Między kreacją a kreatywnością : świat przedstawiony i język neologizmów w wybranych powieściach "fantasy" po 2000 roku

Abstract

Within the genre of fantasy, creating a presented world with the view to building an unusual setting, is reflected in a language that the creator must adapt to meet the requirements of his or her literary imagination. Creating a new context, phenomena, or characters necessitates creative use of language, and – as a result – the modeling of the linguistic material for the purpose of the description of a non-existent world. The absence of references to an extra-linguistic reality results in the proliferation of neologisms and other heterotypical elements which thus become key stylistic traits of the genre. While the newly created lexical units serve to describe an unfamiliar literary reality to the reader facing the uncanny, at the same time they themselves need to be characterized by reference to universal concepts. The operation of adjusting language for the purpose of the description of a fantasy world – a fundamental element of the genre’s construction – as well as translation practices aimed at reflecting this operation in the target language, are presented in the article on the basis of examples extracted from selected fantasy novels of the recent years. These examples include: Painted Man by Peter V. Brett, Beyonders by Brandon Mull, and The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks.