Literary criticism as a science arose at the beginning of the 19th century. Of course, literary works have existed since antiquity. Aristotle was the first who tried to systematize them in his book, the first to give a theory of genres and a theory of types of literature (epic, drama, lyric poetry). Plato created a story about ideas (idea → material world → art). Literature is an art form; it creates aesthetic values, and therefore is studied from the point of view of various sciences.
Literary studies studies the fiction of various peoples of the world in order to understand the features and patterns of its own content and the forms that express them. The subject of literary criticism is not only fiction, but also all the artistic literature of the world - written and oral. Modern literary criticism consists of:
o literary theory
o history of literature
o literary criticism.
The subject of literary criticism is not only fiction, but also all the artistic literature of the world - written and oral.
Literary theory studies general patterns literary process, literature as a form of social consciousness, literary works as a whole, the specifics of the relationship between the author, work and reader. Develops general concepts and terms. Literary theory interacts with other literary disciplines, as well as history, philosophy, aesthetics, sociology, and linguistics.
Poetics - studies the composition and structure of a literary work. The theory of the literary process studies the patterns of development of genders and genres. Literary aesthetics studies literature as an art form. Literary history studies the development of literature. Divided by time, by direction, by place. Literary criticism deals with the evaluation and analysis of literary works. Critics evaluate a work in terms of aesthetic value. From a sociological perspective, the structure of society is always reflected in works, especially ancient ones, so she also studies literature.
Literary studies includes 3 cycles of disciplines:
· History of national literatures (this is the study of issues of the creative evolution of the writer, as well as spiritual and historical issues of the literary process)
Literary theory (research general laws literature):
A) studying the features of the image
B) the study of the artistic whole from the point of view of the artistic. Contents and art. forms.
C) study of the nature, structure of the f-ii
D) study of trends and patterns of literature. ist. process.
D) study of objects. Scientific Methodologies.
· Literary criticism.
Auxiliary literary disciplines:
1. textual criticism – studies the text as such: manuscripts, editions, editions, time of writing, author, place, translation and comments
2. paleography - the study of ancient text carriers, manuscripts only
3. bibliography - an auxiliary discipline of any science, scientific literature on a particular subject
4. library science - the science of collections, repositories of not only fiction, but also scientific literature, union catalogues.
11. Basic and auxiliary literary disciplines
12. Literary criticism and other scientific disciplines
The word "literature" comes from the Latin littera, which means "letter." The concept of "literature" covers all written and printed works on different topics. There is philosophical, legal, economic, etc. Literature. Literature is one of the types of art that figuratively recreates the world through the means of languages and variously creates the world in the ways of language.
The awareness of literature as an art dates back to the 19th century
11 Basic and auxiliary literary disciplines
. Literary criticism is the science of the art of words. It was formed at the end of the 18th - early XIX centuries
In literary criticism there are three main and a number of auxiliary disciplines. The main ones are: history of literature, theory of literature, literary criticism. Each of them has its own subject and tasks
The history of literature (Greek historia - a story about the past and Lat litteratura - alphabetic writing) studies the peculiarities of the development of fiction in connections and mutual influences, the role of individual writers and writers in the literary process of the formation of genera, types, genres, directions, trends. The history of fiction examines the development of literature in relation to the development of society; social, cultural and higher sulfur, starting from ancient times and ending with the works of the present. There are national, continental and world histories of literature. The fiction of each nation has its own specific characteristics.
The theory of literature (Greek thedria - observation, research) studies the general patterns of development of fiction, its essence, content and form, criteria for evaluating works of art, methodology and methods for analyzing literature as the art of words, features of genera, types, genres, movements, trends and styles. The theory of literature was established at the turn of the XVIII-XIX centuries.
Literary criticism (Greek kritike - judgment) studies new works, the current literary process; its subject is a separate work, the work of a writer, new works of several writers. Literary criticism helps readers understand the features of content and form work of art, its achievements and losses, contributes to the formation of aesthetic tastes.
The leading genres of literary criticism are literary portraits, literary critical reviews, reviews, reviews, annotations, etc.
Literary theory, literary history and literary criticism are closely related. Without literary theory there is no history, and without history there is no literary theory. Achievements of literary theory. Literary historians and literary critics are keen to use it. A literary critic is also a literary theorist, a literary historian, and a comparativist (Latin comparativus - comparative). He studies literature in interrelationships, connections, mutual influences, looking for similarities and differences in works of art.
Literary criticism enriches the history of literature with new facts, identifying trends and prospects for the development of literature
Auxiliary literary disciplines are textual criticism, historiography, bibliography, paleography, hermeneutics, translation studies, psychology of creativity
Textual criticism (Latin texturn - fabric, connection and Greek logos - word) is a branch of historical and philological science that studies literary texts, compares options, clears editorial and censorship changes, and restores the author's text. Textual criticism is important for publishing works and for studying creative process. Undesirable changes to literary texts have been made since antiquity. There are many of them in the works of writers who were repressed during the Soviet period. The publishers retouched texts containing a national idea in accordance with communist ideology. In a poem. V. Simonenko “About the land with a red brow” with the following lines; with the following rows:
Very nice!
Poverty writhes and dwindles in this
You scream into my brain like a curse
And those who come, and your corrupt ones
Love is terrible!
My communist joy!
Take me!
Take my little angry one. I!
In the manuscript, the first two lines were sharper:
Very nice!
In the stench and fog of dung
The first two lines of the next stanza sounded like this:
Love of light!
And my joyless joy!
The task of the textual critic is to establish the original of the work, its completeness, completeness, compliance with the will of the author and his intention; the textualist can determine the name of the author of an unnamed work
textualists distinguish between author's self-editing and author's self-censorship, caused by the ideological pressure of textual study of the changes and amendments that a writer makes to works that reveal his creative laboratory.
Historiography (Greek historia - a story about the past and grapho - I write) is an auxiliary discipline of literary criticism that collects and studies materials about the historical development of theory, criticism and history throughout all eras; it is formed by studies of historical periods (antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Baroque, Enlightenment, romanticism, realism, modernism, postmodernism) and disciplines associated with specific personalities (Homeric studies, Danthenic studies, Shevchenko studies, French studies, forest studies, co-syurological studies).
Bibliography (Greek biblion - book and grapho - I write, describe) is a scientific and practical discipline that discovers, systematizes, publishes and distributes information about manuscripts, printed works, compiles indexes, lists, which are sometimes accompanied by laconic annotations that help to choose necessary literature. There are different types of bibliographic indexes: general, personal, thematic. Special bibliographic journals-chronicles are published: chronicle of journal articles, chronicle of reviews. Chronicle of newspaper articles.
The history of bibliography begins in the 2nd century BC, from the works of the Greek poet and critic. Callimachus, leader. Library of Alexandria. Callimachus compiled a catalog of it. Domestic bibliography begins in the 11th century. The first Ukrainian bibliographic work is “Izbornik. Svyatoslav” (1073 hectares) (1073 rubles).
Paleography (Greek palaios - ancient and grapho - writing) is an auxiliary literary discipline that studies ancient texts, establishes the authorship, place, and time of writing of a work. Before the advent of printing, works of art were copied by hand. The scribes sometimes made their own corrections to the text, supplemented or shortened it, and put their names under the works. The names of the authors were gradually forgotten. We still don’t know, for example, the author of “The Tale of Igor’s Regiment.” Paleography is a historical and philological science that has existed since the 17th century. The following types of paleography are known: epigraphy, which studies inscriptions on metal and stone, and papyrology - on papyrus, codicology - handwritten books, cryptography - graphics of secret writing systems. A French explorer began paleography. B. Montfaucon ("Greek Paleography", 1708). In Ukraine, the first studios of paleography and grammar. Lawrence. Zizania (1596). Today, geography is developing - the science of modern written texts, into which changes were made by censors or editors or changes by censors or editors.
Hermeneutics (Greek hermeneutikos - I explain, I explain) is a science associated with the study, explanation, interpretation of philosophical, historical, religious, philological texts. The name "hermeneutics" comes from the name. Hermes. In ancient mythology - the messenger of the gods, the patron of travelers, roads, trade, the guide of the souls of the dead. According to opinion. Yu. Kuznetsova, the etymology of the concept is not related to the name. Hermes, the term comes from the ancient Greek word erma, which means a pile of stones or a stone pillar, which the ancient Greeks used to mark a burial site. Hermeneutics is a method of interpreting works of art, commenting on works, and a textual critic preparing for publication. At first, hermeneutics interpreted the predictions of oracles, sacred texts, and subsequently legal laws and the works of classical poets.
Hermeneutics uses various methods of interpreting literary texts: psychoanalytic, sociological, phenomenological, comparative-historical, existentialist, semiotic, structural, post-structural, mythological, deconstructivist, receptive, gender.
Translation studies is a branch of philology, connected with the theory and practice of translation; its task is to comprehend the features of literary translation from one language to another, the components of translation science. The main problem of translation studies is the problem of the possibility or impossibility of adequate translation. Translation studies includes the theory, history and criticism of translation. The term "translation studies" was introduced into Ukrainian literary studies. V. Koptilov. They made a significant contribution to understanding the problems of translation studies. O. Kundzic. M. Rylsky. Roksolana. Zorivchak. Lada. Kolomietsak,. Lada. Kolomiets.
The psychology of literary creativity was formed at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries at the border of three sciences: psychology, art history and sociology. In the field of view of the psychology of creativity, conscious and subconscious e, intuition, imagination, reincarnation, personification, fantasy, inspiration. They studied the psychology of literary creativity. O. Potebnya. I. Franko,. M. Arnaudov. G. Vyazovsky. S. Freud,. K. Jung. Today -. A. Makarov. R. Pikhmanets.. Pikhmanets.
12 Literary studies and other scientific disciplines
The science of literature is associated with such disciplines as history, linguistics, philosophy, logic, psychology, folklore, ethnography, art history
Works of art appear in certain historical conditions, they always reflect the peculiarities of time. A literary critic must know history in order to understand this or that literary phenomenon. Literary scholars study archival materials, memoirs, letters in order to better understand the events, the atmosphere of the era, and the biography of the artist.
Literary criticism interacts with linguistics. Works of fiction are material for linguistic research. Linguists decipher the sign systems of the past. Literary studies, studying the features of languages and how works are written, cannot do without the help of linguistics. Studying the language allows you to better understand the specifics of Turkish fiction.
Before the advent of writing, works of art were distributed orally. Works of oral folk art are called "folklore" (English folk - people, lore - knowledge, teaching). Folklore works appeared even after the emergence of writing. Developing in parallel with fiction, folklore interacts with it and influences it without influence.
The development of literature and literary criticism is influenced by philosophy: rationalism is the philosophical basis of classicism, sensationalism is the philosophical basis of sentimentalism, positivism is the philosophical basis of realism and naturalism. On literature XIX-XX centuries were influenced by existentialism, Freudianism, and intuitionism.
Literary studies has contacts with logic and psychology. Main subject fiction - man. These sciences make it possible to penetrate deeper into her inner world and understand the processes of artistic creativity.
Literary criticism is related to theology. Works of fiction may have a biblical basis. Biblical motifs in the works "Psalms to David" by T. Shevchenko, "Moses" I.. Franko, "Obsessed" Lesya Ukrainskaya, "S. Garden of Gethsemane" Ivana. Bagryany, "Cain" J. Byronsky" by Ivan. Bagryany, "Cain". Byron.
· literary theory
· history of literature
literary criticism
Artistic (literary) image.
An artistic image is a universal category of artistic creativity, a form of interpretation and exploration of the world from the position of a certain aesthetic ideal by creating aesthetically affecting objects. Any phenomenon creatively recreated in a work of art is also called an artistic image. An artistic image is an image from art that is created by the author of a work of art in order to most fully reveal the described phenomenon of reality. The artistic image is created by the author for the fullest possible development of the artistic world of the work. First of all, through the artistic image, the reader reveals the picture of the world, plot moves and features of psychologism in the work.
The artistic image is dialectical: it unites living contemplation, its subjective interpretation and evaluation by the author (as well as the performer, listener, reader, viewer).
An artistic image is created on the basis of one of the media: image, sound, linguistic environment, or a combination of several. It is integral to the material substrate of art. For example, the meaning, internal structure, clarity of a musical image is largely determined by the natural matter of music - the acoustic qualities of musical sound. In literature and poetry, an artistic image is created on the basis of a specific language environment; V theater arts all three means are used.
At the same time, the meaning of an artistic image is revealed only in a certain communicative situation, and the final result of such communication depends on the personality, goals and even the momentary mood of the person who encountered it, as well as on the specific culture to which he belongs. Therefore, often after one or two centuries have passed since the creation of a work of art, it is perceived completely differently from how its contemporaries and even the author himself perceived it.
In Aristotle's Poetics, the image-trope appears as an inaccurate exaggerated, diminished or altered, refracted reflection of the original nature. In the aesthetics of romanticism, likeness and resemblance give way to the creative, subjective, transformative principle. In this sense, incomparable, unlike anyone else, which means beautiful. This is the same understanding of the image in avant-garde aesthetics, which prefers hyperbole, shift (the term of B. Livshits). In the aesthetics of surrealism, “reality multiplied by seven is truth.” In modern poetry, the concept of “meta-metaphor” (term by K. Kedrov) has appeared. This is an image of the transcendental reality beyond the threshold of light speeds, where science falls silent and art begins to speak. The metametaphor is closely related to the “reverse perspective” of Pavel Florensky and the “universal module” of the artist Pavel Chelishchev. It's about expanding the limits of human hearing and vision far beyond physical and physiological barriers.
The problem of the relationship between plot and plot. Elements of a classic plot (fable).
There are many definitions of these two concepts, and even more debate on this matter. Wolkenstein believes that the plot of a drama is the most important circumstances and the most significant events - stages of a dramatic struggle. Tomashevsky calls the plot a set of interconnected events that are reported in the work. Sometimes the plot is understood as a sequence of events in their natural, chronological and causal order. The plot in this case is the same events, in the order in which they occur in a work of fiction. The plot and plot may not coincide. In our opinion, it is better to use the terms composition and disposition, it will be more accurate. Disposition is the natural structure of events. Composition is their sequence in a work of art.
A rather interesting definition of plot is given by Bentley E: “if drama is the art of depicting emergency situations, then plot is the means by which the playwright draws us into these situations and (if he wants) takes us back out of them” 1 . Barboy, on the contrary, believes that the plot does not have so much of great importance. In his opinion, modern theater got rid of the pressure of the plot, but nevertheless retained its inherent principles - the principles of combining all elements, different in nature, into one, artistic whole work. He calls this principle structure and based on it he derives “structural analysis.” We will not dwell on it, because... it is more characteristic of directing than of dramaturgy itself, and without delving into the thorns of terminological disputes, we will try to briefly consider these concepts.
Literary portrait.
Under literary portrait refers to the depiction in a work of art of a person’s entire appearance, including the face, physique, clothing, demeanor, gestures, and facial expressions. The reader’s acquaintance with the character usually begins with a portrait.
13. Artistic method and artistic style. Individual and “big” styles.
One of the most important concepts associated with the evolution of costume over time in human society is the concept style: style of the era, style of historical costume, fashionable style, fashion designer style. Style- the most general category of artistic thinking, characteristic of a certain stage of its development; ideological and artistic community of visual techniques in the art of a certain period or in separate work, artistic and plastic homogeneity of the subject environment, which develops during the development of material and artistic culture as a single whole uniting different areas of life. Style characterizes the formal and aesthetic features of objects that carry a certain content. The style expresses a system of ideas and views that reflects the worldview of the era. Therefore, style can be considered the general artistic expression of an era, a reflection of the artistic experience of a person of his time. The style reveals, in particular, the ideal of beauty that prevails in a given historical era. Style is a concrete embodiment of emotional characteristics and ways of thinking that are common to the entire culture and determine the basic principles of formation and types of structural connections, which are the basis for the homogeneity of the subject environment at a certain historical stage. Such styles are called “great artistic styles of the era,” and they are manifested in all types of art: architecture, sculpture, painting, literature, music. Traditionally, art history is viewed as a succession of great styles. Each style in the process of its development goes through certain stages: origin, apogee, decline. Moreover, in each era, as a rule, several styles coexisted simultaneously: the previous one, the dominant one at the moment and elements of the emerging future style. Each country had its own dynamics of the evolution of artistic styles, associated with the level of cultural development, political and socio-economic development, and the degree of interaction with the culture of other countries. So in the 15th century. in Italy - the flowering of Renaissance culture, in France - "late Gothic", and in Germany, especially in architecture, "Gothic" prevailed until the second half of the 16th century. In addition, microstyles can develop within a large style. So, within the Rococo style in the 1730-1750s. There were micro-styles of “chinoiserie” (Chinese) and “Turkeri” (Turkish style), in the “Art Nouveau” style (“Art Nouveau”, “Liberty”) in the 1890-1900s. One can distinguish “neo-Gothic”, “neo-Russian” style and others, in the “Art Deco” style (1920s) - “Russian”, “African”, “geometric” styles, etc. However, with the change historical eras Gone are the days of great artistic styles. The acceleration of the pace of human and social life, the development of information processes, the influence of new technologies and the mass market have led to the fact that a person’s experience of his time is manifested not in one style, but in a variety of stylistic forms and plastic images. Already in the 19th century. styles appeared based on the use of styles of the past and their mixing (“historicism”, “eclecticism”). Eclecticism has become one of the most important characteristics of the culture of the 20th century, especially its last third - the culture of "postmodernity" (eclecticism - mixing various styles, the coexistence of several styles at the same time), which influenced both fashion and costume. The last “great artistic style” can probably be considered the “modern” style. In the 20th century “Great styles” were replaced by new concepts and methods associated primarily with the innovative essence of avant-garde art: “abstractionism”, “functionalism”, “surrealism”, “pop art”, etc., reflecting the worldview of a person of the 20th century. And it may not be about big style, but rather about a fashionable style (when a style becomes fashionable, while losing the stability for quite a long time that the “great styles of the era” had). In fashion of the 20th century. Each decade had its own micro-styles in costume, successively replacing each other: in the 1910s. - “oriental style” and “neo-Greek”; in the 1920s - "Art Deco" ("Russian", "Egyptian", "Latin American", "African", "geometric"; in the 1930s - "neoclassicism", "historicism", "Latin American", "Alpine", " surrealism"; in the 1940s - in the USA, the "country" and "western", "Latin American" styles appeared in fashionable costume; in the 1950s - "nude look", the "Chanel" style; in the 1960s gg. - “cosmic”; in the 1970s - “romantic”, “retro”, “folklore”, “ethnic”, “sports”, “denim”, “diffuse”, “military” , “linen”, “disco”, “safari”, “punk style”; in the 1980s - “ecological”, “new pirates” style, “neo-classic”, “neo-baroque”, “sexy” “corset”, “ethnic”, “sports”; in the 1990s - “grunge”, “ethnic”, “ecological”, “glamour”, “historicism”, “neo-punk”, “cyber-punk” , “neo-hippie”, “minimalism”, “military”, etc. Every season, fashion publications promote new styles, every clothing designer strives to create his own style, but the impressive variety of styles in modern fashion does not mean that they appear arbitrarily. The style in which political events resonate becomes relevant, social problems that concern people, their hobbies and values. Fashionable styles reflect changes in the lifestyle and image of a person of each time, ideas about his first place and role in modern world. The emergence of new styles is influenced by the invention of new materials and methods of processing them. Among the many styles, we can highlight those called " classic" - these are styles that do not go out of fashion, remaining relevant for a long time. Styles that have certain qualities become classic, which allow them to “linger” for a long time, having survived many different “fashions” and fashionable styles: versatility, multifunctionality, integrity and simplicity of form, compliance with human needs and long-term lifestyle trends. Styles such as “English” and “denim” can be considered classic. In addition to large artistic styles and microstyles, there are concepts such as “. author's style"-a set of main ideological- artistic features creativity of the master, manifested in his typical themes, ideas, in the originality of expressive means and artistic techniques. The work of the largest couturiers and clothing designers was distinguished by its style - one can rightfully talk about the Chanel style, the Dior style, the Balenciaga style, the Courrèges style, the Versace style, the Lacroix style, etc. Associated with the concept of "style" is the concept "stylization"- artistic technique when creating new works of art. Stylization is the deliberate use of formal features and figurative system of one or another style (characteristic of a certain era, movement, author) in a new, unusual artistic context. Stylization involves free handling of prototypes, in particular, transformation of forms, but while maintaining connection with the original style, the creative source is always recognizable. In certain eras, imitation of the styles of classical art (the art of antiquity) was the dominant principle; the technique of stylization was used in the eras of classicism, neoclassicism, and empire style. Stylization as an artistic technique served as a source for the emergence of new forms and images in modern art. In modern design, stylization retains its importance, especially when it comes to the so-called commercial design (corporate design), focused on creating products for the mass consumer. Stylization: 1) conscious use of features of a particular style when designing products (the term “styling” is more often used in this meaning); 2) direct transfer of the most obvious visual signs of a cultural sample onto the designed item, most often into its decor; 3) creation of a conventional decorative form by imitating the external forms of nature or characteristic objects. Stylization is widely used in clothing modeling in order to create new forms and expressive images. Brilliant examples of stylization are the collections of Yves Saint Laurent of the 1960-1980s: “African Women”, “Russian Ballets/Operas”, “Chinese Women”, “Spanish Women”, “In Memory of Picasso”, etc. The artistic and plastic homogeneity of the modern object environment has been defined as “design style”. The design style reflects the results of the aesthetic development of technical progress and the achievement of industrial mastery of the material. Design style is associated with the latest materials and technologies that can change not only the appearance of things, but also add new qualities to human life, influencing the interaction between things and people.
Classicism.
Classicism is one of the artistic methods that actually existed in the history of art. Sometimes it is referred to by the terms “direction” and “style”. Classicism (French) classicisme, from lat. classicus- exemplary) - artistic style and aesthetic direction in European art of the 17th-19th centuries.
Classicism is based on the ideas of rationalism, which were formed simultaneously with the same ideas in the philosophy of Descartes. A work of art, from the point of view of classicism, should be built on the basis of strict canons, thereby revealing the harmony and logic of the universe itself. Of interest to classicism is only the eternal, the unchangeable - in each phenomenon it strives to recognize only essential, typological features, discarding random individual characteristics. The aesthetics of classicism attaches great importance to the social and educational function of art. Classicism takes many rules and canons from ancient art (Aristotle, Horace).
Classicism establishes a strict hierarchy of genres, which are divided into high (ode, tragedy, epic) and low (comedy, satire, fable). Each genre has strictly defined characteristics, the mixing of which is not allowed.
Sentimentalism.
Sentimentalism (fr. sentimentalisme, from fr. sentiment- feeling) - a direction in Western European and Russian culture and a corresponding literary direction. Works written within this artistic movement place special emphasis on the sensuality that arises when reading them. In Europe it existed from the 20s to the 80s of the 18th century, in Russia - from the end of the 18th to the beginning of the 19th century.
SENTIMENTALISM. By sentimentalism we understand that direction of literature that developed at the end of the 18th century and colored the beginning of the 19th century, which was distinguished by the cult of the human heart, feelings, simplicity, naturalness, special attention to the inner world, and a living love for nature. In contrast to classicism, which worshiped reason, and only reason, and which, as a result, built everything in its aesthetics on strictly logical principles, on a carefully thought-out system (Boileau’s theory of poetry), sentimentalism provides the artist with freedom of feeling, imagination and expression and does not require his impeccable correctness in architectonics literary creations. Sentimentalism is a protest against the dry rationality that characterized the Age of Enlightenment; he values in a person not what culture has given him, but what he has brought with him in the depths of his nature. And if classicism (or, as it is more often called here in Russia, false classicism) was interested exclusively in representatives of the highest social circles, royal leaders, the sphere of the court and all kinds of aristocracy, then sentimentalism is much more democratic and, recognizing the fundamental equivalence of all people, is omitted into the valleys of everyday life - into that environment of the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie, the middle class, which at that time had just advanced in purely economic terms and began - especially in England - to play an outstanding role on the historical stage. For a sentimentalist, everyone is interesting, because in everyone intimate life glows, shines and warms; and you don’t need special events, stormy and bright activity, in order to be honored with getting into literature: no, it turns out to be hospitable in relation to the most ordinary people, to the most ineffective biography, it depicts the slow passing of ordinary days, the peaceful backwaters of nepotism, the quiet a trickle of everyday worries.
Romanticism.
Romanticism- a literary movement of the late 18th - early 19th centuries, which opposed itself to classicism as a search for forms of reflection that were more in line with modern reality.
Romanticism(fr. romanticism) - ideological and artistic direction in the culture of the late 18th century - the first half of the 19th century, it is characterized by the affirmation of the intrinsic value of the spiritual and creative life of the individual, the depiction of strong (often rebellious) passions and characters, spiritualized and healing nature. Spread to various areas human activity. In the 18th century, everything strange, picturesque and existing in books, and not in reality, was called romantic. At the beginning of the 19th century, romanticism became the designation of a new direction, opposite to classicism and the Enlightenment.
Originated in Germany. The harbinger of romanticism is Sturm and Drang and sentimentalism in literature.
Lyric epic. Poem.
Lyro-epic- one of the four types of literature in the traditional classification, located at the intersection of lyric and epic. In lyric-epic works, the reader observes and evaluates the artistic world from the outside as a plot narrative presented in poetic form, but at the same time the events and characters receive a certain emotional (lyrical) assessment by the narrator. That is, lyric epic is equally characterized by both lyrical and epic principles of reflecting reality.
Poem(ancient Greek
ποίημα) - literary genre.
Large or medium-sized multi-part poetic work lyric-epic character, belonging to a specific author, a large poetic narrative form. Can be heroic, romantic, critical, satirical, etc.
Throughout the history of literature, the genre of the poem has undergone various changes and therefore lacks stability. So, " Iliad» Homer- epic work, A. Akhmatova “ Poem without a hero" - exclusively lyrical . There is also no minimum volume (for example, a poem Pushkin « Robber brothers» volume of 5 pages).
Masculine rhyme
Masculine - rhyme with stress on the last syllable in the line.
Feminine rhyme
Feminine - with emphasis on the penultimate syllable in the line.
Dactylic rhyme
Dactylic - with stress on the third syllable from the end of the line, which repeats the pattern of dactyl - -_ _ (stressed, unstressed, unstressed), which, in fact, is the name of this rhyme.
Hyperdactylic rhyme
Hyperdactylic - with stress on the fourth and subsequent syllables from the end of the line. This rhyme is very rare in practice. She appeared in the works oral folklore, where size as such is not always visible. The fourth syllable from the end of the verse is not a joke! Well, an example of such a rhyme goes like this:
Rhyme accurate and inaccurate
Rhyme - repetition of more or less similar combinations of sounds at the ends of poetic lines or symmetrically located parts of poetic lines; In Russian classical versification, the main feature of rhyme is the coincidence of stressed vowels.
Literary criticism as a science. Composition of literary criticism.
Literary criticism as a science arose at the beginning of the 19th century. Of course, literary works have existed since antiquity. Aristotle was the first who tried to systematize them in his book, the first to give a theory of genres and a theory of types of literature (epic, drama, lyric poetry). He also belongs to the theory of catharsis and mimesis. Plato created a story about ideas (idea → material world → art).
In the 17th century, N. Boileau created his treatise “Poetic Art”, based on the earlier work of Horace. It isolates knowledge about literature, but it was not yet a science.
In the 18th century, German scientists tried to create educational treatises (Lessing “Laocoon. On the Boundaries of Painting and Poetry”, Gerber “Critical Forests”).
At the beginning of the 19th century, the era of the dominance of romanticism began in ideology, philosophy, and art. At this time, the Brothers Grimm created their theory.
Literature is an art form; it creates aesthetic values, and therefore is studied from the point of view of various sciences.
Literary studies studies the fiction of various peoples of the world in order to understand the features and patterns of its own content and the forms that express them. The subject of literary criticism is not only fiction, but also all the artistic literature of the world - written and oral.
Modern literary criticism consists of:
· literary theory
· history of literature
literary criticism
Literary theory studies the general laws of the literary process, literature as a form of social consciousness, literary works as a whole, the specifics of the relationship between the author, work and reader. Develops general concepts and terms.
Literary theory interacts with other literary disciplines, as well as history, philosophy, aesthetics, sociology, and linguistics.
Poetics - studies the composition and structure of a literary work.
The theory of the literary process - studies the patterns of development of genders and genres.
Literary aesthetics – studies literature as an art form.
Literary history studies the development of literature. Divided by time, by direction, by place.
Literary criticism deals with the evaluation and analysis of literary works. Critics evaluate a work in terms of aesthetic value.
From a sociological perspective, the structure of society is always reflected in works, especially ancient ones, so she also studies literature.
Auxiliary literary disciplines:
1. textual criticism – studies the text as such: manuscripts, editions, editions, time of writing, author, place, translation and comments
2. paleography - the study of ancient text carriers, manuscripts only
3. bibliography - an auxiliary discipline of any science, scientific literature on a particular subject
4. library science - the science of collections, repositories of not only fiction, but also scientific literature, union catalogues.
Literary criticism
Literary criticism
LITERARY STUDIES - the science that studies fiction (see Literature). This term is of relatively recent origin; before him, the concept of “literary history” (French histoire de la litterature, German Literaturgeschichte) was widely used. The gradual deepening of the tasks facing researchers of fiction has led to increased differentiation within this discipline. A theory of literature was formed, which included methodology and poetics. Together with the theory of literature, the history of literature was included in the general composition of the “science of literature,” or “L.” This term is extremely popular in Germany (Literaturwissenschaft, cf. art criticism - Kunstwissenschaft), where it is used by such researchers as, for example. O. Walzel, R. Unger and many others. etc. (Unger R., Philosophische Probleme in der neuen Literaturwissenschaft, 1908; Elster E., Prinzipien der Literaturwissenschaft, 1911; Walzel O., Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft; Philosophie der Literaturwissenschaft, collection Edited by E. Ermattinger, Berlin, 1930 , etc.). This term also became widely used in Russian around 1924-1925 (see, for example, the books: P. N. Sakulina, Sociological method in Leningrad, Moscow, 1925; P. N. Medvedeva, Formal method in Leningrad, Leningrad. , 1928; A. Gurshteina, Questions of Marxist L., M., 1931, collections “Against Mechanistic L.”, M., 1930, “Against Menshevism in L.”, M., 1931, and many others. also used the term "L."
The purpose of this article, in addition to the above terminological information, is twofold:
1) outline the general tasks that continue to confront the science of literature;
2) understand the boundaries of its components.
In a number of points, this article intersects with other articles in the “Literary Encyclopedia” - Literature, Marxism-Leninism in literary criticism, and many others. etc. The specificity of this article is in the general formulation of the problem of the tasks of science and its composition.
In the article “Literature” the nature of fiction was already established - a special form of class consciousness, the means of expression of which are verbal images. The science of literature came to this view of its subject through a process of complex internal restructuring, as a result of a fierce struggle with a number of unscientific methodological systems. Some researchers approached literature with the criteria of dogmatic aesthetics (Boileau, Gottsched, Sumarokov), others looked for reflections of the influences of the cultural “environment” in works (Ten, Pypin, Höttner), others saw in them an expression of the creative “spirit” of the author (impressionists and intuitionists) , the fourth paid their attention exclusively to artistic techniques, on the technology of verbal and figurative art (“formal” school). These methodological trends of the past reflected the worldview various groups nobility, bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie; Despite some achievements, these groups turned out to be unable to build a science of literature (see Methods of Pre-Marxist Literary Studies). Removing all these idealistic and positivistic points of view, Marxist-Leninist literature substantiated the view of literature as a specific form of class ideology that arises and develops in close connection with other superstructures.
The conditionality of verbal and figurative creativity on an economic basis is one of the main provisions of dialectical materialism, which currently does not require particularly detailed evidence. It is from the conditions of production and the production relations of classes that the primary influences on all forms of class consciousness come. At the same time, in a developed class society, these influences are never direct: literature is influenced by a number of other superstructures, more closely related to the economic base, for example. political relations of classes formed on the basis of production relations. Since this is so, the most essential task of literature is to establish the dependence of literary facts on the facts of class existence and related forms of class consciousness, to establish the roots of literary facts in the socio-economic reality that determined their appearance. The most important task of the science of literature should be to establish the class of which this work was an expression of the ideological tendencies. The dialectical-materialist study of literature requires, as Plekhanov wrote, “translating the idea of a given work of art from the language of art into the language of sociology, finding what can be called the sociological equivalent of a given literary work” (G. V. Plekhanov, Preface to the collection “For 20 years"). It is not a person of genius, as the impressionists asserted, nor a cultural-historical environment, as Taine believed, nor separate literary traditions of “senior” and “junior” schools, as the formalists believe, but class existence is the root cause of literature, as well as any other ideology that grows on the basis of this existence in the process of intensified class struggle. First of all, it is important to find out whose sentiments a given writer is the mouthpiece of, what tendencies he expresses in his work, the interests of what social group bring his works to life - in short, what is the social genesis of a literary work or, more broadly, of the work of a writer, of whom it is the work belongs to the style in which this writer, along with others, participates. Establishing social genesis is an extremely responsible and difficult task. It is necessary to be able to see the general, leading principles in a work and at the same time not throw overboard those individual shades in which these general principles are clothed (the unity of the “general” and the “particular”). Establishing the dependence of literature on class existence and other forms of class consciousness, at the same time we must not forget for a moment that we have before us a specific ideology, which cannot be reduced to any other form, which must be analyzed and studied , constantly revealing ideological content This form is “thinking in verbal images.” It is necessary to be able to find in literature the influence of the economic basis and at the same time almost always mediate this influence by a number of intermediate connections between literature and politics, philosophy, art and other forms of class consciousness. It is necessary to finally find that social group whose aspirations and interests are expressed in a given work, not in statics only, not in the form of a metaphysically constructed group, but in historical dynamics, in development, in an acute struggle with antagonists, and the literary work itself with all its ideological tendencies to study as an act of class struggle on the literary front. It is especially important to emphasize the latter: until quite recently, Pereverzianism, which dominated in Latvia, sinned precisely by this hypertrophy of the genetic analysis of literary series isolated from each other and completely ignoring the interaction of these literary streams. In the books of Pereverzev (see), in the articles of his students (U. Fokht, G. Pospelov, I. Bespalov and many others - including the author of this article), the social roots of Gogol, Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Gorky, Goncharov were studied as literary facts that develop independently of the complexity of the class struggle in the literature of a particular era.
Determining the genesis of literary works is inseparable from the analysis of artistic features, from the establishment of structural features of literary facts and the internal essence of a literary work. If literature is a figurative form of class consciousness, then how did the “content” (class consciousness) determine the form (“thinking in images”), what is the literary style that is born in the dialectical unity of “content” and “form”? If class ideology is expressed in poetic style (about the enormous role of ideas, see the article “Literature”), then an equally important task of literature will be to reveal the ideological nature of the “form” itself. A literary critic must show how the economy, production relations of classes, the level of their political self-awareness and diverse areas of culture determine the images of works of art, the disposition of these images, their deployment in the plot, dictated by ideological positions characteristic and specific to a given social group at a given stage of its history, at this stage of the class struggle. A comprehensive study of the components of a literary work that reflect the ideology of the class should be the subject of detailed study. A literary critic establishes the theme of the images - their character and ideology, the composition - the methods of internal construction of each of the characters in the work and the ways of their development in the plot, and finally the stylistics - those linguistic means with which the images are endowed, the degree of correspondence of the speech of the characters to their social affiliation, the linguistic pattern itself the author of the work, etc. No matter how difficult this task of the sociological Marxist study of literary style is (see “Style”), it can in no way be eliminated from the field of view of science. L. of our day struggles with the cultural-historical method, which completely ignored the analysis of poetic style, with the psychological method, which limited this study to the field of individual psychology. It fights formalism, which studies literary style as an immanent technological series, not conditioned by anything other than the state of previous traditions. It finally fights Perversianism, which fetishizes the study of the sociology of style and solves these problems in the spirit of mechanistic materialism, in complete isolation from specific historical forms of class struggle.
But establishing the genesis and artistic features of literary facts does not exhaust the work of a literary critic. The entire analysis of a literary fact and its genesis must serve the purpose of establishing the function of a literary fact. A literary work is always a reflection of the practice of the class to which it owes its appearance; it always reflects objective reality with varying degrees of breadth. However, at the same time, it is a class ideology, the attitude towards this reality of a class that protects its interests through it, a class that fights with its opponents for certain economic and political interests. Being a form of class consciousness, it at the same time represents a form of its action. Like any ideology, it not only reflects, but also expresses, not only registers, consolidates, but also organizes, actively influences everyone who perceives a literary work. A literary work influences primarily the work of writers contemporary to it or who came to literature in a subsequent period. It sometimes has a powerful influence on the literary production of less mature class groups, imposing on them its motives and techniques, subordinating them to its ideological tendencies. Even within literature itself, a poetic work is therefore not only a “fact”, but also a “factor” that draws other literary movements into the orbit of its influences. But another function of literature is incomparably more important - its direct impact on the reader, modern and later, related to her class and belonging to other social groups. Any “interpretation” of a work by a reader, based on the content objectively existing in the work, can at the same time be completely different depending on the reader’s class personality, his likes and dislikes, his demands and needs. The history of French literature knows the intense struggle of reader opinions around Victor Hugo's Ernani, a drama that played a colossal role in the fate of the romantic theater and dealt a crushing blow to classical tragedy. The famous “battles” around Hugo’s drama (battles not only in the figurative, but also in the most literal sense of the word) were a reflection not only of literary innovations of the style in which the author of “Hernani” and “Cromwell” worked, but also of acute social disagreements between the supporters of classicism and the pioneers of romanticism, for both literary movements were based on the ideology of different classes, and their mutual struggle was one of the forms of class struggle in French literature of the 20-30s. These reactions of readers were expressed even more openly with the publication of Turgenev’s novel “Fathers and Sons” (1862), dedicated to depicting the most topical phenomenon of that era - “nihilism”: this work was met with enthusiastic praise from one part of the readers and unbridled denial from others. the other side. The basis of these disagreements was not so much the subjectivity of the interpretation of Turgenev’s text, but rather a certain social attitude towards the revolutionary raznochinsky and the desire of various class groups (the ideologists of the peasant revolution, grouped around Sovremennik, liberals, the bloc of serf owners - characteristic laudatory reviews of the novel have reached us, given him by the Third Department) to use Turgenev’s novel in open political struggle. Each literary work, more or less broadly reflecting reality, becomes an active and organizing factor in social life, an object of struggle between opposing reader reactions, and in this sense represents a certain factor not only in literary, but also in social development. Let us recall Lenin’s articles about L. Tolstoy as a “mirror of the Russian revolution,” and we will easily understand that this enormous functional richness of literature is due to its cognitive essence: the struggle around “Fathers and Sons” would not have been distinguished by even a fraction of the fierceness that it in fact, it would have been acquired if Turgenev’s readers had not sought from the latter an objective image of the common youth. The enormous popularity of Leo Tolstoy’s “folk” works among the peasantry was determined precisely by the fact that the peasantry sought in them an answer to the question of how to get out of the unbearably difficult situation in which this class found itself in the post-reform era. Readers are always characterized by an approach to literature as a means of learning about life; hence the unprecedented passion of their reactions and the enormous functional role of literature.
A number of literary works influence the reader’s consciousness long after they were published. Such is the fate of the so-called. "eternal companions of humanity." Shakespeare, who worked in Elizabethan England, clearly transcends the boundaries of his time, and in the historical perspective of three too many centuries we see how often we learn from him, how much interest in him is revived, how he is not only a factor in the literary and reading process, but also a fact of literary politics (see, for example, the slogan “Down with Schiller,” thrown out by some RAPP theorists in their polemics with the LitFrontists about the creative method of proletarian literature). A literary critic has no right to forget that the problem of the social function of fiction is the most important of the problems facing him: “The difficulty lies not in understanding that Greek art and epic are connected with known social forms of development. The difficulty lies in understanding that they still continue to give us artistic pleasure and, in a certain sense, retain the meaning of a norm and an unattainable model” (K. Marx, On Criticism political economy). In order to bring the study of the functional role of literature to the proper height, it is necessary to study the real role of a literary work in the struggle of classes, class groups, parties, to establish what actions it prompted them to, what public resonance it created. As an auxiliary point, one should widely expand the history of the reader, take into account his interests, and examine his reactions.
It is needless to say that this study must be made on the basis of class as the main factor determining the difference in perception and reaction. Marxist literature must decisively combat trends that exaggerate the importance of the reader, such as, for example, “Thoughts on Literature and Life,” expressed by P. S. Kogan: “To understand a work of art means to understand its readers. The history of literature is the history of what is read, but not the history of what is written" (P. S. Kogan, Prologue, "Thoughts on Literature and Life", 1923, p. 10). The history of literature is both the history of what is “written” and the history of what is “read,” because both the objective essence of a literary work and the different class attitudes of the reader towards it are important to us. By rejecting the “written,” we thereby slide into clearly idealistic relativism, into a practical ignorance of the objective existence of literature. But we must object even more decisively to the opposite extreme - against that denial of the functional study of literature, which in our time has been so clearly reflected in Pereverzianism. “The task of a literary critic,” wrote Pereverzev, “is to reveal in a work of art that objective being that provided the material for it and determined its structure. Marxist research comes down to the revelation of this being, the clarification of the organic, necessary connection of a given work of art with a certain being” (“Necessary prerequisites for Marxist literary criticism,” collection of Literary Studies, M., 1928, p. 11). Without touching on the other aspects of this formula, it must be stated that public role work, its influence on the reader had no place in it. Studying exclusively the genesis of literary works and their style, “being” and “structure,” Pereverzev argued that the study of functions should be undertaken by a special discipline - “the history of the reader.” This delimitation is clearly illegal, since the study of the function of literary works is not limited to the study of the “History of the Reader”, and, on the other hand, is closely connected with the analysis of the class essence of the works. Only in establishing the class role of a work does the genetic and stylistic analysis of a literary critic receive full confirmation, and in this sense, the denial of functional study is inappropriate and illegal. It is, however, extremely characteristic of Perversianism, which considered literature only a means of reflecting the class psyche, practically denied the active role of ideologies and therefore reduced the science of literature to the level of passivist registration of poetic facts.
No matter how important the study of the real class function of literary works is, and in particular the study of the reader’s relationship to them, it still cannot be divorced from the analysis of literary works and replace it. Literature itself is functional, it contains that ideological orientation that causes such dissimilar reader assessments. And the very approach to the reader in Marxist literature should in no way be passivist registering. By asserting the opposite, we would inevitably slide into “tailism”, into the denial of philosophy as a science that studies one of the most effective ideologies. The leading, avant-garde part of literature - criticism - does not so much study the reader’s reactions as stimulate them, organize them, establishing the social roots of a given literary phenomenon, its artistic integrity and ideological orientation. The tasks of a Marxist literary critic in this area are to expose reader reactions, in their own way social essence harmful and reactionary, in deepening the tastes of the proletarian-peasant reader, in reshaping and re-educating intermediate petty-bourgeois groups, etc. The same should be said about L.’s attitude towards the writer: assistance to the ally of proletarian literature, active improvement of the qualifications of proletarian writers and merciless exposure reactionary tendencies in the work of bourgeois writers of town and country are included in the circle of the most important responsibilities of Marxist-Leninist literature and sharply distinguish it from the bourgeois-Menshevik, objectivist approach to literature. In our time of intense struggle for a new literary style and creative method of proletliterature, the problem of functional study must be raised to its full extent and introduced into the everyday use of our science.
The studies we have outlined represent only individual aspects of the essentially unified act of Marxist research into a literary work. We have divided this act into its constituent parts only in the interests of the greatest methodological clarity and the greatest possible detail of the analysis. In practice, the implementation of the above tasks is inextricably intertwined. By examining the style, we establish the features of class ideology manifested in it, thereby outlining the class genesis of the work and opening the way to identifying it. social functions. In turn, considering the goal of studying the last two problems, we cannot solve them without analyzing the features of the literary style. However, this unity is in no way identical: each aspect of the study is important, necessary and cannot be removed without obvious damage to the whole. By ignoring the social genesis of creativity, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to correctly answer the question about the reasons for its appearance, we fall into idealism or take a vulgar materialistic, “consumer” point of view. By removing the task of analyzing the artistic features of literary facts, we blur the specificity of literature, mix it with other ideologies, and impoverish the consciousness of the class. Finally, by forgetting about functional study, we break the strong connections of literary works with the reality that their authors seek to influence.
Repeated attempts to construct a dogmatic methodology for the study of literature inevitably suffer from mechanism. The order of studying literary facts in each individual case is determined by specific conditions - the availability of this or that material (in some cases, much information about this or that literary fact can only be speculative) and the inclination of the researcher to one or another form of analysis. Establishing generally binding prescriptions for the order of study can only be harmful here; these recipes must give way to the greatest methodological flexibility. The only important thing is that, although individual literary scholars can pose these tasks separately, not one of these tasks can be removed by scientific literature. To comprehensively study Pushkin using the only scientific method of dialectical materialism means to establish which class ideology his work was an expression of, to establish exactly what group within the class Pushkin represented, to understand the dependence between the developing and changing creativity of Pushkin and the social transformation of his class group; understand in this same aspect of social transformation the entire Pushkin style from the stages of initial maturation to its final stages, study this style as a system of Pushkin’s ideological statements, as a natural phenomenon in the struggle of the Pushkin class for social self-affirmation, separating individual moments in Pushkin’s work, characteristic of him personally, from the moments characterizing the social group; analyze Pushkin’s form of verbal-figurative thinking in its socio-historically determined connections with the previous literary culture and at the same time in its repulsions from this culture; finally, to determine the influence that Pushkin’s work has had and continues to have to this day on literature and on readers of the most diverse class groups, explaining this functional role by the social orientation of creativity, the ideological demands of readers, and finally by the entire historical reality in all the complexity of its internal contradictions. It is especially important to emphasize the latter. Marxist-Leninist L. contrasts the essentially Menshevik search for genesis on the basis of an isolated sociological analysis of a given writer with the study of the writer from the angle of the most diverse contradictions of his era. The deepest novelty and value of Lenin’s analysis of the works of Leo Tolstoy lies in the fact that he connected creative growth this writer with the peasant movement of the post-reform era, that he showed how dialectically this writer of noble origin reflected both the positive and negative sides of the peasant revolution and how this reflection determined the essentially revolutionary function of his work. To resolve this entire series of inextricably intertwined questions means to study the writer’s work comprehensively and exhaustively.
From the formulation of these common tasks, which stand before modern literature (for a more detailed discussion of them, see “Marxism-Leninism in Leninism”), let us now move on to establishing the composition of this science. We have already said above that the term “L.” arose as a result of the exceptional complexity of its composition. Currently, it represents a whole complex of disciplines, each of which has its own special internal boundaries within the general whole that they form.
The vanguard of literary criticism is literary criticism (see). Its historical morphology is extremely varied, its breadth of coverage is extremely significant. We know criticism based on the principles of dogmatic aesthetics (Merzlyakov), formalist criticism (Shklovsky), psychological (Gornfeld), impressionist (Aikhenwald, Lemaitre), educational-journalistic criticism (Pisarev), and finally Marxist. Without, of course, seeking here to exhaustively classify the types of criticism, we will only emphasize its avant-garde role in literature. Criticism almost always acts before academic literature and is a pioneer of scientific analysis. It has the difficult but honorable task of establishing the general milestones of this analysis, which other groups of literature will then follow. The most characteristic example of how criticism has established milestones for the history of literature is the creative practice of the cultural-historical method: S. A. Vengerov and A. N. Pypin were based in the construction of Russian history literature of the 19th century V. on the critical articles of Belinsky and Dobrolyubov, reducing and simplifying their views. Modern Marxist literature would be unthinkable without the widespread development a decade or two earlier of a broad phalanx of Marxist criticism.
Criticism, of course, does not negate the arrival of further detachments of literature, no matter what methodological movement it belongs to. This is due at least to the fact that the critic is concerned not so much with establishing an internal connection between literary facts, but with an ideological and political assessment of these facts. Critics may sometimes not be interested in a literary work in itself: for them it sometimes turns out not to be a goal, but a means for posing a number of philosophical or socio-journalistic problems to the reader. Let us recall here, on the one hand, the criticism of the symbolists, and on the other, such a characteristic example of journalistic criticism as the article by N. G. Chernyshevsky “Russian man on rendez-vous”, written to raise the problems of peasant reform in relation to Turgenev’s story “Asya”. Criticism may no longer set itself the task of understanding the process of preparing a given literary fact, studying its surroundings, literary destinies- everything that is a mandatory requirement for a literary historian. For criticism it is not necessary to use that detailed and complex auxiliary apparatus, without which the history of literature is unthinkable - the tasks of establishing authorship and criticizing a text do not exist for it.
L. also includes the history of literature, repeating, deepening and correcting the conclusions of criticism, clarifying it research method. Very often, critics themselves write historical and literary articles at a certain stage of their activity (let’s take as an example Belinsky’s articles on Pushkin with their review of the entire previous period of Russian literature). It is typical for a literary historian to use additional materials, biographies and technologies, a deeper study of a number of special problems, greater “academicism,” which, however, should in no way be equated with a lack of party affiliation.
The differences between criticism and literary history are internal differences between individual parts of the same science of literature. Criticism evaluates a literary work in the context of the current day; literary history examines it from a distance, from a historical perspective. However, Marxist criticism always strives to take a literary work from a historical perspective, and Marxist literary history cannot help but connect its work with modern literary life. What is imperceptible to a critic today, therefore, becomes possible for a literary historian to ascertain, and, conversely, very often those features of a work that a contemporary critic vividly perceives in it elude the literary historian. If criticism always represents a sharp weapon of the class struggle at its current contemporary stage, then the history of literature deals primarily with material that has, to some extent, lost its combative, relevant significance. This, of course, does not mean that the history of literature is “objective” and criticism is “subjective”, as the idealists tried and are still trying to present the matter - Marxist criticism is scientific and, when applied to modernity, operates with the same method of dialectical materialism that underlies all sciences about ideologies. But if the method is the same, then the supporting material becomes significantly more complicated, its volume, the perspective with which this material is studied, etc. The Marxist critic makes equal demands on both the monograph on Shakespeare and the review of M. Gorky’s play partisanship and scientific character. The difference here is determined by the difference in the objective historical content of the objects of analysis, the difference in their historical contexts and the resulting difference in specific assessments, practical conclusions, as well as the “tactics” of research techniques. Neither exclude criticism from scientific literature, much less oppose it to it, as some idealist theorists did, for example. Yu. Aikhenvald, - we have no reason.
It would be scientific pedantry to demand the establishment of precise, once and for all defined internal boundaries between criticism and the history of literature. Their competence can vary quite greatly depending on the nature of the era under study. And the goals pursued by both disciplines, and the techniques with which they operate, are often extremely close to each other. One of the main differences between them is the greater breadth of material (biographical, textual, archival, etc.), which is used by a literary historian who has a historical perspective on the work of a given writer, and thanks to it, establishes his predecessors, associates, and especially followers. This does not mean, of course, that other critics cannot be found who will be interested in the writer’s manuscripts, his biography, and so on; individual exceptions only confirm the rule. By complicating his analysis with material unknown to the critic and illuminating it from a broader perspective, which the critic does not always have the opportunity to take, the literary historian nevertheless organically continues his work. It certainly does not follow from this that the history of literature is doomed to trail behind criticism and cannot help it in any way. All parts of Marxist literature are organically interconnected and provide each other with effective assistance. The possibilities of successful and concrete criticism of phenomena directly related to the literary phenomena of the past, of course, depend significantly on the degree to which the history of literature has developed the material of previous decades. For example, a detailed development of questions of proletarian literature will greatly facilitate the work of Marxist criticism on the material of current proletarian literature.
A specific feature of the history of literature is that it poses questions of the literary process in all their breadth, operating with the material of “mass-cast production.” To illuminate the literary path of a class means to study all its vicissitudes literary development, all its individual stages - from initial accumulation to the flourishing and decline of class literature. The study of individual exemplary works from which idealists tend to write history - the study of “masterpieces” - determines the height of class creativity, but not the direction or structure of its spines. The history of literature is unthinkable without the study of secondary and tertiary fiction writers. Their work sometimes has no aesthetic value; their forms are embryonic and inexpressive. But in terms of historical analysis, to study the trends in the literary development of a class, to characterize its growth, the study of mass production is absolutely necessary. This is necessary in relation to the bourgeois-noble literature of the past, each of the movements of which was characterized by mass character both in its initial and mature stages (examples: aristocratic poetry of the era of serfdom, the bourgeois urban tradition of “physiological essays”, realistic manor novel, etc.). This mass character characterizes proletarian literature to an even greater extent. The absence of great masters of words, quite natural in the era of exploitation of the working class by the bourgeoisie, does not relieve the historian of proletarian literature of the obligation to study it in its earliest sources, in all the diversity of its constituent movements. Talents that are small in their creative range, however, perfectly characterize the ideological tendencies of the class. There is no need to talk about how gigantically the importance of the analysis of mass production is increasing in our time of the broadest flourishing of the labor movement, the formation of thousands literary circles at enterprises and deployed in recent years calling shock workers into literature. The history of literature is now less than ever the history of literary generals only; it can and should turn into the history of literary armies.
Criticism and the history of literature form a sector of practical literature. Their activities are directed by the general theoretical thought of literature. Just as in any army there are headquarters where all strategic work is concentrated on drawing up plans of military operations, coordinating military operations, etc., the role of the theoretical headquarters of literature. is carried out by methodology - the doctrine of methods and ways of the most rational study of fiction from the point of view of certain philosophical foundations (in scientific literature - from the point of view of dialectical materialism). Methodology includes, as an auxiliary but extremely important part, historiography, a consistent historical review of the methodological systems of the past. Criticism of these systems leads us into the depths of methodology, for every new school of literary criticism begins its life with a reassessment of the methodological concepts that prevailed before it. The essence of the methodology is to create an in-depth system of views on the essence, origin and function of literature. The development of this system of views usually requires the involvement of disciplines adjacent to literature - history, aesthetics, philosophy, etc. Methodology is the real brain of any literature, especially Marxist methodology, which requires establishing the conditionality of literature by social practice and revealing the inextricable connections between literature and other related sciences. her superstructures.
However, a general methodological orientation is not yet enough to successfully study a literary work. The methodology establishes the general essence of the phenomena being studied and drives the main piles of literary theory. Poetics (see) comes to the aid of methodology in a specific and painstaking analysis of literary facts, and gives the literary critic an idea of the types of the latter. The cultural-historical school ignored poetics, the Potebnians psychologized it to the extreme, the formalists exorbitantly exaggerated its importance, understanding by poetics the entire theory of literature (V. Zhirmunsky, Questions of the Theory of Literature; B. Tomashevsky), including within its scope the history of literature (a series of formalist in its methodology collections "Poetics"). The latter is especially unacceptable for a Marxist, since the history of literature clearly goes beyond the boundaries of those auxiliary tasks that it sets for itself. theoretical poetics. Elements of any literary style, when taken outside of history, immediately turn into “meager abstractions.” Only on the basis of historical study can theoretical poetics present a rich arsenal of all kinds of information about the structural types of works, which can be extremely useful for a literary critic, supplying him with methodological techniques work on the work. Poetics cannot be anything other than the application of the philosophical foundations of methodology on the broadest literary material- “specific methodology”. Within these boundaries, poetics is extremely helpful to the history of literature, as if forming a bridge between it and general methodology.
The exceptional complexity of studying certain monuments of literature, ancient anonymous or dubious, for which we know neither the author nor a more or less definitively established text, gives rise to the need to create a special auxiliary apparatus. Here the so-called auxiliary disciplines come to the aid of the literary scholar - “knowledge that helps to master research techniques... expanding the scientific horizon of the researcher” (V.N. Peretz, From a lecture on the methodology of the history of literature, Kiev, 1912) - bibliography (see) , history, biography, paleography (see), chronology, linguistics (see), textual criticism (see), etc. The adherents of the philological method suffered from an exceptional exaggeration of the importance of auxiliary disciplines. Its supporters were inclined to consider all historical and literary work exhausted by philological analysis. This phenomenon, which continues in certain circles of extra-Marxist literature today, is undoubtedly explained by their lack of clear general perspectives, disappointment in the methodological concepts of the past, and disbelief in the scientific nature of Marxist literature. Let us cite as an example the pathetic praise of auxiliary disciplines in the “Vision of a Poet” by the intuitionist M O. Gershenzon, who was disillusioned with the cultural and historical study of literature. Marxist literature undoubtedly limits the competence of auxiliary disciplines in the old sense of the word, although it is fully aware of the usefulness of textual criticism, editorial technique, etc. as preliminary work that dissects literary texts and makes them suitable. for scientific study. But with all the more energy, Marxists assert the importance of related disciplines devoted to the study of other superstructures. Idealistic literary criticism is often characterized by the deliberate isolation of literature from other ideologies. “A tempting task would be to construct a literary study from the data of the material itself, based on only the most elementary psychological and linguistic concepts. The author tries to approach this task in the sense that he does not rely on any preconceived psychological, sociological or biological theories, so as not to make his science dependent on changes occurring in related sciences (such as linguistics, natural science and especially philosophy )" (B. I. Yarkho, Borders scientific literary criticism, “Iskusstvo”, Moscow, 1925, No. 2, p. 45). An obviously hopeless attempt to isolate ourselves from other forms of social reality, to build a science without any “prejudices,” that is, without a worldview that synthesizes this reality! Marxists who study literature as one of the superstructures cannot help but involve in the process of studying literary phenomena, first of all, data on political life and struggle, economic processes, and then data on the development of other ideologies - philosophy, art, science, etc. Art criticism ( especially the history of theater and fine arts), philosophy, general history, sociology, economics will help the work of a literary critic, greatly facilitating and deepening the analysis of literary facts.
All of the above allows us to assert that modern Marxist literature is a complex set of disciplines that carry out their own special private tasks within the framework of a common whole. Criticism, literary history, methodology, poetics, and auxiliary disciplines are components of this literary complex. It is no coincidence that Marxist literature opposes the tendency to limit the competence of literary criticism to the study of style (formalists), the psychology of creativity (Potebnianism), the establishment of social genesis (Pereverzianism), and the performance of auxiliary philological tasks. A comprehensive study of literature as a specific form of class ideology requires extreme differentiation of tasks. But at the same time, literature is a single whole, an internal division of labor that provides the solution to the problems that the specific nature of fiction and the method of dialectical materialism poses to the science of literature.
Is L. a science? This question was deeply relevant 15-20 years ago, when idealists of all schools and stripes proclaimed the death of the science of literature. This was the collapse of positivist literature, the scientific weakness of which was revealed by the idealists with great clarity. But that turn to intuition, which became so sharply evident at the turn of the 20th century, signified the complete inability of the bourgeoisie to build a science of literature. What the decaying class could not achieve is already being accomplished by the leadership of the proletariat on an unshakable basis. philosophical basis dialectical materialism.
Marxist-Leninist literature faces tasks of enormous importance - to trace the work of writers of the past from the point of view of Lenin’s directives on the use of the literary heritage; to open a merciless struggle against the literary and literary production of classes hostile to the proletariat, to help create a creative method of proletarian literature, leading the work that unfolded around this issue. In short, Marxist literature is called upon to create a theory that helps the literary practice of the proletariat, organizes and directs it. These tasks are especially responsible and relevant at this stage of the construction of proletarian literature, which is characterized by its mass character and planning. The growing army of proletarian writers must be armed with the weapons of Marxist-Leninist literature, which will accelerate and ensure its creative victory. Marxists must resolutely resist any attempts to “apoliticize” the science of literature. Literary theory the working class must be put at the service of its literary practice. Bibliography:
Dashkevich N., Gradual development of the science of literary history and its modern tasks, “University News”, 1877, No. 10; Kareev N., What is the history of literature, “Philological Notes”, 1883, no. V-VI; Plotnikov V., Basic principles scientific theory Literature, "Philological Notes", 1887, vol. III-IV, VI (1888, issue I-II); Sorgenfrei G., The concept of literary criticism and its tasks, “Gymnasium”, 1895, August; Anichkov E.V., Scientific problems of the history of literature, “University News”, 1896, No. 4; Tikhonravov N. S., Problems of the history of literature and methods of its study, Sochin. N. S. Tikhonravova, vol. I, M., 1898; Pypin A. N., History of Russian literature (several ed.), vol. I. Introduction; Evlakhov A., Introduction to the philosophy of artistic creativity, vol. I-III, Warsaw, 1910, 1912 (Rostov n/D., 1916); Lanson G., Method in the history of literature, with afterwords. M. Gershenzona, M., 1911; Sipovsky V., History of Literature as a Science, ed. 2nd, St. Petersburg, 1911; Veselovsky A. N., Poetics, Collection. sochin., vol. I, St. Petersburg, 1913; Peretz V.N., From lectures on the methodology of the history of Russian literature, Kyiv, 1914; Gornfeld A., Literature, “New encyclopedic dictionary Brockhaus and Efron", vol. XXIV, 1915; Arkhangelsky A. S., Introduction to the history of Russian literature, vol. I, P., 1916; Sakulin P.N., In search of scientific methodology, “Voice of the Past”, 1919, No. 1-4; Voznesensky A., Method of studying literature, “Proceedings of Belorussk. state University", Minsk, 1922, No. 1; Mashkin A., Essays on literary methodology, “Science in Ukraine”, 1922, No. 3; Piksanov N.K., New path of literary science, “Iskusstvo”, 1923, No. 1; Smirnov A., Paths and tasks of the science of literature, “Literary Thought”, 1923, book. II; Sakulin P.N., Synthetic construction of the history of literature, M., 1925; Yarkho B.I., Borders of scientific literary criticism, “Iskusstvo”, 1925, No. 2, and 1927, book. I; Tseitlin A., Problems of modern literary criticism, “Native language at school”, 1925, book. VIII; Sakulin, Sociological method in literary criticism, M., 1925; Plekhanov G., Sochin., vol. X and XIV, Guise, M. - L., 1925; Voznesensky A., The problem of “description” and explanation in the science of literature, “Native language at school”, 1926, book. XI-XII; Polyansky V., Questions modern criticism, Giza, M. - L., 1927; Efimov N.I., Sociology of Literature, Smolensk, 1927; Petrovsky M., Poetics and art criticism, art. first, “Art”, 1927, book. II-III; Nechaeva V., Literary criticism and art criticism, “Native language at school”, 1927, book. III; Belchikov N., The importance of modern criticism in the study of modern fiction, “Native language at school”, 1927, book. III; Prozorov A., Boundaries of scientific formalism (regarding Art. Yarkho), “At the literary post,” 1927, No. 15-16; Yakubovsky G., Tasks of criticism and literary science, “At a literary post”, 1928, No. 7; Schiller F.P., Modern literary criticism in Germany, “Literature and Marxism”, 1928, book. I; Him, Marxism in German literary criticism, “Literature and Marxism”, 1928, book. II; Sakulin P.N., To the results of Russian literary criticism for 10 years, “Literature and Marxism”, 1928, book. I; Medvedev P.N., Immediate tasks of historical and literary science, “Literature and Marxism”, 1928, book. III; Timofeev L., On the functional study of literature, “Russian language in Soviet school", 1930; Vokht U., Marxist literary criticism, M., 1930; Belchikov N.F., Criticism and literary criticism, “Russian language in the Soviet school”, 1930, book. V; “Against mechanistic literary criticism,” collection, M., 1930; “Against Menshevism in Literary Criticism,” collection, Moscow, 1930; Dobrynin M., Against eclectics and mechanists, M., 1931; Fritsche V. M., Problems of art criticism (several editions); “Literary Studies”, collection edited by V. F. Pereverzev, Moscow, 1928 (for the controversy about this collection, see the bibliography to the article “Pereverzev”); Gurshtein A., Questions of Marxist literary criticism, Moscow, 1931. also bibliography for the following articles. Art.: Marxism-Leninism in literary criticism, Methods of pre-Marxist literary criticism (see also foreign bibliography), Poetics, Criticism and Aesthetics.
Literary encyclopedia. - At 11 t.; M.: Publishing House of the Communist Academy, Soviet Encyclopedia, Fiction. Edited by V. M. Fritsche, A. V. Lunacharsky. 1929-1939 .
Literary studies
A group of sciences that study fiction. Literary criticism also includes the so-called. auxiliary disciplines: textual criticism, or text criticism, paleography, bibliography, bibliography. The purpose of textual criticism is to establish the history of the text, the relationship between various author’s manuscripts and lists, and the comparison of editions (fundamentally different versions of the same work). Textual criticism establishes the canonical text of a work, which, as a rule, is an expression of the author’s last will. Paleography determines the time of writing a manuscript by the characteristics of handwriting and watermarks on paper. Book studies deals with the study of books, identifying their authors, publishers, and printing houses in which they were printed. The task of bibliography is to compile catalogs and lists of literature on a particular topic.
Literary criticism itself is a science that studies the laws of construction of literary works, the development of literary forms - genres, styles etc. It is divided into two main parts - theoretical and historical literary criticism. Theoretical literary criticism is literary theory, or poetics. She explores the basic elements of fiction: image, childbirth And types, styles etc. Literary theory is forced to turn a blind eye to particulars. She consciously ignores the differences between eras, languages and countries, “forgets” about the uniqueness of the artistic world of each writer; she is not interested in the particular, the concrete, but in the general, repeating, similar.
The history of literature, on the contrary, is interested primarily in the concrete and unique. The subject of her research is the uniqueness of various nationalities. literatures, literary periods, trends and trends, the work of individual authors. The history of literature examines any literary phenomenon in historical development. Thus, a literary historian - unlike a theorist - seeks to establish non-permanent, unchanging features baroque or romanticism, and the originality of Russian or German baroque of the 17th century. and the development of romanticism or individual romantic genres in French, Russian or English literature.
Separate part literary studies – poetry. Its subject is classification, determination of the originality of the main forms of versification: rhythms, metrics, stanzas, rhymes, their story. Poetry uses mathematical calculations and computer text processing; in its accuracy and rigor it is closer to the natural sciences than to the humanities.
Historical poetics occupies an intermediate place between theory and literary history. Like literary theory, it studies not specific works, but individual literary forms: genres, styles, types of plots and characters, etc. But unlike literary theory, historical poetics examines these forms in development, for example. changes in the novel as a genre are traced.
The place in literary criticism is also peculiar stylistics– a discipline that studies the use of language in literary works: the functions of words of high and low styles, poeticisms and vernacular, features of the use of words in a figurative meaning - metaphors And metonymy.
A separate field is comparative literature, which studies in comparison the literature of different peoples and countries, patterns characteristic of a number of nationalities. Sci.
Modern literary criticism is moving closer to related humanities disciplines - semiotics of culture and myth, psychoanalysis, philosophy, etc.
Literature and language. Modern illustrated encyclopedia. - M.: Rosman. Edited by prof. Gorkina A.P. 2006 .
Synonyms:
- Literary language - the science of fiction, its origin, essence and development. Subject and disciplines of literary criticism. Modern literature is a very complex and flexible system of disciplines. There are three main branches of Leningrad: ... ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia
Section II.
Summary of theoretical material
| № | Lecture topics | watch | ||||
| Literary criticism as a science | ||||||
| Understand literature | ||||||
| Literary genera and genres | ||||||
| Literary style. Figures of poetic language. | ||||||
| Poetry and prose. Theory of verse. | ||||||
| Word/literary work: meaning/content and meaning. | ||||||
| Narration and its structure | ||||||
| The inner world of a literary work | ||||||
| Methodology and technique of semiotic analysis of a work of art. | ||||||
Topic I. Literary studies as a science.
(Source: Zenkin S.N. Introduction to literary criticism: Theory of literature: Textbook. M.: RSUH, 2000).
1. Prerequisites for the emergence of literary criticism as a science
2. The structure of literary criticism.
3. Literary disciplines and subjects of their study
3. Ways of approaching the text: commentary, interpretation, analysis.
4. Literary criticism and related scientific disciplines.
The subject of any science is structured, isolated in the continuous mass of real phenomena by this science itself. In this sense, science is logically prior to its subject, and in order to study literature, one must first ask the question of what literary criticism is.
Literary criticism is not something to be taken for granted; in terms of its status, it is one of the most problematic sciences. Indeed, why study fiction - that is, the mass production and consumption of obviously fictitious texts? And how is it justified in general (Yu.M. Lotman)? So, the very existence of the subject of literary criticism needs explanation.
Unlike a number of other cultural institutions that have a conventionally “fictional” nature (such as, for example, the game of chess), literature is a socially necessary activity - proof of this is its compulsory teaching at school in a variety of civilizations. In the era of romanticism (or at the beginning of the “modern era,” modernity) in Europe, it was realized that literature was not just a mandatory set of knowledge for a cultural member of society, but also a form of social struggle and ideology. Literary competition, unlike sports competition, is socially significant; hence the possibility, when speaking about literature, to actually judge life (“ real criticism"). In the same era, relativity was discovered different cultures, which meant a rejection of normative ideas about literature (ideas of “good taste”, “correct language”, canonical forms poetry, plot composition). Culture has variations; it does not have one fixed norm.
These options have to be described not for the purpose of determining the best (so to speak, identifying the winner), but to objectively clarify the possibilities human spirit. This is what emerged in romantic era literary criticism.
So, two historical prerequisites for scientific literary criticism are the recognition of the ideological significance of literature and cultural relativity.
The specific complexity of literary criticism lies in the fact that literature is one of the “arts,” but a very special one, since its material is language. Each science of culture is a kind of metalanguage for describing the primary language of the corresponding activity.
The difference between metalanguage and the language of the object, required by logic, is given by itself when studying painting or music, but not when studying literature, when one has to use the same (natural) language as literature itself. Reflection on literature is forced to carry out the difficult work of developing its own conceptual language, which would rise above the literature it studies. Many forms of such reflection are not scientific in nature. Historically, the most important of them are criticism, which arose many centuries before literary criticism, and another discourse that has long been institutionalized in culture - rhetoric. Modern theory literature largely uses the ideas of traditional criticism and rhetoric, but its general approach is significantly different. Criticism and rhetoric are always more or less normative in nature.
Rhetoric is a school discipline designed to teach a person how to construct correct, elegant, persuasive texts. From Aristotle comes the distinction between philosophy, which seeks truth, and rhetoric, which works with opinions. Rhetoric is needed not only by a poet or writer, but also by a teacher, lawyer, politician, and in general by any person who has to convince someone of something. Rhetoric is the art of fighting to convince the listener, standing on a par with the theory of chess or the art of war: all these are tactical arts that help to achieve success in competition. Unlike rhetoric, criticism was never taught in school; it belongs to the free sphere public opinion, therefore, it has a stronger individual, original beginning. IN modern era a critic is a free interpreter of a text, a type of “writer”. Criticism uses the achievements of rhetorical and literary knowledge, but does this in the interests of literary and/or social struggle, and the appeal of criticism to the general public puts it on a par with literature. So, criticism is located at the intersection of the boundaries of rhetoric, journalism, fiction, and literary criticism.
Another way of classifying metaliterary discourses is by “genre” distinguishing between three types of text analysis: commentary, interpretation, poetics. A typical commentary is an expansion of the text, a description of all sorts of extra-texts (these are the facts of the author’s biography or the history of the text, responses to it from other people; the circumstances mentioned in it - for example, historical events, the degree of veracity of the text; the relationship of the text with the linguistic and literary norms of the era , which may become obscure to us, like outdated words; the meaning of deviations from the norm is the author’s ineptitude, adherence to some other norm, or a conscious breakdown of the norm). When commenting, the text is fragmented into an unlimited number of elements related to the context in the broadest sense of the word. Interpretation reveals a more or less coherent and holistic meaning in the text (always necessarily partial in relation to the whole of the text); it always comes from some conscious or unconscious ideological premises, it is always biased - politically, ethically, aesthetically, religiously, etc. It comes from a certain norm, i.e. this is a typical activity of a critic. The scientific theory of literature, since it deals with the text and not the context, is left with poetics - the typology of artistic forms, more precisely the forms and situations of discourse, since they are often indifferent to the artistic quality of the text. In poetics, a text is viewed as a manifestation of the general laws of narration, composition, character systems, and language organization. Initially, literary theory is a transhistorical discipline about eternal types discourse, and it has been this way since Aristotle. In the modern era, its goals have been rethought. A.N. Veselovsky formulated the need historical poetics. This combination - history + poetics - means recognition of the variability of culture, the change in it of different forms, different traditions. The process of such a change also has its own laws, and their knowledge is also the task of literary theory. So, the theory of literature is not only a synchronic, but also a diachronic discipline; it is a theory not only of literature itself, but also of the history of literature.
Literary criticism is correlated with a number of related scientific disciplines. The first of these is linguistics. The boundaries between literary criticism and linguistics are fluid; many phenomena of speech activity are studied both from the point of view of their artistic specificity, and outside it, as purely linguistic facts: for example, narrative, tropes and figures, style. The relationship between literary criticism and linguistics on the subject can be characterized as osmosis (interpenetration), between them there is, as it were, a common strip, a condominium. In addition, linguistics and literary criticism are connected not only by subject matter, but also by methodology. In the modern era, linguistics provides methodological techniques for the study of literature, which has given grounds to combine both sciences within the framework of one general discipline - philology. Comparative-historical linguistics developed the idea of the internal diversity of languages, which was then projected into the theory of fiction; structural linguistics provided the basis for structural-semiotic literary criticism.
From the very beginning of literary criticism, history interacts with it. True, a significant part of its influence is associated with commentary activity, and not theoretical-literary activity, with a description of the context. But as historical poetics develops, the relationship between literary criticism and history becomes more complex and becomes bilateral: there is not just an import of ideas and information from history, but an exchange. For the traditional historian, the text is an intermediate material that must be processed and overcome; the historian is busy “criticizing the text,” rejecting unreliable (fictional) elements in it and isolating only reliable data about the era. A literary critic works with the text all the time - and discovers that its structures find their continuation: in the real history of society. This, in particular, is the poetics of everyday behavior: relying on patterns and structures extrapolated to extraliterary reality.
The development of this two-way relationship between literary criticism and history was particularly stimulated by the emergence and development of semiotics. Semiotics (the science of signs and sign processes) developed as an extension of linguistic theories. She has developed effective procedures for analyzing text, both verbal and non-verbal, for example, in painting, cinema, theater, politics, advertising, propaganda, not to mention special information systems from maritime flag codes to electronic codes. The phenomenon of connotation, which is clearly observed in fiction, turned out to be especially important; that is, literary criticism here too has become a privileged area for the development of ideas extrapolated to other types of sign activity; However, literary works are not only of a semiotic nature and cannot be reduced to only symbolic discrete processes.
Two more related disciplines are aesthetics and psychoanalysis. Aesthetics interacted more with literary criticism in the 19th century, when theoretical reflection on literature and art was often carried out in the form of philosophical aesthetics (Schelling, Hegel, Humboldt). Modern aesthetics has shifted its interests to a more positive, experimental sphere (specific analysis of ideas about the beautiful, ugly, funny, sublime in different social and cultural groups), and literary criticism has developed its own methodology, and their relationship has become more distant. Psychoanalysis, the latest of the “companions” of literary criticism, is a partly scientific, partly practical (clinical) activity that has become an important source of interpretive ideas for literary criticism: psychoanalysis provides effective diagrams of unconscious processes, also identified in literary texts. The main two types of such schemes are, firstly, Freudian “complexes”, the symptoms of which Freud himself began to identify in the literature; secondly, Jung’s “archetypes” are prototypes of the collective unconscious, which are also widely found in literary texts. The difficulty here lies precisely in the fact that complexes and archetypes are discovered too widely and easily and are therefore devalued and do not allow us to determine the specifics of the text.
This is the circle of metaliterary discourses in which literary criticism finds its place. It grew out of the process of reworking criticism and rhetoric; it has three approaches - commentary, interpretation and poetics; it interacts with linguistics, history, semiotics, aesthetics, psychoanalysis (as well as psychology, sociology, theory of religion, etc.). The place of literary criticism turns out to be uncertain: it often deals with “the same thing” as other sciences, sometimes approaching the boundaries beyond which science becomes art (in the sense of “art” or practical “art” like military science). This is due to the fact that literature itself in our civilization occupies a central position among other types of cultural activity, which determines the problematic position of the science of it.
Literature: Aristotle. Poetics (any publication); Genette J. Structuralism and literary criticism // Genette J. Figures: Works on poetics: In 2 volumes. T. 1. M., 1998; It's him. Criticism and poetics // Ibid. T. 2; It's him. Poetics and history // Ibid.; Lomman Yu.M. Structure literary text. M., 1970; Todorov Ts. Poetics / / Structuralism: “for” and “against” M. 1975; Tomashevsky B.V. Theory of Literature: Poetics (any edition); Jacobson R.O. Linguistics and poetics // Structuralism: “for” and “against” M. 1975.
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