Revisiting the Use of the Writer’s Image in Advertising Discourse

Abstract

The article’s purpose is to identify the functional aspects of the use of а writer’s image in advertising discourse and to raise the ethical issues that arise in this case. Being at a junction of masscult and elitism, а writer’s image is exploited in advertising and becomes a brand, a stamp, a label. It becomes the part of what implements both functions of attracting attention and self-presentation. The ‘pleasure of recognition’ and the feeling of satisfaction from the involvement in cultural integrity are those positive emotions that advertising marketing focuses on. For this the advertising of consumer goods, catering establishments, shops, medical services, etc., uses literary classics texts. In this way, advertising refers to cultural memory as collective reconstructions of our common past image. The transfer of the classical text specific element into the advertising genre as into another semiotic system automatically simplifies and schematizes the meanings of the source text. At the same time, the range of images used in advertising as in a utilitarian genre demonstrates what fills the collective cultural memory, what is considered as necessary for its preservation. The analysis of advertising texts against the ethical permissibility-inadmissibility, the acceptability-redundancy (being extreme/over the line) gives grounds to draw the following conclusions: - advertising using а writer’s image, being only a small part of the general advertising discourse, creates a visual noise situation, ‘simplifying’ the classical text understanding impoverishes the process of its interpretation; - advertising built on the basis of the writer’s images desemantization and deformation, works towards the deformation and perception of the author, forms false meanings; - advertising, based on linguistic turns of phrase, like any joke, has the potential to cross the border of what is permissible when the writer’s image (name, text) as a result of carnivalization acquires additional vulgar and taboo meanings. The mechanisms that determine the flexibility of language matter also since its instability and aesthetic choice turns out to be inextricably linked with a moral choice.