Poetics (Greek: poiētiké téchnē – poetic art) is the science of the system of means of expression in literary works, one of the oldest literary disciplines. In ancient times (from Aristotle (IV century BC) to the classicist theorist N. Boileau (XVII century), the term “poetics” denoted the study of verbal art as a whole. This word was synonymous with what is now called “literary theory” .
As a field of literary theory, poetics studies the specifics of literary types and genres, movements and directions, styles and methods, and explores the laws of internal connection and correlation of various levels of the artistic whole. Depending on which aspect (and scope of the concept) is put at the center of the study, it is customary to talk, for example, about the poetics of romanticism, the poetics of the novel, the poetics of the work of a writer as a whole or one work.
Since all means of expression in literature ultimately come down to language, poetics can also be defined as the science of artistic use means of language.
The goal of poetics is to isolate and systematize the elements of the text that participate in the formation of the aesthetic impression of the work.
Poetics usually differ general(theoretical or systematic – “macropoetics”) private(or actually descriptive – “micropoetics”) and historical.
General poetics, which elucidates the universal properties of verbal and artistic works, is divided into three areas that study, respectively, the sound, verbal and figurative structure of the text.
Private poetics deals with the study of literary texts in all of the above aspects, which makes it possible to create a “model” - individual system aesthetically effective properties of the work.
The main problem of private poetics is composition, that is, the mutual correlation of all aesthetically significant elements of the work.
Historical poetics studies the evolution of individual poetic devices and their systems with the help of comparative historical literary criticism. the main problem historical poetics – genre in the broadest sense of the word, from artistic literature as a whole to such varieties as “European love elegy”, “classical tragedy”, “psychological novel”, etc. The boundaries separating literature from non-literature, and the boundaries separating genre from genre, changeable, and eras of relative stability of these poetic systems alternate with eras of decanonization and form creation;
The goal of poetics is to isolate and systematize the elements of the text that participate in the formation of the aesthetic impression of the work. Every culture has its own set of means that distinguish literary works from non-literary ones.
The study of the poetic system “from within” a given culture leads to the construction normative poetics(more conscious, as in the era of classicism, or less conscious, as in the European XIX literature century), research “from the outside” - to build descriptive poetics. Until the 19th century, while regional literatures were closed and traditionalistic, the normative type of poetics dominated. Normative poetics were guided by the experience of one of literary trends and justified it. The emergence of world literature (starting from the era of romanticism) puts forward the task of creating descriptive poetics.
The task of normative poetics is not an objective description of existing techniques, but a value judgment about them and the prescription of certain techniques as the only logical ones. Normative poetics aims to teach how literary works should be written. Each literary school has its own views on literature, its own rules and, consequently, its own normative poetics.
What was called “poetics” at the beginning of the 19th century. , was a mixture of problems of general and normative poetics. The “rules” were not only described, but also prescribed. This poetics was essentially the normative poetics of French classicism, established in the 17th century. and dominated literature for two centuries. But at the beginning of the 19th century. there was a literary split between the classics and the romantics, who led the new poetics; after romanticism came naturalism; then at the end of the century symbolism, futurism, etc. The rapid change of literary schools, especially noticeable at the present time, which is revolutionary in all areas human culture, proves the illusory nature of the desire to find a universal normative poetics.
Descriptive P. aims to recreate the path from conception to completion. text, through which the researcher can fully understand the author's intention. Wherein different levels and parts of the work are considered as a whole<...>Historical painting studies the development of individual artists. techniques (epithets, metaphors, rhymes, etc.) and categories (artistic time, space, basic opposition of features), as well as entire systems of such techniques and categories characteristic of a particular era.” “Poetics, which focuses its attention on the properties of specific works and draws conclusions based on a review of texts, is usually called descriptive.”
Historical poetics.
Along with the theoretical system of poetics, in the history of the development of this science we find attempts to construct a “historical” poetics. The history of literature as the history of the evolutionary development of literary forms is essentially the core of “historical” poetics, the brightest and largest representative of which is rightfully considered A. N. Veselovsky. The starting point in the work of this scientist is the desire “to collect material for the methodology of the history of literature, for inductive poetics, which would eliminate its speculative constructions, to clarify the essence of poetry - from its history.” With the help of such inductive research, in a purely empirical way, the implementation of the grandiose plan of “historical” poetics, which would cover the development of literary forms of all times and peoples, is imagined. However, the work of A. N. Veselovsky had many successors, among whom it is worth mentioning, first of all, Yu. N. Tynyanov, M. M. Bakhtin, V. Ya. Propp.
IP studies the variability of historical and literary categories:
1. Author - hero - reader and their relationship in various sources. periods. Initially, the author builds the text and puts meaning into it. In this case, Biographical Author = Intratextual Author (Old Russian literature)
The method of creating an artistic image is a metaphor, which was treated differently at different times.
German enlighteners Metaphors were avoided for simplicity of storytelling.
Baroque: literature is only for the elite, deliberate complication. (Lope de Vega)
Classicism: a means of illustration and simplification.
19th century: one metaphor illustrates one trait
20th century: bunches of metaphors from Mayakovsky, Pasternak.
According to Veselovsky, the method of historical poetics is historical and comparative. An example of one-sided and non-historical generalizations was for Veselovsky the aesthetics of Hegel, incl. his theory of literary genera, built only on the basis of the facts of ancient Greek literature, which were accepted as “the ideal norm of literary development in general.” Only a comparative historical analysis of all world literature allows, according to Veselovsky, to avoid the arbitrariness of theoretical constructions. approaches will remain a defining feature of the new science. After Veselovsky, new impetus for the development of historical poetics was given by the works of Freudenberg, M.M. Bakhtin and Propp. One of the first tasks of historical poetics is to highlight large stages or historical types of artistic integrity, taking into account the “big time” in which the slow formation and development of an aesthetic object and its forms takes place. Veselovsky identified two such stages, calling them the eras of “syncretism” and “personal creativity.” On slightly different grounds, Yu.M. Lotman distinguishes two stages, calling them “aesthetics of identity” and “aesthetics of opposition.”
Theoretical (“general,” “systematic”) poetry (or “macropoetics”) deals with a systematic description of the laws of construction of various levels of art. whole, structure of verbal art. image and individual aesthetic means text organization. Theoretical literature explores the relationship between literary and extraliterary reality, the connection between “internal” and “external” fiction. form, the laws of translating reality and material into art. (poetic) world of the work, organization of the artist. time and space, as well as ways of embodying the writer’s intentions in the text of the work - depending on the stage of the historical and cultural process, direction, literary kind and genre.
General (or theoretical) poetics, which elucidates the universal properties of verbal and artistic works, is divided into three areas that study, respectively, the sound, verbal and figurative structure of the text.
Target general poetics– compile a complete systematized repertoire of techniques (aesthetically effective elements) covering all these three areas.
Theoretical poetics, mutually connected of course with the history of literature, is further represented by a numerous number of researchers of the 19th-20th centuries, starting with Humboldt, his theory of the epic in the book about “Herman and Dorothea”. The linguistic foundations of Humboldt's poetics are outlined in the preface to Kawi-Sprache. Humboldt’s line is continued, independently developing it, by Potebnya (“Thought and Language,” “From Notes on the Theory of Literature,” etc.), who created an entire school. A different line of poetics, coming from the objective-idealistic school of Dilthey, is given by the philosophical-formalistic method presented by one of the largest German literary critics - Walzel (German) Russian. By highlighting the study of form as a necessary way to comprehend the essence of art, Walzel is by no means is limited to the external aspects of the work, focusing its attention on the analysis of the internal composition, on the arrangement of the emotional side of the work, on the disclosure of internal symmetry, etc. Believing that in all arts in a given era the same formal law prevails at the basis of composition, Walzel believes A very fruitful method of parallel study of the arts.
Over the last century, poetics (or theoretical poetics) began to be called a section of literary criticism, the subject of which is the composition, structure and functions of works, as well as the types and genres of literature. A distinction is made between normative poetics (focusing on the experience of one of the literary movements and substantiating it) and general poetics, which elucidates the universal properties of literary works.
In the 20th century There is another meaning of the term “poetics”. This word fixes a certain edge literary process, namely, the attitudes and principles of individual writers carried out in the works, as well as artistic directions and entire eras. Our famous scientists own monographs on the poetics of Old Russian and early Byzantine literature, on the poetics of romanticism, the poetics of Gogol, Dostoevsky, Chekhov. The origins of this terminological tradition are the research of A.N. Veselovsky creativity V.A. Zhukovsky, where there is a chapter “Romantic poetics of Zhukovsky”.
In our country, theoretical poetics began to take shape (to some extent relying on the German scientific tradition, but at the same time independently and creatively) in the 1910s and became stronger in the 1920s. Throughout the 20th century, it has been intensively developed in Western countries. And this fact marks a most serious, epoch-making shift in the understanding of literature.
In the last century, the subject of study was primarily not the works themselves, but what was embodied and refracted in them (social consciousness, legends and myths; plots and motifs as the common heritage of culture; biography and spiritual experience of the writer): scientists looked, as it were, through the works rather than focusing on them themselves.
IN XIX century were interested primarily in the spiritual, ideological, general cultural prerequisites of artistic creativity: “The history of literature has been so busy studying the conditions in which works were created that the efforts spent on analyzing the works themselves.”
In the 20th century the picture has changed radically. In the repeatedly reprinted book of the German scientist W. Kaiser “Verbal piece of art. Introduction to Literary Studies" it is rightly said that main subject modern science about literature - the works themselves, everything else (psychology, views and biography of the author, social genesis literary creativity and the impact of works on the reader) is auxiliary and secondary.
Theoretical literary criticism of the 20s is heterogeneous and multidirectional. The formal method (a group of young scientists led by V.B. Shklovsky) showed itself most clearly. But at that time there was another layer of the science of literature, marked by undoubted achievements in the field of theoretical poetics. It is represented by the works of M.M. Bakhtin (most of which were published relatively recently), articles by A.P. Skaftymova, S.A. Askoldova, A.A. Smirnov, which did not attract sufficient attention from contemporaries.
These scientists inherited the tradition of hermeneutics and, to a greater or lesser extent, relied on the experience of domestic religious philosophy of the beginning of the century.
The situation in the 1930s and subsequent decades in our country was extremely unfavorable for the development of theoretical poetics. The legacy of the 10–20s began to be intensively mastered and enriched only starting from the 60s. The Tartu-Moscow school, headed by Yu.M., was very significant. Lotman.
Structuralist poetics
Lotman: Language is the material of literature. From this very definition it follows that in relation to literature, language acts as a material substance, like paint in painting, stone in sculpture, sound in music.
Being a means of transmitting information, language, as it seems to modern linguistics, developing the well-known position of F. de Saussure, consists of two principles. One is a set of signal signs that have a certain physical nature. In the process of performing a speech act, a certain part of the signals is realized. In order for information to be possible, it is necessary that the signals realized in the process of transmitting information in the perceiver correspond to the same, but potential, unrealized signals [In modern linguistic literature, these two (real and potential) sides are called speech (or language activity) and language ability] . However, in order for the speaker to be understood by the listener, a third principle is also necessary: a code that would allow classifying linguistic signals and establishing their meaning.
Descriptive poetry and descriptive poetics are based on the idea of artistic construction as a mechanical sum of a number of separately existing “techniques”. At the same time, artistic analysis is understood as a listing and ideological and stylistic assessment of those poetic elements that the researcher discovers in the text. A similar method of analysis has become stronger in school practice. Methodical manuals and textbooks are full of expressions: “let’s choose epithets,” “find metaphors,” “what did the writer want to say with such and such an episode?” and so on.
The structural approach to a literary work implies that this or that “technique” is considered not as a separate material reality, but as a function with two, or more often many, constituents. Any enumeration of techniques will not give us anything, since, entering into different structures of the whole, the same material element text inevitably acquires different, sometimes opposite, meanings. This is especially evident when using negative techniques, “minus techniques”. Let's give an example.
Let’s take Pushkin’s poem “Again I visited...” that already attracted us. From the point of view of descriptive poetics, it is almost impossible to analyze. If to romantic poem You can still apply a similar technique: select abundant metaphors, epithets and other elements of the so-called “reverse speech” and, on the basis of them, evaluate the ideological system and style - then it is absolutely inapplicable to works like Pushkin’s lyrics of the 1830s. There are no epithets, no metaphors, no rhymes, no emphasized “rhythm”, and the researcher can only state the absence of “artistic techniques”.
Structural analysis will allow us to approach the issue differently: artistic technique- not a material element of the text, but an attitude. In an era when the reader’s consciousness, brought up in the poetic school of Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, and young Pushkin, identified romantic poetics with the very concept of poetry, art system“I visited again...” gave the impression not of the absence of “techniques,” but of their maximum saturation. But these were “minus techniques,” a system of consistent and conscious, reader-perceivable refusals. In this sense, in 1830, a poetic text written according to the already generally accepted norms of romantic poetics would produce a more “bare” impression, would indeed be more devoid of elements of artistic structure.
Descriptive poetics is similar to an observer who has recorded a certain life scene (for example, a “naked man”). Structural poetics always proceeds from the fact that the observed phenomenon is only one of the components of a complex whole. She is like an observer, always asking, “In what situation?”
S.P. had three main geographical centers: Paris, Tartu and Moscow. The most important property of systematicity, or structure, was considered to be the hierarchy of the levels of structure. This position was taken from structural linguistics. The levels were as follows (their number and sequence varied depending on which researcher took up the matter): phonics (the level of sounds that could acquire a specifically poetic, poetic purpose, for example, alliteration-strophic, vocabulary (metaphor, metonymy, etc.) , grammar (for example, the game opposite the contrast between the first person and the third - syntax (least developed in S. p.); semantics (the meaning of the text as a whole). If we were talking about a prose work, then phonics, metrics and strophic were removed, but a plot and plot were added , space, time (that is, a special artistic modeling of space and time in a literary text). It must be said that S. p.’s favorite genre was the analysis of a small lyric poem, which, in the hands of a structuralist, began to resemble a crystalline lattice. One of the most important slogans of S. p. there was a call for accuracy in research, the application of the fundamentals of statistics, information theory, mathematics and logic, and the compilation of frequency dictionaries of the language of poets and indices of poetic meters was welcomed.
Literature, or literature, as this shows last name- is part of human verbal or linguistic activity. It follows that in the series scientific disciplines The theory of literature is closely related to the science that studies language, i.e. to linguistics*. Available whole line borderline scientific problems that can be equally attributed to both problems of linguistics and problems of literary theory. However, there are special questions that belong specifically to poetics. We use language and words constantly in the community for the purpose of human communication. The practical sphere of application of language is everyday “conversations”. In conversation, language is the medium of communication, and our attention and interests are directed exclusively to what is communicated, the “thought”; We usually pay attention to verbal formulation only insofar as we strive to accurately convey to our interlocutor our thoughts and our feelings, and for this we look for expressions that most correspond to our thoughts and emotions. Expressions are created in the process of utterance and are forgotten, disappearing after they reach their goal - instilling in the listener what is required. In this respect, practical speech is unique, because it lives in the conditions of its creation; its character and form are determined by the circumstances of the conversation, the relationship between the speakers, the degree of their mutual understanding, the interests that arise during the conversation, etc. Since the conditions that give rise to conversation are generally unique, the conversation itself is unique. But in verbal creativity there are also verbal constructions, the meaning of which does not depend on the circumstances of their utterance; formulas that, once they have arisen, do not die out, are repeated and preserved so that they can be reproduced again and do not lose their original meaning when reproduced again. We call such fixed, preserved verbal structures literary works. In its elementary form, every successful expression, remembered and repeated, is a literary work. These are sayings, proverbs, sayings, etc. But usually literary works mean constructions of a slightly larger volume.
The system of expressions of a work—in other words, its text—can be consolidated in different ways. You can consolidate speech in written or printed form - then we get written literature; it is possible to memorize a text and transmit it orally - then we get oral literature, which develops mainly in an environment that does not know writing. The so-called folklore - folk oral literature - is preserved and arises mainly in layers alien to literacy.
Thus, a literary work has two properties: 1) independence from the random everyday conditions of utterance * and 2) the fixed immutability of the text. Literature is an intrinsically valuable fixed speech
The very nature of these signs shows that there is no firm boundary between practical speech and literature. Often we record our practical speech, which is random and temporary, according to the conditions of its transmission to the interlocutor. We write a letter to someone to whom we cannot directly address with live speech. A letter may or may not be a literary work. On the other hand, a literary work may remain unrecorded; being created at the moment of its reproduction (improvisation), it can disappear. These are improvised plays, poems (impromptu), oratory, etc. Playing human life the same role as purely literary works, fulfilling their function and taking on their meaning, these improvisations are part of literature, despite their random, transient nature. On the other hand, the independence of literature from the conditions of its origin should be understood restrictively: we must not forget that all literature is unchanged only within more or less wide limits of a historical era and is understandable to layers of the population of a certain cultural and social level. I will not multiply examples of borderline linguistic phenomena; I only want to point out with these examples that in sciences like poetics, there is no need to strive to strictly legally delineate the areas being studied, there is no need to look for mathematical or natural science definitions. It is enough if there is a number of phenomena that undoubtedly belong to the area under study - the presence of phenomena that only more or less possess a noted attribute, so to speak, standing on the boundaries of the area under study, does not deprive us of the right to study this area of phenomena and cannot discredit the chosen definition.
The field of literature is not united. In literature we can outline two broad classes of works. The first class, to which scientific treatises, journalistic works, etc. belong, always has an explicit, unconditional, objective purpose of statement, lying outside the purely literary activity person. A scientific or educational treatise aims to convey objective knowledge about something that really exists; a political article aims to induce the reader to take some action. This area of literature is called prose in the broad sense of the word. But there is literature that does not have this objective, obvious purpose on the surface. Typical feature This literature is the interpretation of fictitious and conventional objects. Even if the author has the goal of communicating scientific truth to the reader (popular science novels) or influencing his behavior (propaganda literature), this is done by stimulating other interests contained in the literary work itself. While in prose literature the object of immediate interest always lies outside the work - in this second area, interest is directed towards the work itself. This area of literature is called poetry (in a broad sense).
The interest awakened in us by poetry and the feelings that arise when perceiving poetic works are psychologically related to the interest and feelings aroused by the perception of works of art, music, painting, dance, ornament - in other words, this interest is aesthetic or artistic. Therefore, poetry is also called fiction as opposed to prose - non-fiction literature*. We will use these terms primarily, due to the fact that the words “poetry” and “prose” have another meaning, which will often have to be used in further presentation.
The discipline that studies the construction of non-fiction works is called rhetoric; the discipline that studies the construction of works of art is poetics. Rhetoric and poetics form a general theory of literature.
Poetics is not the only one who studies fiction. There are a number of other disciplines that study the same object. These disciplines differ from each other in their approach to the phenomena being studied.
A historical approach to works of art is provided by the history of literature. A literary historian studies every work as an indivisible, integral unity, as an individual and valuable phenomenon in its own right among other individual phenomena. Analyzing individual parts and aspects of a work, he strives only to understand and interpret the whole. This study is complemented and united by historical coverage of what is being studied, i.e. establishing connections between literary phenomena and their significance in the evolution of literature. Thus, the historian studies the grouping of literary schools and styles, their succession, the importance of tradition in literature, and the degree of originality of individual writers and their works. Describing the general course of development of literature, the historian interprets this difference, discovering the reasons for this evolution, which lie both within literature itself and in the relationship of literature to other phenomena of human culture, in the environment of which literature develops and with which it is in constant relationship. Literary history is a branch of general cultural history.
Another approach is theoretical. At theoretical approach literary phenomena are subject to generalization, and therefore are considered not in their individuality, but as the results of application general laws construction of literary works. Each work is deliberately decomposed into its component parts; in the construction of the work, the methods of such construction differ, i.e. ways of combining verbal material into artistic unities*. These techniques are the direct object of poetics. If attention is paid to the historical genesis, to the origin of these techniques, then we have historical poetics, which traces the historical destinies of such techniques isolated in the study
But in general poetics* it is not the origin of poetic devices that is studied, but the non-artistic function**. Each technique is studied from the point of view of its artistic expediency, i.e. analyzes why this technique is used and what artistic effect it achieves. In general poetics, the functional study of literary device is the guiding principle in the description and classification of the phenomena being studied.
Nevertheless, although the methods and tasks of theoretical study differ significantly from the methods and tasks of historical disciplines, an evolutionary point of view must always be present in poetics*. If in poetics the question of historical significance literary work as a whole, considered as some organic system, then the study and interpretation of the immediate artistic effect should always be carried out against the background of the usual, historically established application of this technique. The same technique changes its artistic function depending, for example, on whether it is a sign of literary modernism and is felt as unusual, breaking tradition, or whether it is an element of this tradition, a sign of the “old school”.
There is another approach to literary works, represented in normative poetics. The task of normative poetics is not an objective description of existing techniques, but a value judgment about them and the prescription of certain techniques as the only logical ones. Normative poetics aims to teach how literary works should be written. Each literary school has its own views on literature, its own rules and, consequently, its own normative poetics. Literary codes, expressed in literary manifestos and declarations, in directional criticism, in professed by various literary circles belief systems, and represent various shapes normative poetics. The history of literature is partly a revelation of the real content of normative poetics that determines being individual works and the evolution of this content in changes in literary schools.
What was called “poetics” at the beginning of the 19th century was a mixture of problems of general and normative poetics. The “rules” were not only described, but also prescribed. This poetics was essentially the normative poetics of French classicism, established in the 17th century. and dominated literature for two centuries. Given the relative slowness of literary evolution, this poetics could seem unshakable to contemporaries, and its demands could seem inherent in the very nature of verbal art. But at the beginning of the 19th century. there was a literary split between the classics and the romantics, who led the new poetics; after romanticism came naturalism; then at the end of the century symbolism, futurism, etc. The rapid change of literary schools, especially noticeable at the present time, which is revolutionary in all areas of human culture, proves the illusory nature of the desire to find a universal normative poetics. Any literary norm put forward by one movement is usually met with negation in the opposite literary school. Despite the fact that each literary school usually claims to be its aesthetic principles are universally binding - with the decline in the literary influence of the school, its principles also fall, being replaced by new ones in the new movement that replaces the old one. It is impossible now to build any kind of normative poetics that claims to be stable, since the crisis of art, expressed in the rapid change literary movements and in their changeability, has not yet passed.
Here we will not set ourselves normative tasks, being content with an objective description and interpretation of literary material, i.e. Let us confine ourselves to questions of general poetics.
In choosing material we will turn mainly to literature of the 19th century. as the closest to us. We will, if possible, avoid contacting literary material until the 17th century, for it was from the 17th century. in Europe, the history of new literature begins, the continuous transmission of literary tradition from generation to generation begins, and only a few works created earlier have an impact on the work of later eras, and even these works (such as ancient literature, the literature of eastern peoples) are so are modified, refracted through the conventional interpretation of modern times, which makes it difficult to talk about their direct and holistic impact on the literary tradition.
8.2. Composition and plot
8.3. Artistic language
Poetics is one of the oldest terms in literary criticism. Greek roietike - skill of creation, technique of creativity. In antiquity, poetry was considered the science of fiction. This is how Aristotle ("Poetics") and Horace ("To Piso") understood poetics. In the era of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and classicism, poetry was used to understand the features of the form of works of art (Scaliger - "Poetics", N. Boileau - "Poetic Art"). In the XIX-XX centuries. Poetics was considered that part of literary criticism that studies composition, language, and versification. There are attempts to identify poetics with stylistics. Works appear on the poetics of types, genres, trends, trends.
IN modern literary criticism There are many definitions of poetics. Having analyzed some of them, G. Klochek calls following values this term:
1) artistry;
2) a system of creative principles;
3) art form;
4) consistency, integrity;
5) skill of the writer.
Poetics cannot be identified with the theory of literature; it is only one of the branches of literary criticism.
There are normative, descriptive, historical, functional, and general poetics. The author of normative poetics is N. Boileau (“Poetic Art”). Descriptive poetics is based on comparative study various literatures. Historical poetics explore the evolution of types, genres and artistic means, using the comparative historical principle. The founder of historical poetics was A. Veselovsky, who defined its subject as follows: “The evolution of poetic consciousness and its form.” Functional poetics studies a work as a function or system, while general poetics determines the basic laws of artistry.
What is included in the subject of poetics? A detailed answer to this question was given by V. Vinogradov: “The question about motives... and plots, about their sources and forms of grafting, about their structural variations, about various techniques and principles of deployment or development of the plot, about the laws of plot formation, about artistic time as a category of construction and movement of events in literary works, about composition as a system of assembly, interaction, movement of unification of linguistic, functional-stylistic and ideological-thematic plans of a literary work, the question of means and techniques of plot-dynamic and own speech characteristics characters in various genres and types of literature, about genre structural differences in the relationships and connections of monologue and dialogic speech in different eras literary development and in various types of verbal and artistic structures, about the influence ideological plan and the thematic plan of the work on its stylistic linguistic structure, on the connection between the public and the figurative-narrative aspects of the composition of literary works."
The range of issues that poetics studies helps determine the titles of books, articles, sections of monographs: “Poetics of Ancient Greek Literature”, “Poetics of Metaphor”, “Poetics artistic space", "Poetics of artistic time", "Poetics of genre", "Poetics of style", "Poetics of names", "Poetics of Boris Oliynyk".
We can talk about the poetics of movements, trends, eras, national literature, literature of a particular region.
For a long time, our literary criticism was dominated by increased attention to the social significance and social aspect of the functioning of a work of art. IN last decades We observe a deep interest among literary scholars in questions of poetics.
Unity of form and content in literature
In theoretical poetics, the conceptual pair form and content has been known since antiquity. Aristotle in his Poetics distinguishes between the subject of imitation and the means of imitation. Representatives of the formal school believed that the concept of “content” in literary criticism was superfluous. And form must be compared with life material, which is artistically neutral. Y. Lotman suggests replacing the terms “content” and “form” with the terms “structure” and “idea”. The terms "form" and "content" are used in various fields of knowledge.
Form and content are a dialectical unity. A. Tkachenko uses the terms “zmistoformi” and “formozmists” to emphasize the connection between content and form. Hegel wrote about the connection between these concepts: “Content is nothing more than the transition of form into content, and form is nothing more than the transition of content into form.” Hegel and V. Belinsky, in addition to the term “content,” use the term “idea.” Plato identified idea and form.
Topic 1. Poetics
I. Dictionaries
1) Sierotwie?ski S. S?ownik termin?w lierackich.
P. - “formerly identical with the theory of literature, is currently interpreted as its part, namely the theory of a literary work, the science of artistic means, linguistic, compositional, typical structures of literary works, genera, genres, varieties. The definition is also used to designate the science of poetry as opposed to prose" (S. 195).
2) Wilpert G. von. Sachw?rterbuch der Literatur.
P. - “the doctrine and science about the essence, genres and forms of poetry - about their inherent content, technique, structures and visual media; as the theory of poetry is the basis (core) of literary criticism and part of aesthetics, but also a prerequisite for the history of literature and criticism" (S. 688).
3) Aikhenvald Yu. Poetics // Dictionary of literary terms: In 2 volumes. T. II. Stlb. 633-636.
P. - “the theory of poetry, the science of poetic creativity, which sets itself the goal of elucidating its origin, laws, forms and meaning.” "... no matter how great the importance of psychological and historical poetics, it does not exhaust poetics in general. Not only along with historical, empirical, philological poetics, but perhaps even ahead of it, philosophical poetics should become, penetrating deeply into the essence and spirit poetic art."
4) Ivanov Vyach.Vs. Poetics // Brief literary encyclopedia(KLE). T. 5. P. 936-943:
"P.<...>- the science of the structure of lit. works and aesthetic system. means used in them. Consists of a general P. that studies the artist. means and laws of constructing any work; descriptive literature, which deals with the description of the structure of specific works of individual authors or entire periods, and historical literature, which studies the development of literary art. funds. With a broader understanding, poetry coincides with the theory of literature; with a narrower understanding, it coincides with the study of poetry. language or art speech (see: Stylistics).
GENERAL P. explores possible ways artist embodiment of the writer’s plan and the laws of combination in various ways depending on the genre, type of literary and type of literary.<...>Artist means can be classified into different levels, located between the plan (representing highest level) and its final embodiment in verbal fabric."<...>
"Descriptive P. aims to recreate the path from the idea to the final text, through which the researcher can fully penetrate the author's intention. At the same time, different levels and parts of the work are considered as a single whole<...>Historical P. studies the development of both individual artists. techniques (epithets, metaphors, rhymes, etc.) and categories (artistic time, space, basic opposition of features), as well as entire systems of such techniques and categories characteristic of a particular era.”
5) Gasparov M.L. Poetics // Literary Encyclopedic Dictionary (LES). pp. 295-296.
P. - "the science of the system of means of expression in literary works<...>In the expanded sense of the word, literature coincides with the theory of literature; in the narrowed sense, it coincides with one of the areas of theoretical literature. P. (see below). As a field of literary theory, P. studies the specifics of literature. genres and genres, movements and trends, styles and methods, explores the laws of internal communication and the relationship between different levels of art. the whole<...>Since all means of expression in literature ultimately come down to language, literature can also be defined as the science of art. using language means (see Language of fiction). Verbal (i.e. linguistic) text of the production. is the only one. material form of existence of its content<...>P.'s goal is to highlight and systematize the elements of the text involved in the formation of aesthetics. impressions of the production (see Structure of a literary work).<...>Usually a distinction is made between general (theoretical or systematic - "macropoetics"), particular (or actually descriptive - "micropoetics") and historical.
General P. is divided into three areas that study, respectively, the sound, verbal and figurative structure of the text; the goal of general P. is to compile a complete systematization. a repertoire of techniques (aesthetically effective elements) covering all three of these areas. [Further - about poetry, stylistics and “themes” - N. T.].<...>Part of P. is engaged in the description of lit. prod. in all the lists. above aspects, which allows you to create a “model” - an individual aesthetic system. effective properties of the work<...>Historical P. studies the evolution of the department. poetic techniques and their systems with the help of comparative historical literary criticism, identifying common features poetic systems of different cultures and reducing them or (genetically) to common source or (typologically) to the universal laws of human consciousness."
6) Broitman S.N. Historical poetics // Literary terms (materials for the dictionary). Vol. 2.
"I. p. is a section of poetics that studies the genesis and development of an aesthetic object and its architectonics, as they manifest themselves in the evolution of meaningful artistic forms. I. p. is connected with theoretical poetics by relations of complementarity. If theoretical poetics develops a system of literary categories and gives them conceptually -logical analysis, through which the system of the subject itself (fiction) is revealed, then I. p. studies the origin and development of this system (p. 40).
II. Textbooks, teaching aids
1) Tomashevsky B.V. Theory of literature. Poetics.
“The task of poetics (otherwise known as the theory of literature or literature) is to study the methods of constructing literary works. The object of study in poetics is fiction. The method of study is the description and classification of phenomena and their interpretation” (p. 22).
"The field of literature is not united<...>The discipline that studies the construction of non-fiction works is called rhetoric; the discipline that studies the construction of works of art is poetics. Rhetoric and poetics form a general theory of literature" (pp. 24-25).
“With a theoretical approach, literary phenomena are subject to generalization, and therefore are considered not in their individuality, but as the results of the application of general laws of construction of literary works<...>In general poetics, the functional study of literary device is the guiding principle in the description and classification of the phenomena being studied" (pp. 25-26).
2) Zhirmunsky V.M. Introduction to Literary Studies: A Course of Lectures. pp. 227-244.
“We call poetry the science of literature as an art, the science of poetic art, the science of poetry (if we use the word “poetry” in a broader sense than the word is sometimes used, as embracing the entire field of literature), in other words, the theory of poetry.” .
“The general philosophical and aesthetic prerequisites of poetic art are considered by the theory of literature. Poetics, based on the main conclusions of the theory of literature, studies the system of means of expression used by poetry” (p. 227).
“Next to historical poetics and on the basis of historical poetics, theoretical poetics should be built, poetics that generalizes historical experience...”
"An artistic image is created in poetry with the help of language. Therefore, we can say that the first department of poetics, its lower floor, should be oriented towards linguistics< ... >main sections of the theory poetic language- poetic phonetics, poetic vocabulary and poetic syntax" (p. 240). "Usually poetic vocabulary and poetic syntax are combined under the general name of stylistics. Then we get metrics and stylistics as two sections of the theory of poetic language: metrics relating to the external side of the word, the sounds of the word; and stylistics, which concerns poetic language in its internal features, from the meaning of words, and not from the external sound form" (pp. 241-242).
“But it would be a mistake to assume that questions of poetic language exhaust the questions of poetics. Although the image in poetry is concretized in language, it is not exhausted by language<...>There is a side to the art of poetry that, from any point of view, cannot be dissolved in linguistics. This can be said about the problems of theme and composition of a work of art (p. 243).
“But only to a very small extent can we talk about these aspects of poetics outside the problem of literary genre<...>It is practically quite convenient to distinguish - as was done in the old poetics - metrics, stylistics and the theory of literary genres, bearing in mind that in the last section we will include the entire complex set of questions that rises above the theory of poetic language" (p. 244).
3) Farino Jerzy. Introduction to literary criticism. Wstep do literaturoznawstwa. S. 57-67.
“In some cases, the word “poetics” is used as a synonym for the theory of literature. Then it means systematized information about the properties of an artistic literary work and the literary process. In others - and much more often - poetics is understood as one of the components of the theory of literature. The range of its issues is then limited only to the properties and laws of a literary work, which is sometimes called the theory of a literary work< ... >poetics systematizes the observed (and possible) properties of literary texts and develops tools for their analysis< ... >She considers every property of a literary text from a double perspective - both from the point of view of its actual function and from the point of view of its relationship to the previous states of literary texts" (p. 58).
“Poetics, which focuses its attention on the properties of specific works and draws conclusions based on a review of texts, is usually called descriptive” (p. 62).
"Poetics focused on the historicity of the properties of literature and the history of these properties, history understood not only as the appearance and disappearance, but also as the transformation of properties, such poetics took shape<...>as poetics and historical [link to art. in KLE - N.T.] (p. 64).
“If in the approach to the text of a work from the point of view of descriptive poetics the moment of statement or only cognition prevails, then in the approach from the point of view of structure of structural poetics, the moment of explanation (interpretation) prevails - to the noted properties of the text, structural poetics raises, as a rule, the question of their function, as well as their mutual relationships, connections."
“The unit of descriptive poetics is the property it marks (device, trope, etc.), while the unit of structural poetics is t e x t” (p. 64).
"Outside of language, a literary work is unthinkable<...>language is the material carrier of a work - like canvas and paints in painting, like sounds in music, like stone or wood in sculpture. But if in painting, for example, the function of canvas and paints (as substance, not color) may be limited to this, then in literature, on the contrary, a work of art is created due to all possible properties of language, both physical and semantic.
The section of poetics that studies the properties of language (speech) used in literature and their functions is usually called s t i l i s t i c o .
[About the “world” to which the statement is addressed]: “For this aspect, most poetics do not find their own separate name, but it is usually taken into account precisely in those chapters of works that are devoted to composition, theme, depicted world. After Tomashevsky, we will not call this section of poetics a very apt term for composition."
"A certain part of literary works is characterized by a special rhythmic organization of their linguistic material<...>. The section of poetics that deals with precisely this aspect of a work is usually called poetry" (p. 66).
[About genders and genres]: “...these questions are dealt with by the section of poetics called gen ology” (p. 67).
III. Special works
1) Zhirmunsky V.M. Tasks of poetics // Zhirmunsky V.M. Theory of literature. Poetics. Stylistics. pp. 15-55.
"Poetics is a science that studies poetry as an art<...>historical and theoretical poetics" (p. 15).
"The traditional division into form and content<...>was opposed<...>division into material and reception."
"All art uses some material borrowed from the natural world<...>as a result of processing, a natural fact (material) is elevated to the dignity of an aesthetic fact and becomes a work of art<...>The study of poetry, like any other art, requires determining its material and the techniques with the help of which a work of art is created from this material” (p. 18).
"... An exhaustive definition of the characteristics of an aesthetic object and aesthetic experience, by the very essence of the question, lies beyond the boundaries of poetics as a private science and is the task of philosophical aesthetics<...>Our task in constructing poetics is to proceed from completely indisputable material and, regardless of the question of the essence of artistic experience, to study the structure of the aesthetic object, in in this case- works artistic word" (p. 23).
"The task of general, or theoretical, poetics is the systematic study of poetic techniques, their comparative description and classification: theoretical poetics must build, based on specific historical material, the system of scientific concepts that the historian of poetic art needs when solving the individual problems that confront him. Since the material of poetry is the word,<...>Each chapter of the science of language must correspond to a special chapter of theoretical poetics" (p. 28).
2) Bakhtin M.M. The problem of content, material and form in verbal artistic creativity// Bakhtin M. Questions of literature and aesthetics. pp. 6-71.
"...without a systematic concept of the aesthetic, both in its difference from the cognitive and ethical, and in its connection with them in the unity of culture, it is impossible even to single out the subject subject to the study of poetics - art This work in the word is from the mass of works of a different kind; and this systematic concept, of course, is introduced every time by the researcher, but completely uncritically" (p. 9).
“Poetics, defined systematically, must be the aesthetics of verbal artistic creativity” (p. 10).
"When a sculptor works on marble<...>the created sculptural form is an aesthetically significant form of the human body<...>the attitude of the artist and the contemplator to marble as to a certain physical body is of a secondary, derivative nature" (p. 15).
“...form - on the one hand, truly material, entirely realized on the material and attached to it, on the other hand - axiologically takes us beyond the boundaries of the work as an organized material, as a thing...” (p. 24).
3) Medvedev P.N. (Bakhtin M.M.). Formal method in literary criticism.
[Subject, tasks and method of sociological poetics].
"What is a literary work? What is its structure? What are the elements of this structure and what are their artistic functions? What is the genre, style, plot, theme, motive, hero, meter, rhythm, melody, etc. All these questions<...>- all this is the field of sociological poetics" (p. 37).
"...we can talk about the need for a special historical poetics as an intermediary link between theoretical sociological poetics and literary history<...>Each definition of sociological poetics must be a definition adequate to the entire evolution of the form being defined" (p. 38).
“The tasks of sociological poetics are primarily specific, descriptive and analytical. To highlight a literary work as such, to give an exposition of its structure, to determine its elements and their functions - these are its main tasks<...>Before looking for the laws of development of literary forms, you need to know what these forms are" (p. 41).
4) Mukarzhovsky J. Poetics // Mukarzhovsky J. Structural poetics. pp. 31-34.
"Poetics is the aesthetics and theory of poetic art.<...>In the process of its development, poetics, experiencing various gravitations, sometimes draws closer, and often merges with any of the related sciences, but even in those cases when it would seem to be on foreign territory, the ultimate goal of all questions, even similar with the problems of the history of literature, sociology, etc., for her it is always the illumination of poetic structure. Hence the close connection between poetics and linguistics, a science that studies the laws of the most important material of poetry - language.<...>Thus, focusing attention on artistic construction means, as is clear from all that has been said, not a narrowing of the problematic and not limiting it to questions of form, but the establishment of a single angle of view that finds application in solving the most diverse problems of poetic art."
5) Jacobson R. Questions of poetics. Postscript to the book of the same name (1973) // Jacobson Roman. Works on poetics. pp. 80-98.
“We can say that poetics is the linguistic study of the poetic function of verbal messages in general and poetry in particular.<...>The subject of study of a linguist who analyzes a poetic text is “literariness,” or, in other words, the transformation of speech into a poetic work and the system of techniques through which this transformation is accomplished.”
"A poetics concerned with considering poetic works through the prism of language and studying the dominant function in poetry, by definition is the starting point in the interpretation of poetic texts, which, of course, does not exclude the possibility of their study from the factual, psychological or psychoanalytic, as well as sociological side, however, specialists in these disciplines should not forget that all functions of a work are subordinated to the dominant function, and every researcher must proceed, first of all, from the fact that before him is the poetic fabric of a poetic text" (p. 81).
6) Todorov Ts. Poetics / Trans. A.K.Zholkovsky // Structuralism: pros and cons. pp. 37-113.
"Poetics destroys<...>symmetry between interpretation and science in the field of literary studies.
Unlike the interpretation of individual works, it does not strive to clarify their meaning, but to understand the patterns that determine their appearance. On the other hand, unlike sciences such as psychology, sociology, etc., it searches for these laws within literature itself<...>The object of structural poetics is not the literary work in itself: it is interested in the properties of that special type of utterance, which is the literary text" (p. 41).
“...the object of poetics is not a set of empirical facts (literary works), but some abstract structure (literature)” (p. 45).
“The most closely related to it are other disciplines that study types of text and together form the field of activity of rhetoric, understood in the broadest sense - as the general science of texts (discours)” (p. 46).
QUESTIONS
1. Compare and formulate the criteria by which poetics is divided either into general, particular (descriptive) and historical, or into theoretical and historical.
2. Compare different interpretations of the relationship between poetics and philosophical aesthetics, on the one hand, and with linguistics, on the other. Try to explain them.
Poetics and methodology of literary criticism. Analysis and philological interpretation of a work of art.
Lecture outline
1. Poetics. Types of poetics.
2. The concept of historical poetics A.N.. Veselovsky
3. Description, andanalysis and interpretation of a work of art.
4. The problem of adequacy of interpretation.
1. Poetics. Types of poetics.
Poetics(Greek poiētiké téchnē - poetic art) is the science of the system of means of expression in literary works, one of the oldest literary disciplines.
In ancient times (from Aristotle (IV century BC) to the classicist theorist N. Boileau (XVII century), the term “poetics” denoted the study of verbal art as a whole. This word was synonymous with what is now called “literary theory” .
Currently in in the expanded sense of the word poetics coincides with literary theory, in a narrowed– with one of the areas of theoretical poetics.
How field of literary theory poetics studies the specifics of literary types and genres, movements and directions, styles and methods, explores the laws of internal connection and correlation of various levels of the artistic whole. Depending on which aspect (and scope of the concept) is put at the center of the study, it is customary to talk, for example, about the poetics of romanticism, the poetics of the novel, the poetics of the work of a writer as a whole or one work.
In Russia, theoretical poetics began to take shape in the 1910s and strengthened in the 1920s. This fact marked a serious shift in the understanding of literature. In the 19th century, the subject of study was primarily not the works themselves, but what was embodied and refracted in them (social consciousness, legends and myths, plots and motifs as the common heritage of culture; the biography and spiritual experience of the writer): scientists looked, as it were, “through works” rather than focusing on them. In other words, in the 19th century, scientists were primarily interested in the spiritual, worldview, and general cultural preconditions of artistic creativity. Literary scholars have been primarily concerned with studying the conditions in which works were created, with much less attention paid to the analysis of the texts themselves. The formation of theoretical poetics contributed to a change in the situation; the works themselves became the main object; everything else (psychology, views and biography of the author, the social genesis of literary creativity and the impact of works on the reader) is considered as something auxiliary and secondary.
Since all means of expression in literature ultimately come down to language, poetics can also be defined as the science of the artistic use of language. The verbal (that is, linguistic) text of a work is the only material form of existence of its content; according to it, the consciousness of readers and researchers constructs the content of the work, seeking either to recreate the author’s intention (“Who was Hamlet for Shakespeare?”) or to fit it into the culture of changing eras (“Who was Hamlet for Shakespeare?”) What does Hamlet mean to us? Both approaches ultimately rely on a verbal text studied by poetics. Hence the importance of poetics in the system of literary criticism.
The goal of poetics is to isolate and systematize the elements of the text that participate in the formation of the aesthetic impression of the work. All elements are involved artistic speech, but to varying degrees: for example, in lyric poems, plot elements play a small role and rhythm and phonics play a large role, and in narrative prose, vice versa. Every culture has its own set of means that distinguish literary works from non-literary ones: restrictions are imposed on rhythm (verse), vocabulary and syntax (“poetic language”), themes (favorite types of characters and events). Against the background of this system of means, its violations are no less powerful aesthetic stimulant: “prosaisms” in poetry, the introduction of new unconventional themes in prose, etc. A researcher who belongs to the same culture as the work he is studying better senses these poetic interruptions, and the background takes them for granted. A researcher of a foreign culture, on the contrary, first of all feels the general system of techniques (mainly in its differences from the one familiar to him) and less - the system of its violations. The study of the poetic system “from within” a given culture leads to the construction normative poetics(more conscious, as in the era of classicism, or less conscious, as in European literature of the 19th century), research “from the outside” leads to the construction descriptive poetics. Until the 19th century, while regional literatures were closed and traditionalistic, the normative type of poetics dominated. Normative poetics focused on the experience of one of the literary movements and substantiated it. The emergence of world literature (starting from the era of romanticism) puts forward the task of creating descriptive poetics.
Usually vary general poetics(theoretical or systematic – “macropoetics”) private(or actually descriptive – “micropoetics”) and historical.
General poetics, which explains the universal properties of verbal and artistic works, is divided into three areas that study, respectively sound, verbal And figurative structure of the text.
The purpose of general poetics– compile a complete systematized repertoire of techniques (aesthetically effective elements) covering all these three areas.
The sound structure of works is studiedphonics (sound organization of artistic speech) and rhythm, and in relation to the verse - also metrics And stanza (these concepts are usually not differentiated, and if they are, then metric means a combination of sounds and combining them into feet, and rhythm means a combination of feet into lines).
Since the primary material for study in this case is provided by poetic texts, this area is often called (too narrowly) poetry.
IN verbal structure features are being studied vocabulary, morphology And syntax works; the corresponding area is called stylistics (there is no consensus on the extent to which stylistics as linguistic and literary disciplines coincide with each other). Features of vocabulary (“selection of words”) and syntax (“connection of words”) have long been studied by poetics and rhetoric, where they were considered as stylistic figures and tropes. The features of morphology (“the poetry of grammar”) have become a subject of consideration in poetics only recently.
IN figurative structure works are studied images(characters and objects), motives(actions and deeds), stories(connected sets of actions). This area is called “topics” (traditional name), “thematics” (B. Tomashevsky) or “poetics” in the narrow sense of the word (B. Yarho). If poetry and stylistics have been considered in poetics since ancient times, then topic, on the contrary, has been little developed, since it was believed that art world works are no different from the real world; therefore, a generally accepted classification of the material has not yet been developed.
Private poetics is engaged in the study of literary texts in all of the above aspects, which makes it possible to create a “model” - an individual system of aesthetically effective properties of the work.
In this case, the word “poetics” defines a certain facet of the literary process, namely, the attitudes and principles of individual writers, as well as artistic movements and entire eras, implemented in the work. Famous Russian scientists have published monographs on the poetics of ancient Russian literature, the poetics of romanticism, and the poetics of N.V. Gogol, F.M. Dostoevsky, A.P. Chekhov. The origins of this terminological tradition are the research of A.N. Veselovsky (1838 – 1906) creativity of V.A. Zhukovsky, where there is a chapter “Romantic poetics of Zhukovsky”.
The main problem of private poetics is composition , that is, the mutual correlation of all aesthetically significant elements of the work (phonic, metric, stylistic, figurative plot and general composition that unites them) in their functional relationship with the artistic whole.
There is a significant difference between small and large literary form: in a small number of connections between elements, although large, is not inexhaustible, and the role of each in the system of the whole can be shown comprehensively; in a large form this is impossible, and a significant part of the internal connections remains unaccounted for as aesthetically imperceptible (for example, the connection between phonics and plot).
The final concepts to which all means of expression can be raised during analysis are the “image of the world” (with its main characteristics, artistic time and artistic space) and the “image of the author”, the interaction of which gives a “point of view” that determines everything important in the structure works. These three concepts emerged in poetics from the experience of studying literature of the 19th and 20th centuries; Before this, European poetics was content with a simplified distinction between three literary genres: drama (giving the image of the world), lyric poetry (giving the image of the author) and the intermediate epic between them.
The basis of private poetics (“micropoetics”) are descriptions of individual works, but more generalized descriptions of groups of works (one cycle, one author, genre, literary movement, historical era) are also possible. Such descriptions can be formalized into a list of initial elements of the model and a list of rules for their connection; as a result of the consistent application of these rules, the process of gradual creation of a work from the thematic and ideological concept to the final verbal design is imitated (the so-called generative poetics ).
Historical poetics studies the evolution of individual poetic techniques and their systems with the help of comparative historical literary criticism, identifying common features of the poetic systems of different cultures and reducing them either (genetically) to a common source or (typologically) to universal patterns of human consciousness.
The roots of literary literature go back to oral literature, which represents the main material of historical poetics, which sometimes makes it possible to reconstruct the course of development of individual images, stylistic figures and poetic meters from deep (for example, pan-Indo-European antiquity).
The subject of historical poetics, which exists as part of comparative historical literary criticism, is the evolution of verbal and artistic forms (having meaningfulness), as well as the creative principles of writers: their aesthetic attitudes and artistic worldview.
The main problem of historical poetics is genre in the broadest sense of the word, from artistic literature as a whole to such varieties as “European love elegy”, “classic tragedy”, “psychological novel”, etc. - that is, a historically established set of poetic elements of various kinds that cannot be derived from each other , but associated with each other as a result of long coexistence. The boundaries separating literature from non-literature, and the boundaries separating genre from genre, are changeable, and eras of relative stability of these poetic systems alternate with eras of decanonization and formal creation; These changes are studied by historical poetics.