THE EDITOR’S LETTER AS A SPECIFIC SPEECH GENRE IN ART CRITICISM DISCOURSE

Abstract. Performed in the framework of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of speech genres, the present study investigates samples of an editor’s letter – introductory address to readers of art review magazines written by the director of the museum, or the editor-in- chief of an art review magazine. The content of such magazines is generally focused on art, contains serious academic analysis of works of art; the texts of articles belong to various genres of institutionalized critical art discourse and thus follow certain formal and communicative rules.

According to Bakhtin, all speech genres belong to two types – primary and secondary, the latter demonstrating cultural, literary or academic sophistication and profoundness of the text. Speech genres may be informative or phatic in nature, or can combine the two functions. While art criticism is fundamentally informative and secondary, oral speech genres are often phatic. The genre of an editor’s letter answers several criteria of a phatic genre, belonging, at the same time, to the secondary genre type. The objective of the paper is to identify in the editor’s letter genre features typical for phatic texts, trace them to oral genres of several types. The methods used involve contextual linguistic analysis, comparison of different genres, and investigation of content blocks of the text as well as theoretical appraisal of the findings.

The results show that compared to critical art reviews, editor’s letters are on a different level of dialogism, with a more definite addressee. The phatic function is actualized by a certain set of linguistic features, proximity to primary genres is evident in the incorporation of “beseda po dusham” (soul-to-soul intimate talk), “beseda o zhizni” (talk about life) and other oral speech genres. At the same time, the excellence of intellectual discourse, a thorough understanding of a wide range of artistic and philosophical topics that are addressed signal the transition of this genre to the secondary genre type and demonstrate the mechanism of this transition.

Keywords: speech genres, primary and secondary genres, phatic and informative genres, art criticism, genre features, letter of the editor