Category of Eventfulness in Interdiscourse

The paper focuses on the interaction between two socially significant discourses – law discourse and literary discourse, forming a unique linguo-socio-cultural space – interdiscourse. This interdiscourse, the formation of which is associated with a specific historical-legal communicative situation – to transfer knowledge from a highly specialized, closed legal field to the public in order to solve some urgent social problems – is actualized in the artistic worldview in the novel on various levels of meaning generation. Unpredictable correlations in the text of a literary work emerging at the junction of two polar discourses, and requiring dynamic “switching” of the mindset – legal and creative, are suggested to be considered through the rhizome-model of event-driven narration. This structural matrix makes it possible to bring together two worldviews in the recipient’s mind, to trace discursive transformations and new meanings, to detect multiplicative effects arising during studying the series of events in the novel. The category of discursive eventfulness reflects significant changes in the historical-legal reality of England in the mid 19th century (in particular, in Chancery Court) and allows the researcher to evaluate the integrity of a literary work functioning on the borderline between two polar, but equally socially significant discourses. By combining separate fragments separated from one another in the textual space of the novel, the category of eventfulness facilitates the modeling of semantic connections of the “cause – effect” type. The identified types of the category of discursive eventfulness (event-emblem, event-node, event-retrospective, event-interference, event-accumulation) describe one macro-event – the crisis in the Chancery Court – from different points of view. Due to a wide range of literary descriptive means, Ch. Dickens manages not only to create a prototypical image of reality, but also to demonstrate his legal consciousness himself – to act as a “homo linguis”