Every literary work has three aspects — the audial, the visual and the mental. The first two aspects are what make up the form of the work, while the last one is what makes up the content of the work.
Then we can conclude that «literariness» is indeed verbal artfulness, which is in turn nothing but proper choice and good arrangement of all linguistic components. The quality of literariness is realized only in a person’s mind; the true locus of literariness is not the work but the author and the reader. And since both author and reader are subject to external influences from the changing universe which they live in, «literariness» is never a stabile quality that can be fixed once for all. It is a changeable quality that can vary with times, places, persons and types of the work. So, in this case we can be talking about dynamic principle of literariness.
If we are thus speaking about literariness as a verbal artfulness we are speaking about an indeterminate quality because different people in different times and places can see artfulness in different things. As we have discussed so far, Russian formalists took such formal features as similarity and parallelism for verbal artfulness. The postmodernists claimed that verbal artfulness just as anything that came by chance, not as any artistic order — this definition opposed to the normal or traditional idea of art.
To conclude, it should be noted that we must see the concept of «literariness» as something determined collectively by the entire speech community to which we belong. Literariness or verbal artfulness must eventually be a functional variable in the public mind.
Now pass on the last part of this research summary — describing of three components of literary reading.
Three components of literary reading
As we said and discussed above, many linguists and literary theorists came to the conclusion that there are no special characteristics in a literary work which can distinguish literature from other texts. If we refer to cognitive psychology, literary understanding is considered here within a general theory of the discourse process.
If we go over the review of empirical studies, however, that reveals traces of «literariness», we can find there a three component model of literariness which include foregrounded textual or narrative features, reader’s defamiliarizing responses to them and the consequent modification of personal meanings.
So, in this part of our abstract we try to analyze and to describe the main components of literary reading which, in its turn, seem to be essential in understanding of the nature of the concept «literariness».
T o return to literary reading, we first try to answer the question — what kind of activity is the reading of literature? W e can really find several possible answers depending on the theoretical commitments. F irst, literary reading can be understood, for instance, as a kind of discourse processing. S econd, it can be a special organization of the cognitive processes that are apparent in ordinary prose or conversation.
T hen, literary reading may be the outcome of rhetorical devices which are designed to promote a particular ideology. All of these meanings can definite literary reading.
In this part of our short abstract we try to offer the idea of literariness as the product of a distinctive mode of reading. Then it can be identifiable through three key components of literary reading.
So, three components of literary reading that constitute literariness look like follows:
The first component of literariness is the occurrence of the stylistic variations that are distinctively associated with literary texts — the present case, a metaphor and an archaic, polysemous noun;
The second component of literariness is the occurrence of the type of defamiliarization;
The third component of literariness is the modification or transformation of a conventional concept or feeling.
It should be noted, of course, that we try to emphasize these three components of literariness according to the empirical study of reader’s responses to several literary texts focusing on the passages in these texts that they found more striking.
Each component of literariness can occur separately but the key to literariness is the interaction of these component processes. Literature is unique because it posturizes a distinctive form of psychological change.
Literary texts contain features that stand out from ordinary uses of language or are foregrounded.
Now, summarize our thoughts and observations about the concept «literariness».
Conclusion
Consulting and analyzing different works and studies which, in their turn, made many attempts to examine and to explore the phenomenon «literariness» we tried to definite this concept and to get a better understanding of the nature and the locus of «literariness».
Dealing with different definitions of «literariness» we have come to the conclusion that the most popular idea of «literariness» belongs to Russian formalism and the leading fellows of this linguistic circle.
According to them, literariness was considered as a special set of characteristics and features which are able to distinguish literary texts from non-literary texts and a literary language or poetic language from an ordinary or standard language. Their promoted idea, however, which the language constitutes not for the purpose of communication but for its own sake, met rigorous problems for understanding the concept of literariness.
Dealing with a number of observations we found a very interesting view of the concept «literariness». Literariness was understood as a uniqueness or style because every literary text is one of its kind or unique.
We met also a definition of literariness as artfulness describing the main features and devices of this phenomenon that let us to get more clear understanding of the nature and the locus of literariness.
Finally, we analyzed some empirical studies and determined the three key components of literariness or literary reading and made an effort to clarify such activity as reading of the literature.
To make the conclusion, it is worthwhile to say that the concept of «literariness» has no universal definition and in its nature seems to remain open for further study.
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