The categorial system of linguistic means of evaluating the "other" in a literary text

Abstract

The article presents three categorical systems of evaluating the „other“ in a literary text. These have been developed on the basis of the systematization of imagological categories, verbalization, and narrative strategies. The subcategories were refined and expanded based on the analysis of selected novels by Vladimir Sorokin and Jachym Topol. The validity of the systems was verified by applying them to the text of Karel Klostermann. The first categorical system is formed by the binary opposition of „we“ and „they“ as „nodal points of discourse“ to which other lexemes are bound in a chain of equivalences. The second categorial system is based on the evaluation scale of mania-philia-phobia-distance. The third categorial system is based on the systematization of nominative and predictive strategies known from discourse analysis, and on the categorization of central themes and dominant narratives. The essay also examines the psychological mechanisms of depictions of the „other“ and enmification.