Figurative Language and Conceptual Conflicts in the Novel “Nice Work” by David Lodge

The paper offers the results of a comprehensive linguistic and literary research aimed at identifying distinctive features of artistic and figurative representation of literary conflict in the novel “Nice Work” by David Lodge. In the course of the research the authors worked on a number of tasks - to classify the author's methods of plot construction; to establish structural features of the storyline; to disclose distinctive linguistic and cultural peculiarities of the novel, manifested through the figurative language and stylistic devices of the novel. The authors disclose the conceptual сoherence of the novel with the lyrical ballad “The Lady of Shalott” by Alfred Tennyson and corresponding artworks painted by the English artist John William Waterhouse. The paper also discovers and describes typical instances of postmodernism in their literary manifestation in the novel, which, taken together, bring about multiple interpretations of its genre. These features are: intertextuality, pastiche, elements of parody, word play, cultural codes and signs hidden in the text, perceived only by the reader familiar with British cultural and linguistic traditions. It has been shown that the literary conflict lying in the base of the plot can be viewed as a complex multi-layered inverted pyramid, with the main storyline lying on its broad side. The underlying levels reveal hidden meanings in their artistic and historical perspective, richly saturated by means of stylistic techniques. The literary conflict of the novel bases on a close network of metaphor, antithesis, hyperbole, linguistic and semantic symbolism, woven together and found both at the level of the plot and composition and in the meaning of separate words. The basis of the textual integrity of D. Lodge's novel “Nice work” is a comprehensive and recurrent metaphor of ‘shadow' implying a fuzzy vague reflection of reality, embodied in the antithesis. The same role is played in the novel by the multilayer antithesis together with the metaphor of the ‘shadow'. In fact, the novel “Nice work” itself is presented by the author as a ‘shadow' and at the same time a literary reflection of Alfred Tennyson's ballad “the Lady of Shallott”.