IMAGO URBIS: PARIS IN PAUL VERLAINE’S PROSE POEMS

Abstract

Aim. The purpose of article is the revelation of the image of Paris as a mental-geographic space using the option of the concept of «genius loci», important from overview of the cultural paradigm of the city, its metageography. Methods. Research methodology is based on integrated use of systematic, philosophical aesthetic approaches; cultural-historical, contextual, mythological, biographic methods. Results. It is clarified that in Verlaine’s prose, Paris text combines as literary topography, which bears a certain landscape signs of the city, so feelings of the lyrical hero – the fatigue, the fear, the ghostly feeling of happiness on the background of the city. The dichotomy of the image exacerbates the opposition of material and spiritual dimensions of Paris, as urban landscapes with numerous signs of town life are closely intertwined with a singular «landscape of the soul», in which first of all the emotions of the lyrical hero are the subject of the image, his impressions of reality. The scientific novelty of the work consists in consideration of the image of Paris as a discursive practice of urban space, that is realized as the contradiction between the meanings attached to the signs and reality, between reality as such and the reality of urban landscape. The practical significance. The article may serve for the further investigation of the urban landscape in literature.