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Owners of Their Own Whiteness. Stories about Whiteness in Jan Skácel's Poetry

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2017

Abstract

Based on modern cognitive semantic theories of color names (especially R. Tokarski), the study deals with the theme of white color in poetry by Jan Skácel.

In Skácel's poetry, white color is connected not only with prototypic concepts, esp. snow (frequently in winter sceneries); not rarely (and often at the same time) can be found in very specific contexts: in numerous collocation with abstracts from the semantic areas of emotion and inner human experiences (white feeling, shame, thirst) or time (time is white as hair, white moment) etc. Significantly, whiteness correlates with blindness, deafness, silence, non-being, "nothing", omission etc.

It relates to specific semantic profile of whiteness (perhaps in addition to "quantitative white" and "qualitative white"), which is connected with colorlessness. White as "colorless" is a basis for extensions related to silence, blindness, deafness etc., and points out, more generally, absence, omitting, non-existence, negation, and the specific concept of "nothing".

It can be, in a paradoxical way, connected with an escalated experience of being, or "other" modus of being (other side of silence).