Emilio Alarcos theorist and critic: language and literature

Abstract

It is noteworthy in Emilio Alarcos Llorach the scientific coherence between his primary activity as a master of Linguistics and his contributions to literary criticism, as well as the naturalness with which he refined the complexity of the Theory to illuminate the texts as humanistic achievements. For him poetry and literature were, above all, a phenomenon of communication, and critical activity one more consequence of the mere exercise of reading. He claimed the maximum social value of literary art: "communication, coexistence with others, participation of others". Delve into literature from the nakedness of language phenomena: that was his work program.               In the wake of the father of modern Linguistics, the Genevan Ferdinand de Saussure, of the Circles of Moscow, Prague and Copenhagen and of French functionalism, Emilio Alarcos elaborated a theoretical and practical corpus to which we must add another reference equally of lineage Central European: the Phenomenology of the German Edmund Husserl and its application to the ontology and epistemology of the literary work of art formulated by his Polish disciple Roman Ingarden. Compatible influence in the critical exercise of Alarcos with the Hjelmslevian model, according to which the literary and poetic language is constituted as a language whose level of expression is at the same time the usual language of the reader and the poet. Nothing, then, of diversion or opacity: in the most refined achievements of literature, none other than the words of the tribe resonate.