THE IMPLICATION FORMATIVE POTENTIAL RECEPTIVE AND SEMANTIC POTENTIAL

OF SILENCE IN MODERN LITERARY AND MEDICAL DISCOURSE

The article aims to analyse the receptive and semantic potential of silence based on the novel “Critical

Condition” (2002) by the contemporary Canadian-American physician, writer Peter Clement. The research

methodology is based on the application of modern literary studies in the fields of narratology,

receptive aesthetics and literary hermeneutics. The theoretical significance of the research consists

in the disclosure of the narrative category of silence in the modern American literary and medical

discourse. The results of the study will improve the content of training courses in the world literature

and form a methodological basis for the development of special courses, theme-based seminars

and academic syllabi. In the course of the study, it was found that silence within the analysed literary

work symbolizes the epistemological and communicative crisis of language. The author’s intentions

and receptive resource of silence in the text have been analysed. The leading role of facial expressions

as a means of exteriorizing the silence effect in the “doctor — patient” communicative situation has been

observed. The patient’s silence in the novel is associated with the author’s rethinking of the phenomena

of illness and disability, thus stimulating the reader to embrace the active position of co-creation and

receptive cooperation by filling-in the narrative “gaps” of the text. Further research is needed to study

the role of the reader’s reception in constructing the silence in the “doctor — patient”communicative

situation, as exemplified by the literary and medical discourse of the US prose.