Information on the thesis

The thesis substantiates the problem of genre differentiation of texts from spell
and incantation poetry. It is for the first time that the paper employs theoretical
conclusions of the representatives of the French school of semiotics (Algirdas Julius
Greimas) to describe the structure of the narrative models of Ukrainian incantations.
The methodological analysis of structural elements has been expanded.
Overview of publications presenting incantation texts helped compile the
data basis of the sources for the research, and revealed the timeline for using the
genre, such as the first record about the use of the texts, and the application of
magic practices accumulated in chronicles and court acts; and offered a review of
genres of oral literature.
The accomplishments of Ukrainian and international theoretical researchers
offer the basis and set vectors to study this genre over the several recent centuries.
The early scholarly research of the genre originates parallel to collecting folklore
materials. They raise the issues of the genesis of the genre, its structural
peculiarities, the system of imagery, classification, as well as methods to
accumulate and record samples of folklore.
It was analyzed the academic legacy of scholars on structural description of
incantations. It was identified several methodological principles to describe the
structure.
Substantiation of the narrative nature in incantation poems, the use of
experience in the analysis of the narrative structure of spell texts suggested by a
Lithuanian researcher D. Vaytkiavichene, and the application of its transformational
model helped us study the following actant roles in the spells.
Analysis of the incantation texts showed several narrative models: complete
and incomplete. Texts with complete narrative model reveal two types of
transformation, Type one provides separation of the negative object from the sick
person, while the second type implies the destruction of the negative object. Texts
with incomplete narrative model have a leading part with the sorcerer, or a
mythical character.
Analysis of spell texts helped highlight the peculiarities of poetic thinking.
Peculiarities of functioning and preservation of spell and incantation tradition
facilitated the enhancement of spell texts as magical formulas, and also extract the
formula elements in the incantation texts themselves. The material analyzed offers
evidence to highlight certain types of formula within the texts, and mark them as
text-formative, or, with regard for the ceremonial situation, experience of the
performer, rather to “transfer” the same formula into the category of microgenre.
The inter-status migration of the formula elements facilitates flexible structural
transformations that are also reflected in the poetics of incantations. The formula
basis of the texts also helps identify the semantic clichéd formula containing the
mechanism of transformation of folklore imagery. A bright illustration to the
semantic formula is the one of [uroky na soroky] (‘magpie for evil eye’). The study
of its semantic meaning helped us track the transformation of mythological
assumptions about a witch into a poetic formula. In addition, we defined a certain
semantic field that in different ways encrypted information through semantic
affinity and sense relations. In actual fact, the peculiarity expresses certain
principles of aesthetic effect described by Otto Rank as the “economy of thought”
which is the basis for inherent means of aesthetic effect.
Analysis of the preservation status of the local tradition in Western
Boykivshchyna showed some valid evidence that within a separate folklore dialect,
there function homotypic texts that confirm the theory of “folklore dialects” and
the area specific distribution of certain phenomena within one ethnographic group.
Key words: incantation and spell texts, text structure, narrative models,
poetics, semantics, folklore imagery, formula-based structure.