MEANING CONSTRUCTION IN HYBRID GENRES:A CASE STUDY OF THE DRABBLE
The article looks at meaning construction in hybrid genres represented by drabbles (short-short stories of 100 words). The discourse analysis of drabbles aims at construing the meaning of the work during which the researcher identifies the genres or subgenres involved, how they contribute to the meaning construction of the drabble and which analytical tools prove to be most effective. The author provides a brief overview of a number of contemporary approaches to genres and hybrid genres and explores genre hybridity from a dynamic perspective with regard to cognitive processes underlying meaning construction. The article emphasizes the role of postmodern social and cultural context that determines certain genre features of a drabble - its unusually small size, unconventional structure and form, open or unusual ending, intertextuality, interdiscursivity, blending, even mimicry of various genres that result in a genre hybrid. It requires considerable cognitive effort on the recipient's part to adapt his knowledge about the world to the fictional one created by the author. The author argues that an effective hybrid genre analysis should draw on the modern version of the conceptual integration theory and illustrates it with a brief analysis of a short-short.