The Means of Expression in Victor Hugo’s Publicism

DOI 10.17721/2522-1272.2024.85.6

Olexandr Meleshchenko,
Doctor of Philological Sciences, Professor,
Educational and Scientific Institute of Journalism,
Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv,
0000-0002-0012-5669

ABSTRACT

The peculiarities of Victor Hugo’s use of tropes and stylistic figures as means of textual expressiveness in his publicistic works are clarified, which, in fact, is the purpose of the article. Head of the literary school of romantics, poet, novelist, playwright, literary critic, publicist, opposition politician V. Hugo used expressive means to enrich his oral and written speech. This especially applies to publicistic broadcasting, which is designed to serve the interests of society, preserve universal human values, basic rights and freedoms, protect the offended and unjustly convicted, expose arrogant or corrupt leaders, and formulate social ideals for future generations.

To achieve the goal, the article used the following methods: working with documents, which made it possible to study the available theoretical sources, to study Victor Hugo’s publicistic texts; the additionally applied bibliographic method made it possible to analyze in the article the flow of documents on the researched topic, their qualitative selection, which ended with the compilation of a bibliographic list; the descriptive method made it possible to describe the means of expression in the analyzed texts; the method of stylistic analysis made it possible to identify linguistic and stylistic devices in the analyzed texts; the generalization method made it possible to summarize the research results.

Tropes and various figures of speech help the author or speaker, working in a publicistic style, to create certain images that play a key role in the publicist’s art of argumentation in order to influence the audience. During this process, images conveyed by tropes and stylistic figures stimulate the imagination of readers and listeners, thus increasing the effectiveness of the expected impact.

The brilliantly educated Victor Hugo in every period of his life – in youth, maturity and old age – saturated his publicistic work with means of expression – lexical (literary tropes) and syntactic (stylistic figures). Among the tropes, this author mostly used comparison, epithet, metaphor, personification, personification, allegory, metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole, litote, periphrasis, irony, sarcasm. Stylistic figures include question and answer, rhetorical question, rhetorical exclamation (rhetorical exclamation), amplification, allusion, anaphora, epiphora, epanaphora, antithesis, oxymoron (oxymoron), parcellation, polysyndeton, gradation, lexical repetition, paradox. This made his manner of writing, as well as oral speech bright, expressive and effective, which is indirectly evidenced by the popularity of the writer and publicist in the French society of that time, the large editions of his individual book editions and «feuilleton novels» in newspapers, translations of his works into foreign languages.

KEYWORDS: tropes; stylistic figures; expressive means of journalistic and literary texts; publicism; Victor Hugo.