А function of language, related to the aspect of communication known as message; it is also called a poetic function.
In each communication process, one addresser transmits a message to one addressee; this process occurs in the context of the code and a form of contact or channel between the addresser and the addressee.
One component is associated with each component of communication. The emotive function is related to the addresser, the conative – to the addressee, the referential to the context, the phatic to the contact; the metalinguistic with the code and the aesthetic or poetic with the message itself.
Today, many scholars believe that in the literary text, language is used not only to express the feelings of authors, to direct the actions of readers, or to mark the objects of world events; but also to reveal one’s own nature and power. This concept of the aesthetic function of language or communication (a thesis supported, for example, by Roman Jakobson) is formalistic rather than contextual because it recognizes this function in the form inherent in the literary (or artistic) text. To this end, it is necessary to abstract from the psychobiographical context of the author’s life and from the historical context in which the text is written and read.
As Virginia Woolf notes, “art is a web, always loosely attached, but still attached to life [or reality] for all four ends” (1929 [1975], 43).
To fully understand such a network, one must carefully trace its mysterious threads and shapes and use the points of its attachment.
The formal consideration of the aesthetic text as a self-sufficient and self-referential system needs to be supplemented with contextual understandings of various kinds.
