Topos “Book” in the History of Culture: The Origins of the Development of the Semantic Field, the Evolution of the Values

Abstract

The article analyzes the main aspects of the functioning of the topos “book” in the history of culture: the sources of formation of the semantic field, as well as the dynamics of the values of the topos. As the precedent texts that defined the core of the topos “book”, named myths and the Bible, which actualize the positively marked elements of the binary opposition that make up the structure of the topos: “salvation”, “power” (in the myth), “healing”, “wealth”, “justice” (in the Bible), as well as the seven “memory”, “knowledge” – common to the two sources. The emergence of fundamentally new values of the topos “book” occurs in a situation of transition, historical instability. Around the topos “book” formed a stable poetic and semantic complex, the structure of which, on the one hand, includes the traditional motives of the mental existence of the book, the identification of the book with the true knowledge, on the other hand, there are qualitatively new ideas related to the archiving of book culture, as well as the destruction of humanitarian knowledge (which is especially important for the literature of recent decades). The main stages of the evolution of the topos “book” are considered: each cultural epoch has its own peculiarities of perception of this topos as a model of the world, which demonstrates the ontological, axiological and epistemological attitudes characteristic of a person's worldview of a particular historical period.