and via language, and it is realized via emotionally charged linguistic units (Ashurova 2005). Emotiveness being an inherent property of literary concepts accumulates the convergence of both linguistic (emotive lexicon and phraseology; emotive structures; stylistic devices) and nonlinguistic (emotional situation, emotional presupposition, intentions, emotional state of the communicants) factors (Ashurova 2005). The periphery of concepts receives codes of human's interaction with the surrounding world, and language encodes emotional experiences of its user into its sign system too. Emotiveness of literary concepts presupposes twofold process: expression of emotions by the side of the author in the literary text and evocation of corresponding emotions in the reader (Fayzullayeva 2024). Consequently, emotive signals along with their associative links conveyed by literary concepts craft a complex emotive space of the whole literary text.

6. Literary concepts are characterized by figurativeness. Imagery is the matter under consideration in stylistics, literary studies, text linguistics, cognitive linguistics and others. The images reflect the figurative perception of reality by a person and its embodiment in a literary text (Fayzullayeva 2024). The notions of literary concept and literary imagery are interrelated, since the former is supposed to fix an image in itself (Neroznak 1997). It can be implied that literary concept is wider in scope than image is.

According to S.A. Askoldov, literary concepts are figurative, as “they mean more than the content placed in them” (Askoldov 1928). As a matter of fact, the concept can be considered as a verbalized image: it is a phenomenon that operates with images, externalizing the human imagination with the help of the linguis tic picture of the world. E.A. Afanaseeva agrees that lexical representation of literary concepts bears imagery, which correlates with the author’s intention and is a metaphorical assimilation of extralinguistic reality determined by a specific subject of thought and speech (Afanaseeva 2004).

7. Literary concepts represent axiological value. The concept appears to be the object of evaluation in life, that is, what a person needs physically and spiritually, is appreciated and valued (Arutyunova 1999). Concepts accumulate and transmit value bearing information about the world, when value dominants are distinguished, the totality of which forms a certain type of culture, supported and preserved in language and speech (Stepanov 1997). Literary concept, being a part of the evaluative picture of the world, bears specific information about social values, thus evaluative-axiological values dominate in the semantic construct of literary concepts. In our opinion, the embodiment of social values within the literary concept is conditioned by the fact that cultural values inevitably and most naturally find their reflection in the works of art, which is an indivisible part of the spiritual culture.

8. Literary concepts dominate in the text forming processes. The literary concept around which the plot of the story is built should be delineated as a text-forming linguistic phenomenon (Fayzullayeva 2024). Each literary concept receives a different degree of foregrounding within the conceptosphere of the literary text and it is conditioned by the subject being vivified by the writer (Danilenko 2022). In addition to the text-forming feature, there are the literary concepts in the literary text that play a particularly major role in the construction of the plot. Such concepts are remarked as “dominant concepts” (Ogneva 2009). The dominant literary concepts are understood as “a conceptual space where a common foundation is elaborated and that contains all the propositions objectified in the course of discourse and arisen from collective or joint knowledge” (Kushneruk 2011). Dominant concepts have different parameters of knowledge storage and transfer, and therefore their interpretation requires a comprehensive and thorough construction of analysis.

9. Literary concepts represent symbolic meaning in the literary text. Symbol is a stylistic device that represents objects, people, places, or abstract ideas to signify something beyond their literal meaning, and it is largely inhabit and recurrent in the literary works. The subjectivity conditioned in the interpretation of literary concepts predetermines a wider range of possible ways of developing the system of meaning and inferring additional implicit senses. Similarly, semantic construct of the symbol is ambiguous too and it is difficult, often impossible to be fully revealed, as symbols are associated with understatement, hints and mystery. Literary concepts transfer symbolic meanings which are largely based on archetypal understandings rooted in the human unconsciousness, meanwhile, archetypes are the products of universal symbolism.

Having enlisted peculiar features of literary concepts, it is to be highlighted that literary concepts represent all characteristic features elucidated above in more or less degree of recognition in literary texts. Importantly, though all those attributes are equally immanent in the semantic construct of all literary concepts, some of them may appear to be exceptionally domineering over the others throughout the text.

The successful interpretation of literary concepts depends, first of all, on the analysis of language means via which they are expressed. Based on this postulate, we dare to claim that an important point in the analysis of a particular concept in a literary text is the study of not only the text itself, but also its special intertextual connections with other sources. Thus, when analyzing a literary concept, linguists can widely employ a technique based on the study of intertextual relations in the text and allowing them to distinguish different levels of the concept, encrypted in lexical units as signs of these phenomena (Tarasova 2004:10).

Being widely and commonly employed intertextual means and embracing conceptual information, religiously marked allusions externalize literary concepts, the correct interpretation of which explicates deep semantic layer of the text in its relation to the preceding religious source. Of huge significance is to mention that all characteristic features peculiar to literary concepts are transmitted to the semantics of RMAs. We strive to substantiate the representation of religiously marked allusions as literary concepts on the basis of the analysis of a literary text. To reach the aim, the most vivid peculiarities of the literary concepts represented by RMAs are intended to be comprehensively analyzed in the short story “Duel” by O’Henry.

“The Duel” by O’ Henry exposes harsh realities of life in a big city. The story narrates about the eventual and inevitable struggle of the newcomers with the city of New York (Whoever comes to it accepts a challenge to a duel), and they will either lose and leave or win and become a New Yorker. The main personages, Jack and William make efforts to stay in the city and in four years when the fellows meet again, it turns out that William has become a businessman and has successfully set up both his life and business and enjoys his current state in NYC. Meanwhile, Jack is of the thought that the city has swallowed William and now he has become alike millions of other habitats of the city. Jack considers himself unconquerable as he knows how to defeat the city and keeps his real self. However, who is the real winner remains under question.

The following scheme of interpretation in gradual succession will be applied in the analysis of the literary concepts detected in the story:

1. Distinguishment of dominant literary concept. The dominant literary concept around which the plot is constructed is to be identified; 2. Crafting the conceptosphere of the story. The dominant literary concept, being central in the conceptosphere, is to be analyzed with the help of other concepts as the constituents of the conceptosphere; 3. Interpretation of non-dominant literary concepts verbalized via religiously marked allusions. The literary concepts externalized by RMAs should be identified and interpreted on the basis of thesaurus; 4. Justification of transmission of characteristic features peculiar to literary concepts to the semantics of RMAs.

The dominant concept of the story is the toponym New York, as all of the sequences of events are constructed around it. The author imparts his way of visualizing the city with the help of several RMAs in the form of metaphorical indirect reference to myths and Bible:

“This town”, said he, “is a leech. It drains the blood of the country. Whoever comes to it accepts a challenge to a duel. Abandoning the figure of the leech, it is a juggernaut, a Moloch, a monster to which the innocence, the genius, and the beauty of the land must pay tribute. Hand to hand every newcomer must struggle with the leviathan. You’ve lost, Billy. It shall never conquer me. I hate it as one hates sin or pestilence or-the color work in a ten-cent magazine. I despise its very vastness and power. It has the poorest millionaires, the littlest great men, the lowest skyscrapers, the dolefulest pleasures of any town I ever saw. It has caught you, old man, but I will never run beside its chariot wheels”.

We can observe the convergence of stylistic devices in this text fragment, specifically, metaphors, epithets and allusions are used in order to portray the city. Among those stylistic devices vivifying the magnitude and cruelty of the city, RMAs “leech”, “juggernaut”, “Moloch”, “leviathan” and “chariot” set a special tone in the description of the dominant literary concept – NYC:

Fig. Description of the dominant literary concept via RMAs.

Below the denotative meanings of these RMAs deduced from the dictionaries will be presented. Noteworthy, beyond their literal definitions, they bear connotative meanings too, which trace back to religious and mythological sources.

I. Dictionary meaning of the term “Leech”: 1. The dictionary “Oxford Student’s Dictionary of Current English” defines the term “leech” as a) an aquatic or terrestrial annelid worm with suckers at both ends. Many species are bloodsucking parasites, especially of vertebrates, and others are predators; b) a person who extorts profit from or sponges on others (OSDCE 1983).

Biblical meaning of the term “Leech”: The mention of the term “leech” can be found in the following biblical verses: “The leech has two daughters. 'Give! Give!' they cry. There are three things that are never satisfied, four that never say, 'Enough!'” (Proverbs 30:15), and is understood as the species commonly known as the horse leech (Haemopsis sanguisuga), that means “the act of drinking blood”. This biblical reference is usually used to describe greedy people who gradually seize the possessions of other people. Importantly, the greed is condemned in the Bible.

II. Dictionary meaning of the term “juggernaut”": 1. According to the dictionary of Britannica, the word “juggernaut” is defined as “something (such as a force, campaign, or movement) that is extremely large and powerful and cannot be stopped”. Collins English dictionary denotes it as “any terrible force, especially one that destroys or that demands complete self-sacrifice” (CCELD 1992).

Mythological origin of the term “juggernaut”: The main meaning of the word took its root from Hinduism, specifically from the Hindu God Jagannath, the “Lord of the Universe”. In fact, the mention of it can be encountered in Indian myths, since Juggernaut is worshiped and commemorated in annual religious festivals in India. Juggernaut is a symbol of happiness and mercy in Hindu mythology. Hindus do not view Juggernaut as a destructive deity, but for the representatives of other nations, Juggernaut represents something sinister and destructive, as it is reported that worshipers have thrown themselves beneath the wheels of the cart onto which the image of Juggernaut is placed so as to be crushed as a sacrifice to Juggernaut. This gave rise to the English word “juggernaut” meaning a person or power that crushes anything in its path. Therefore, these days people deploy the term “juggernaut” to connote something or someone that seems unstoppable, powerful and/or even destructive.

III. Dictionary meaning of the term “Moloch”: 1. In Collins English dictionary, the term “Moloch” is defined as “a semitic deity to whom parents sacrificed their children” (CCELD 1992). The dictionary of Merriam Webster presents the same definition to the term (MWED 1997). The dictionary meaning of the term directly refers to the religious and mythological beliefs.

Biblical origin of the term “Moloch”: Moloch or in some sources, Molech is depicted as a bull-headed deity, which was heated until glowing like flames. Meloch can be confronted in some parts of the Bible:

You shall not give any of your children to offer them to Molech, and so profane the name of your God: I am the Lord (Leviticus 18:21 ).

They built the high places of Baal in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to offer up their sons and daughters to Molech, though I did not command them, nor did it enter into my mind, that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin (Jeremiah 32:35) .

As can be seen in Leviticus 18:21, the worship of Molech included infanticide; specifically, it included the murder of infants as a sacrifice.

The story in Genesis 22, that is about God’s testing Abraham by commanding him to offer Isaac as a burnt sacrifice is thought to be related to Molech worship. However, according to the Bible, God distinguishes Himself from all false gods, especially Molech, by stopping Abraham from completing the sacrifice. So Molech is notorious for infanticide and disclaimed in the Bible to be worshiped.

IV. Dictionary meaning of the term “Leviathan”: 1. In dictionaries the term “leviathan” is defined as follows: 1) a sea monster defeated by Yahweh in various scriptural accounts; 2) a large sea animal (MWED 1997); 3) (in biblical use) a sea monster, identified in different passages with the whale and the crocodile (Job 41, Ps. 74:14), and with the Devil (Isa. 27:1) (OSDCE 1983); 4) something or someone that is extremely large and powerful (CED). As can be testified via explanatory dictionaries, the term “leviathan” has taken its roots in the Bible.

Biblical origin of the term “Leviathan”: May those who curse days curse that day, those who are ready to rouse Leviathan (Job 3:8).

It was you who crushed the heads of Leviathan and gave it as food to the creatures of the desert (Psalm 74:14).

There the ships go to and fro, and Leviathan, which you formed to frolic there (Psalm 104:26).

In that day, the Lord will punish with his sword – his fierce, great and powerful sword – Leviathan the gliding serpent, Leviathan the coiling serpent; he will slay the monster of the sea (Isaiah 27:1).

From all these verses, it can be surmised that the Leviathan lived in the sea, and was a creature to be reckoned with. It appears to have a large size, double-plated armor, sharp teeth, and seeming ability to spit fire from its mouth.

V. Dictionary meaning of the term “Chariot”: The term “chariot” is delineated as as 1) a two-wheeled vehicle drawn by horses, used in ancient racing and warfare; 2) a four-wheeled carriage with back seats and a coachman's seat; 3) a vehicle generally used for warlike purposes. Sometimes, though but rarely, it is spoken of as used for peaceful purposes (MWED 1997).

Biblical origin of the term “Chariot”. Clear instance of God appearing with chariots is found in the following Bible verses: “For behold, the Lord will come in fire, and his chariots like the whirlwind, to render his anger in fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire. For by fire will the Lord enter into judgment, and by his sword, with all flesh; and those slain by the Lord shall be many” (Isaiah 66:15–16)/

Chariot cities were set apart for storing the war-chariots in time of peace (Chronicles 1:14).

Preliminary analysis of the terms on the basis of dictionaries and religious-mythological sources showcase that semantic fields of all these lexemes embody worship, sacrifice, evil and death.

Interpretation of conceptual information conveyed by the RMAs in the story:

The RMAs appear in the role of minor concepts describing the dominant concept “New York” in the story. Having clarified their definitions as well as religious-mythological origins, it can be deduced that these religiously marked allusive concepts are deliberately employed to hint at the “true” being of the city, which may reasonably be assumed to be biased as these implications are the reflection of the author's individual conceptual world picture accumulated on the basis of his experience obtained for years: a) NYC swigs the blood of the country (Leech); b) NYC is so destructive (Juggernaut) that can brutally demolish everything in its path; c) NYC is a magnificent monster (Leviathan) that regardless of their unwillingness, newcomers find themselves in the duel with it – a fierce battle with the city; d) NYC is so harsh that it can swallow ruthlessly (Moloch) despite the age, race and status of its victims (a monster to which the innocence, the genius, and the beauty of the land must pay tribute); d) NYC rides a chariot of victory to the war with its dweller – opponents, and conquers them.

The final stage of the text interpretation implies to evidence the transmission of characteristic properties of literary concepts into the semantics of RMAs. It is of expedient importance to mention that peculiar features of literary concepts may appear in abundance in the semantic whole of RMAs, some of which being extremely vivid and the rest happening to be less conspicuous. The RMAs detected in the story “Leech”, “Juggernaut”, “Moloch”, “Leviathan” and “Chariot” (1) form the conceptosphere of the story (the conceptosphere shaped by the detected religiously marked allusive literary concepts has been outlined above), (2) convey conceptual essence (analysis of the semantic fields of the linguistic units via the deployment of explanatory dictionaries along with the analysis of the biblical as well as mythological origin of the RMAs allowed us to decipher their both denotative and connotative construct), (3) impart a string of (negative) emotions (all of the RMAs representing literary concepts in the “Duel” exert certain emotional impact on the reader), (4) presuppose the activation of imaginative vision (readers visualize the city through the images expressed by the RMAs).

To sum up, the following implications can be made in regard with the representation of religiously marked allusions as literary concepts in the literary texts:

• Literary concept is a complex mental unit that abounds emotional, cultural, conceptual, aesthetic information in its cells and showcases the embodiment of the au thor’s individual world picture in the literary text;
• Literary concept is distinguished by a set of characteristic features that make it distinct from other mental units. Literary concept a) acquires conceptual significance in the literary text; b) constitutes a conceptosphere of the literary text; c) necessitates a two-way interconnected communicative as well as mental processes between the author and reader; d) is characterized by reinterpretability; e) is an emotionally charged mental unit; f) creates imagery (figurativeness); g) is of axiological value; h) functions as a dominant concept in the literary text; i) symbolizes abstract phenomena in the literary
• Religiously marked allusions express and externalize literary concepts in the literary text;
• Literary concepts verbalized via religiously marked allusions serve to reveal the author's individual conceptual world picture (The analysis of the concepts of “Leech”, “Juggernaut”, "Moloch", “Leviathan” and “Chariot” in the short story “The Duel” by O’ Henry);
• Appropriate interpretation of literary concepts verbally explicated via religiously marked allusions and penetrated into the author’s individual conceptosphere allows the reader to decipher the implicit conceptual essence encrypted in the text.

About the authors

Mukhayyo R. Fayzullaeva

Author for correspondence.
Email: muhayyo_uzswlu2706@mail.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-4557-912X

PhD, Senior Teacher, Department of Linguistics and English literature

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