On the onymic system of contemporary dystopias (on the example of French and Czech literature)

Abstract

The onymic structure of a literary work  — especially anthroponyms and toponyms  — creates a functional system linked to the author’s poetics, stylistic and contemporary conventions, and also to a given literary genre or subgenre or modus. The genological aspects and motivations of the use of proper names in an artistic text are among the least treated in contemporary literary onomastics, although they touch upon a wide range of linguistic and literary scientific questions, perspectives and problems. In this regard, our comparative case study focuses on the recently highly productive genre area of dystopias and the analysis of its onymic landscape, namely abionyms; the corpus under study consists specifically of eleven Czech and French prose works published after 1989. Due to the nature of these related genres (among others, representation of the future, but often also in intermingling with the previous present, anticipatory construction, negative image of development striving for realism, believability), the paper focuses primarily on the distribution of the use of authentic and realistic, or authorial, names. The study observes the frequency of these proper names and their functions in (re)modelling the fictional world in relation to the actual world, with the intention of characterising any typical features, tendencies or variations. In this paper, we deliberately chose a comparative approach, which, we believe, more appropriately captures general patterns beyond the scope of individual national language systems  — on this basis, the study concludes that the identified and interpreted characteristics of onymy can be assessed as immanent, generally valid in a given genological category of contemporary literature.