Boyko, M.E. Approaches to Studying Diegetic Actors: Classification, Brief History and Prospects

Abstract: The author of the article offers to divide all approaches to studying diegetic actors into the two large groups, hermeneutical and structuralistic approaches. The separate subgroup of hermeneutic approaches related to psychoanalysis and its branches is specially specified. The author describes the history of development and topical issues of the theory of diergetic actors. He analyzes approaches offered by Lev Vygotsky, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, Karl Leonhard, Vadim Rudnev and other researchers. The author criticizes the naïvehermeneutic approach that has been preventing researchers from recognizing diegetic actors as a true subject of research. The author uses historical, hermeneutic, semiotic and structure-typological methods as well as combinatory analysis, functional analysis and structural analysis. The author demonstrates that structuralistic approaches have important limitations and prove to be efficient only when combined with certain hermeneutical procedures. Thus, further studies of diegetic actors are associated with overcoming the gap between structuralistic and hermeneutic approaches by creating a unified structural-hermeneutic method based on the complementarity principle.

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