Literary Science. Literary criticism

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Literary criticism and its sections. The science of literature is called literary criticism. It covers various areas of the study of literature and at the present stage of scientific development is divided into such independent scientific disciplines as literary theory, literary history and literary criticism.

The theory of literature studies the social nature, specificity, patterns of development and social role of fiction and establishes principles for considering and evaluating literary material.

Familiarity with literary theory is extremely important for every student of literature. At one time, Chekhov showed in one of his stories the teacher of Russian language and literature Nikitin, who during his years at the university never bothered to read one of the classic creations of aesthetic thought - Lessing's "Hamburg Drama". Another character in this story (“Literature Teacher”), a passionate lover of literature and theater, Shebaldin, upon learning of this, “was horrified and waved his hands as if he had burned his fingers.” Why was Shebaldin horrified, why is it that several times in this Chekhov story the talk about “Hamburg Drama” is resumed and Nikitin even dreams about it? Because a teacher of literature, without joining the great achievements of the science of literature, without making them his property, cannot deeply understand either the general properties of fiction, or the nature of literary development, or the features of an individual literary work. How will he teach his students to understand literature?

More specific, but no less important problems are resolved by the history of literature. It explores the process of literary development and, on this basis, determines the place and significance of various literary phenomena. Literary historians study literary works and literary criticism, the work of individual writers and critics, the formation, characteristics and historical fate of artistic methods, literary types and genres.

Since the development of the literature of each people is characterized by national identity, its history is divided into the histories of individual national literatures. This does not mean, however, that one can and should limit oneself to studying each of them separately. Tracing the literary process in a particular country, literary historians, if necessary, correlate with it the processes that took place in other countries - and on this basis reveal the universal significance of the national contribution that has been made or is being made by a certain people to world literature. It becomes global, like world history, only at a certain stage of development in the process of the emergence and strengthening of ties and interactions between peoples. As K. Marx wrote, “World history has not always existed; history as world history is the result.”

The same result in relation to individual national literatures is world literature. It is precisely the result of the connections and interactions of these national literatures, which allows us, when considering each of them in the international context, to “see not only the logic of its internal development, but also the system of its interrelations with the world literary process.”

Based on this, indisputable, in our opinion, position, I. G. Neupokoeva called “not just to present the known facts of the history of national literatures, but to more clearly identify in them what is most significant from the point of view of the history of world literature: not only the uniqueness of the contribution of each national literature into the treasury of world art, but also the manifestation in the national literary system of general patterns of development, its genetic, contact and typological connections with other literatures."

Literary criticism is a lively response to the most important literary events of the time. Its task is a comprehensive analysis of certain literary phenomena and assessment of their ideological and artistic significance for modern times. The subject of analysis in literary critical works can be either a separate work, or the work of a writer as a whole, or a number of works by different writers. The goals of literary criticism are varied. On the one hand, the critic is called upon to help readers correctly understand and appreciate the works he examines. On the other hand, the duty of the critic is to be a teacher and educator of the writers themselves. A clear indication of the enormous role that literary criticism can and should play is, for example, the activities of the great Russian critics - Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov. Their articles inspired and ideologically educated both writers and wide circles of readers.

One can refer to V.I. Lenin’s high assessment (N. Valentinov recalls it) of the educational value of Dobrolyubov’s articles. “Speaking of Chernyshevsky’s influence on me as the main one, I cannot help but mention the additional influence experienced at that time by Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky’s friend and companion. I also took seriously reading his articles in the same Sovremennik. Two his articles - one about Goncharov's novel "Oblomov", the other about Turgenev's novel "On the Eve" - struck like lightning. Of course, I had read "On the Eve" before, but I read the thing early, and I treated it in a childishly. Dobrolyubov knocked this approach out of me. I re-read this work, like Oblomov, again, one might say, with Dobrolyubov’s interlinear remarks. From his analysis of Oblomov, he made a cry, a call to will, activity, revolutionary struggle, and from analysis of "On the Eve" a real revolutionary proclamation, written in such a way that it is not forgotten to this day. This is how it should be written! When "Zarya" was organized, I always told Starover (Potresov) and Zasulich: "We need literary reviews of exactly this kind. Where there! We didn’t have Dobrolyubov, whom Engels called the socialist Lessing.”

Naturally, the role of literary criticism is just as great in our time.

Literary theory, literary history and literary criticism are in direct connection and interaction. The theory of literature is based on the entire set of facts obtained by the history of literature and on the achievements of critical studies of literary monuments.

The history of literature is based on the general principles for considering the literary process developed by literary theory and is largely based on the results of literary criticism. criticism literary artistic

Literary criticism, starting, like the history of literature, from theoretical and literary premises, at the same time strictly takes into account historical and literary data that help it determine the extent of what is new and significant that is introduced into literature by the analyzed work in comparison with previous ones.

Thus, literary criticism enriches the history of literature with new material, clarifies the trends and prospects of literary development.

Literary criticism, like any other science, also has auxiliary disciplines, which include historiography, textual criticism and bibliography.

Historiography collects and studies materials that introduce the historical development of the theory and history of literature and literary criticism. By illuminating the path traversed by each given science and the results achieved by it, historiography makes it possible to fruitfully continue research, relying on all the best that has already been created in this field.

Textual criticism determines the author of an unnamed work of art or scientific work, the degree of completeness of various editions. By restoring the final, so-called canonical, edition of certain works, textual critics provide an invaluable service to readers and researchers.

Bibliography - an index of literary works - helps to navigate a huge number of theoretical-literary, historical-literary and literary-critical books and articles. She registers both existing and emerging works in these sections of literary criticism, compiles general and thematic lists, and provides the necessary annotations.

Analysis and generalization of the practice of literary creativity and literary development are naturally inseparable from an understanding of the entire development of social life, in the process of which various forms of social consciousness arise and take shape. Therefore, it is natural for literary scholars to turn to a number of scientific disciplines closely related to the science of literature: philosophy and aesthetics, history, the science of art and the science of language.

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Literature as art. Literary criticism as a science.

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Introduction 3

1. Literary criticism as a science. Basic and auxiliary literary disciplines 4

2. What the science of literature can and cannot do 6

3. Literary studies and its “surroundings” 8

4. On the accuracy of literary criticism 13

The place of literature among other arts 18

Conclusion 23

References 24

Introduction

Fiction is one of the main types of art. Its role in understanding life and educating people is truly enormous. Together with the creators of wonderful literary works, readers are introduced to the high ideals of truly human life and human behavior.

That's why I named R.G. Chernyshevsky art and literature “a textbook of life”.

Literature (from Latin litteratura - manuscript, composition; to Latin litera - letter) in a broad sense - all writing that has social significance; in a narrower and more common sense - an abbreviated designation of fiction, qualitatively different from other types of literature: scientific, philosophical, informational, etc. Literature in this sense is a written form of word art.

Literary criticism is a science that comprehensively studies fiction, “This term is of relatively recent origin; before him, the concept of “literary history” (French, histoire de la littérature, German, Literaturgeschichte), its essence, origin and social connections was widely used; a body of knowledge about the specifics of verbal and artistic thinking, the genesis, structure and functions of literary creativity, about local and general patterns of the historical and literary process; in a narrower sense of the word - the science of the principles and methods of studying fiction and the creative process

Literary criticism as a science includes:

history of literature;

literary theory;

literary criticism.

Auxiliary literary disciplines: archival science, library science, literary local history, bibliography, textual criticism, etc.

1. Literary criticism as a science. Basic and auxiliary literary disciplines

The science of literature is called 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; he was 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

literary history

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, only manuscripts

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.

2. What the science of literature can and cannot do

The first acquaintance with literary criticism often causes a mixed feeling of bewilderment and irritation: why is someone teaching me how to understand Pushkin? Philologists answer this as follows: firstly, the modern reader understands Pushkin worse than he thinks. Pushkin (like Blok, especially Dante) wrote for people who did not speak quite like us. They lived a life different from ours, they learned different things, read different books and saw the world differently. What was clear to them is not always obvious to us. To mitigate this generational difference, a commentary is needed, and it is written by a literary scholar.

Comments vary. They not only report that Paris is the main city of the French, and Venus is the goddess of love in Roman mythology. Sometimes you have to explain: in that era, such and such was considered beautiful; such and such an artistic technique pursues such and such a goal; such and such poetic size is associated with such and such themes and genres. . . From a certain point of view, all literary criticism is a commentary: it exists in order to bring the reader closer to understanding the text.

Secondly, the writer, as we know, is often misunderstood by his contemporaries. After all, the author is counting on an ideal reader, for whom every element of the text is significant. Such a reader will feel why there was an inserted novella in the middle of the novel and why the landscape is needed on the last page. He will understand why one poem has a rare meter and whimsical rhyme, while another is written briefly and simply, like a suicide note. Is such understanding given to everyone by nature? No. An ordinary reader, if he wants to understand a text, must often “get” with his mind what an ideal reader perceives with intuition, and for this the help of a literary critic can be useful.

Finally, no one (except a specialist) is obliged to read all the texts written by a given author: you can really love “War and Peace”, but never read “The Fruits of Enlightenment”. Meanwhile, for many writers, each new work is a new replica in an ongoing conversation. So, Gogol again and again, from the earliest to the latest books, wrote about the ways in which Evil penetrates the world. Moreover, in a sense, all literature is a single conversation into which we join from the middle. After all, a writer always - explicitly or implicitly, voluntarily or involuntarily - responds to ideas floating in the air. He conducts a dialogue with writers and thinkers of his era and those preceding it. And with him, in turn, his contemporaries and descendants enter into conversation, interpreting his works and building on them. To grasp the connection of a work with the previous and subsequent development of culture, the reader also needs the help of a specialist.

One should not demand from literary criticism something for which it is not intended. No science can determine how talented a particular author is: the concepts of “good and bad” are beyond its jurisdiction. And this is gratifying: if we could strictly determine what qualities a masterpiece should have, this would provide a ready-made recipe for genius, and creativity could well be entrusted to a machine.

Literature is addressed to both reason and feelings at the same time; science is only about reason. It will not teach you to enjoy art. A scientist can explain the author’s thought or make some of his techniques clear - but he will not relieve the reader of the effort with which we “enter”, “get used to” the text. After all, ultimately, understanding a work means correlating it with your own life and emotional experience, and this can only be done by yourself.

Literary criticism should not be despised for the fact that it is not capable of replacing literature: after all, poems about love will not replace the feeling itself. Science can do a lot. What exactly?

3 . Literary studies and its “surroundings”

Literary criticism consists of two large sections - theory and history. O ries of literature.

Their subject of study is the same: works of artistic literature. But they approach the subject differently.

For a theorist, a specific text is always an example of a general principle; a historian is interested in a specific text in itself.

Literary theory can be defined as an attempt to answer the question: “What is fiction?” That is, how does ordinary language turn into the material of art? How does literature “work”, why is it able to influence the reader? The history of literature is ultimately always the answer to the question: “What is written here?” For this purpose, the connection between literature and the context that gave rise to it (historical, cultural, everyday life), the origin of a particular artistic language, and the biography of the writer are studied.

A special branch of literary theory is poetics. It proceeds from the fact that the assessment and understanding of a work changes, but its verbal fabric remains unchanged. Poetics studies precisely this fabric - the text (this word in Latin means “fabric”). Text is, roughly speaking, certain words in a certain order. Poetics teaches us to highlight in it the “threads” from which it is woven: lines and feet, paths and figures, objects and characters, episodes and motifs, themes and ideas...

Side by side, with literary criticism there is criticism, it is even sometimes considered part of the science of literature. This is justified historically: for a long time philology dealt only with antiquities, leaving the entire field of modern literature to criticism. Therefore, in some countries (English- and French-speaking) the science of literature is not separated from criticism (as well as from philosophy and intellectual journalism). There, literary criticism is usually called that - critics, critique. But Russia learned sciences (including philological ones) from the Germans: our word “literary criticism” is a copy of the German Literaturwissenschaft. And the Russian science of literature (like the German) is essentially the opposite of criticism.

Criticism is literature about literature. The philologist tries to see someone else’s consciousness behind the text, to take the point of view of another culture. If he writes, for example, about “Hamlet,” then his task is to understand what Hamlet was for Shakespeare. The critic always remains within the framework of his culture: he is more interested in understanding what Hamlet means to us. This is a completely legitimate approach to literature - only creative, not scientific. “You can classify flowers into beautiful and ugly, but what will this give for science?” - wrote literary critic B.I. Yarkho.

The attitude of critics (and writers in general) towards literary criticism is often hostile. The artistic consciousness perceives the scientific approach to art as an attempt with unsuitable means. This is understandable: the artist is simply obliged to defend his truth, his vision. The scientist’s desire for objective truth is alien and unpleasant to him. He is inclined to accuse science of being petty, of being soulless, of blasphemously dismembering the living body of literature. The philologist does not remain in debt: to him the judgments of writers and critics seem frivolous, irresponsible and not relevant to the point. This was well expressed by R. O. Yakobson. The American University, where he taught, was going to entrust the department of Russian literature to Nabokov: “After all, he is a great writer!” Jacobson objected: “The elephant is also a big animal. We don’t offer him to head the department of zoology!”

But science and creativity are quite capable of interacting. Andrei Bely, Vladislav Khodasevich, Anna Akhmatova left a noticeable mark on literary criticism: the artist’s intuition helped them see what eluded others, and science provided methods of proof and rules for presenting their hypotheses. And vice versa, literary critics V.B. Shklovsky and Yu.N. Tynyanov wrote wonderful prose, the form and content of which were largely determined by their scientific views.

Philological literature is also connected with philosophy by many threads. After all, every science, cognizing its subject, simultaneously cognizes the world as a whole. And the structure of the world is no longer a topic of science, but of philosophy.

Of the philosophical disciplines, aesthetics is closest to literary criticism. Of course, the question is: “What is beautiful?” - not scientific. A scientist can study how this question was answered in different centuries in different countries (this is a completely philological problem); can explore how and why a person reacts to such and such artistic features (this is a psychological problem) - but if he himself begins to talk about the nature of beauty, he will not be engaged in science, but in philosophy (we remember: “good - bad” - not scientific concepts). But at the same time, he simply must answer this question for himself - otherwise he will have nothing to approach literature with.

Another philosophical discipline that is not indifferent to the science of literature is epistemology, that is, the theory of knowledge. What do we learn through literary text? Is it a window into the world (into someone else's consciousness, into someone else's culture) - or a mirror in which we and our problems are reflected?

No single answer is satisfactory. If a work is only a window through which we see something foreign to us, then what do we really care about other people’s affairs? If books created many centuries ago are able to excite us, it means they contain something that concerns us too.

But if the main thing in a work is what we see in it, then the author is powerless. It turns out that we are free to put any content into the text - to read, for example, “The Cockroach” as love lyrics, and “The Nightingale Garden” as political propaganda. If this is not so, then the understanding can be correct and incorrect. Any work is polysemantic, but its meaning is located within certain boundaries, which in principle can be outlined. This is not an easy task for a philologist.

The history of philosophy is, in general, a discipline as philological as it is philosophical. The text of Aristotle or Chaadaev requires the same study as the text of Aeschylus or Tolstoy. In addition, the history of philosophy (especially Russian) is difficult to separate from the history of literature: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Tyutchev are the largest figures in the history of Russian philosophical thought. Conversely, the works of Plato, Nietzsche or Fr. Pavel Florensky belongs not only to philosophy, but also to artistic prose.

No science exists in isolation: its field of activity always intersects with related fields of knowledge. The closest area to literary criticism is, of course, linguistics. “Literature is the highest form of existence of language,” poets have said more than once. Its study is unthinkable without a subtle and deep knowledge of the language - both without understanding rare words and phrases (“On the way there is a flammable white stone” - what is it?), and without knowledge in the field of phonetics, morphology, etc.

Literary criticism also borders on history. Once upon a time, philology was generally an auxiliary discipline that helped the historian work with written sources, and such assistance is necessary for the historian. But history also helps the philologist understand the era when this or that author worked. In addition, historical works have long been part of fiction: the books of Herodotus and Julius Caesar, Russian chronicles and “History of the Russian State” by N. M. Karamzin are outstanding monuments of prose.

Art criticism generally deals with almost the same thing as literary criticism: after all, literature is just one of the types of art, only the best studied. The arts develop interconnectedly, constantly exchanging ideas. Thus, romanticism is an era not only in literature, but also in music, painting, sculpture, even in landscape art. And since the arts are interconnected, then their study is interconnected.

Recently, cultural studies, a field at the intersection of history, art history and literary criticism, has been rapidly developing. She studies the interrelations of such different areas as everyday behavior, art, science, military affairs, etc. After all, all this is born from the same human consciousness. And in different eras and in different countries it sees and comprehends the world differently. A cultural scientist strives to find and formulate precisely those deep ideas about the world, about man’s place in the universe, about the beautiful and the ugly, about good and evil, which underlie a given culture. They have their own logic and are reflected in all areas of human activity.

But even such a seemingly distant field from literature as mathematics is not separated from philology by an impassable line. Mathematical methods are actively used in many areas of literary criticism (for example, in textual criticism). Some philological problems may attract a mathematician as a field of application of his theories: for example, Academician A. N. Kolmogorov, one of the greatest mathematicians of our time, worked a lot on poetic rhythm, based on the theory of probability.

It makes no sense to list all areas of culture that are in one way or another connected with literary criticism: there is no area that would be completely indifferent to him. Philology is the memory of culture, and culture cannot exist if it has lost the memory of the past.

4. On the accuracy of literary criticism

In literary criticism, there is a peculiar complex of one’s own inferiority, caused by the fact that it does not belong to the circle of exact sciences. It is assumed that a high degree of accuracy is in any case a sign of “scientificness”. Hence the various attempts to subordinate literary criticism to a precise research methodology and the inevitably associated limitations on the range of literary criticism, giving it a more or less intimate character.

As is known, in order for a scientific theory to be considered accurate, its generalizations, conclusions, and data must be based on some homogeneous elements with which various operations (combinatorial, mathematical, among others) could be performed. To do this, the material being studied must be formalized.

Since accuracy requires formalization of the scope of study and the study itself, all attempts to create an accurate research methodology in literary criticism are in one way or another connected with the desire to formalize the material of literature. And in this desire, I want to emphasize this from the very beginning, there is nothing odious. Any knowledge is formalized, and any knowledge itself formalizes the material. Formalization becomes unacceptable only when it forcibly ascribes to the material a degree of accuracy that it does not possess and essentially cannot possess.

Therefore, the main objections to various kinds of excessive attempts to formalize literary material come from indications that the material does not lend itself to formalization in general or, specifically, to the proposed type of formalization. Among the most common mistakes is the attempt to extend the formalization of the material, suitable only for some part of it, to the entire material. Let us recall the statements of the formalists of the 1920s that literature is only form, there is nothing in it except form, and it should be studied only as form.

Modern structuralism (I mean all its many branches, which we must now increasingly take into account), which has repeatedly emphasized its kinship with the formalism of the 20s, is in essence much broader than formalism, since it makes it possible to study not only the form of literature , but also its content - of course, formalizing this content, subordinating the studied content to terminological clarification and constructivization. This allows you to operate on the content according to the rules of formal logic, highlighting their “cruel essence” in constantly moving, changing objects of study. This is why modern structuralism cannot be reduced to formalism in general methodological terms. Structuralism embraces the content of literature much more broadly, formalizing this content, but not reducing it to form.

However, here's something to keep in mind. In attempts to achieve accuracy, one cannot strive for accuracy as such, and it is extremely dangerous to demand from a material a degree of accuracy that it does not and cannot have by its very nature. Accuracy is needed to the extent that it is allowed by the nature of the material. Excessive precision can be a hindrance to the development of science and understanding of the essence of the matter.

Literary criticism must strive for accuracy if it is to remain a science. However, it is precisely this requirement of accuracy that raises the question of the degree of accuracy acceptable in literary criticism and the degree of possible accuracy in the study of certain objects. This is necessary at least in order not to try to measure in millimeters and grams the level, size and volume of water in the ocean.

What in literature cannot be formalized, where are the boundaries of formalization and what degree of accuracy is acceptable? These issues are very important, and they need to be resolved so as not to create forced constructivizations and structuralizations where this is impossible due to the nature of the material itself.

I will limit myself to a general formulation of the question of the degree of accuracy of the literary material. First of all, it is necessary to point out that the usual contrast between the imagery of literary creativity and the ugliness of science is incorrect. It is not in the imagery of works of art that one should look for their inaccuracy. The fact is that any exact science uses images, proceeds from images, and recently has increasingly resorted to images as the essence of scientific knowledge of the world. What is called a model in science is an image. When creating one or another explanation of a phenomenon, a scientist builds a model - an image. An atomic model, a molecule model, a positron model, etc. - all these are images in which a scientist embodies his guesses, hypotheses, and then accurate conclusions. Numerous theoretical studies have been devoted to the meaning of images in modern physics.

The key to the inaccuracy of the artistic material lies in another area. Artistic creation is “imprecise” to the extent that it is required for the co-creation of the reader, viewer or listener. Potential co-creation is inherent in any work of art. Therefore, deviations from the meter are necessary for the reader and listener to creatively recreate the rhythm. Deviations from style are necessary for creative perception of style. The inaccuracy of the image is necessary to complete this image with the creative perception of the reader or viewer. All these and other “inaccuracies” in works of art require further study. The necessary and permissible dimensions of these inaccuracies in different eras and among different artists require further study. The permissible degree of formalization of art will depend on the results of this study. The situation is especially difficult with the content of the work, which to one degree or another allows for formalization and at the same time does not allow it.

Structuralism in literary criticism can only be fruitful if there is a clear basis for the possible spheres of its application and the possible degrees of formalization of this or that material.

So far, structuralism is testing its possibilities. He is in the stage of terminological searches and in the stage of experimental construction of various models, including his own model - structuralism as a science. There is no doubt that, as with all experimental work, most experiments will fail. However, every failure of an experiment is, in some respect, also a success. Failure forces one to discard a preliminary decision, a preliminary model, and partly suggests ways for new searches. And these searches should not exaggerate the possibilities of the material; they should be based on the study of these possibilities.

Attention should be paid to the very structure of literary criticism as a science. Essentially, literary criticism is a whole bush of various sciences. This is not one science, but different sciences, united by a single material, a single object of study - literature. In this regard, literary criticism is close in type to such sciences as geography, ocean science, natural history, etc.

Literature can study different aspects of it, and different approaches to literature in general are possible. You can study biographies of writers. This is an important section of literary criticism, because many explanations of his works are hidden in the writer’s biography. You can study the history of the text of works. This is a huge area that includes a variety of approaches. These different approaches depend on what kind of work is being studied: whether it is a work of personal creativity or impersonal, and in the latter case, we mean a written work (for example, a medieval one, the text of which existed and changed for many centuries) or oral (texts of epics, lyrical songs and etc). You can engage in literary source studies and literary archeography, historiography of the study of literature, literary bibliography (bibliography is also based on a special science). A special field of science is comparative literature. Another special area is poetry. I have not exhausted even a small part of the possible scientific studies of literature and special literary disciplines. And this is what you should pay serious attention to. The more specialized the discipline that studies a particular area of literature, the more accurate it is and requires more serious methodological training of a specialist.

The most precise literary disciplines are also the most specialized.

If you arrange the entire bush of literary disciplines in the form of a kind of rose, in the center of which there will be disciplines dealing with the most general issues of interpretation of literature, then it will turn out that the farther from the center, the more accurate the disciplines will be. The literary “rose” of disciplines has a certain rigid periphery and a less rigid core. It is built, like any organic body, from a combination of rigid ribs and a rigid periphery with more flexible and less rigid central parts.

If you remove all the “non-rigid” disciplines, then the “hard” ones will lose the meaning of their existence; if, on the contrary, we remove “hard”, precise special disciplines (such as the study of the history of the text of works, the study of the lives of writers, poetry, etc.), then the central consideration of literature will not only lose accuracy - it will completely disappear in the chaos of the arbitrariness of various unsupported special consideration of the issue of assumptions and conjectures.

The development of literary disciplines should be harmonious, and since special literary disciplines require more training from a specialist, special attention should be paid to them when organizing educational processes and scientific research. Special literary disciplines guarantee that necessary degree of accuracy, without which there is no specific literary criticism, the latter, in turn, supports and nourishes accuracy.

5. Literature as an art form.

The place of literature among other arts

Literature works with words - its main difference from other arts. The meaning of the word was given back in the Gospel - a divine idea of the essence of the word. The word is the main element of literature, the connection between the material and the spiritual. A word is perceived as the sum of the meanings that culture has given it. Through the word it is carried out with the general in world culture. Visual culture is that which can be perceived visually. Verbal culture - more consistent with human needs - the word, the work of thought, the formation of personality (the world of spiritual entities).

There are areas of culture that do not require serious attention (Hollywood films do not require much internal commitment). There is literature at depth that requires a deep relationship and experience. Works of literature are a deep awakening of a person’s inner strengths in various ways, since literature has material. Literature as the art of words. Lessing, in his treatise on Laocoon, emphasized the arbitrariness (conventionality) of signs and the immaterial nature of the images of literature, although it paints pictures of life.

Figurativeness is conveyed in fiction indirectly, through words. As shown above, words in a particular national language are signs-symbols, devoid of imagery. How do these signs-symbols become signs-images (iconic signs), without which literature is impossible? The ideas of the outstanding Russian philologist A.A. help us understand how this happens. Potebni. In his work “Thought and Language” (1862), he singled out the internal form of a word, that is, its closest etymological meaning, the way in which the content of the word is expressed. The internal form of the word gives direction to the listener's thoughts.

Art is the same creativity as the word. The poetic image serves as a connection between the external form and the meaning, the idea. In the figurative poetic word, its etymology is revived and updated. The scientist argued that the image arises from the use of words in their figurative meaning, and defined poetry as an allegory. In cases where there are no allegories in literature, a word that does not have a figurative meaning acquires it in context, falling into the environment of artistic images.

Hegel emphasized that the content of works of verbal art becomes poetic thanks to its transmission “by speech, words, a beautiful combination of them from the point of view of language.” Therefore, the potential visual principle in literature is expressed indirectly. It is called verbal plasticity.

Such indirect figurativeness is a property equally of the literatures of the West and the East, lyric poetry, epic and drama. It is especially widely represented in the literary arts of the Arab East and Central Asia, in particular due to the fact that the depiction of the human body in the painting of these countries is prohibited. Arabic poetry of the 10th century took on, in addition to purely literary tasks, also the role of fine art. Therefore, much of it is “hidden painting”, forced to turn to the word. European poetry also uses words to draw a silhouette and convey colors:

On pale blue enamel, which is conceivable in April,

Birch branches raised

And it was getting dark unnoticed.

The pattern is sharp and small,

A thin mesh froze,

Like on a porcelain plate, a drawing drawn accurately

This poem by O. Mandelstam is a kind of verbal watercolor, but the pictorial principle here is subordinated to a purely literary task. The spring landscape is just an excuse to think about the world created by God, and a work of art that is materialized in a thing created by man; about the essence of the artist’s creativity. The pictorial principle is also inherent in the epic. O. de Balzac had a talent for painting in words, and I. A. Goncharov had a talent for sculpture. Sometimes figurativeness in epic works is expressed even more indirectly than in the poems cited above and in the novels of Balzac and Goncharov, for example, through composition. Thus, the structure of I. S. Shmelev’s story “The Man from the Restaurant,” consisting of small chapters and focused on the hagiographic canon, resembles the composition of hagiographic icons, in the center of which is the figure of a saint, and along the perimeter there are stamps telling about his life and deeds.

This manifestation of figurativeness is again subordinated to a purely literary task: it gives the narrative a special spirituality and generality. No less significant than verbal and artistic indirect plasticity is the imprinting in literature of the other - according to Lessing's observation, the invisible, that is, those pictures that painting refuses. These are thoughts, sensations, experiences, beliefs - all aspects of a person’s inner world. The art of words is the sphere where they were born, formed and achieved great perfection and sophistication of observation of the human psyche. They were carried out using such speech forms as dialogues and monologues. Capturing human consciousness with the help of speech is accessible to the only form of art - literature. The place of fiction among the arts

In different periods of the cultural development of mankind, literature was given different places among other types of art - from the leading to one of the last. This is explained by the dominance of one direction or another in literature, as well as the degree of development of technical civilization

For example, ancient thinkers, Renaissance artists and classicists were convinced of the advantages of sculpture and painting over literature. Leonardo da Vinci described and analyzed a case reflecting the Renaissance value system. When the poet presented King Matthew with a poem praising the day on which he was born, and the painter presented a portrait of the monarch’s beloved, the king preferred the painting to the book and declared to the poet: “Give me something that I could see and touch, and not just listen to.” , and do not blame my choice for the fact that I put your work under my elbow, and hold the work of painting with both hands, fixing my eyes on it: after all, the hands themselves began to serve a more worthy feeling than hearing.” The same relationship should exist between science the painter and the science of the poet, which exists between the corresponding feelings, the objects of which they are made.” A similar point of view is expressed in the treatise “Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting” by the early French educator J.B. Dubos. In his opinion, the reasons for the less powerful power of poetry than painting are the lack of clarity of poetic images and the artificiality (conventionality) of signs in poetry

The Romantics put poetry and music in first place among all arts. Indicative in this regard is the position of F.V. Schelling, who saw in poetry (literature), “since it is the creator of ideas,” “the essence of all art.” Symbolists considered music the highest form of culture

However, already in the 18th century, a different trend arose in European aesthetics - putting literature in first place. Its foundations were laid by Lessing, who saw the advantages of literature over sculpture and painting. Subsequently, Hegel and Belinsky paid tribute to this tendency. Hegel argued that “verbal art, in terms of both its content and method of presentation, has an immeasurably wider field than all other arts. Any content is assimilated and formed by poetry, all objects of spirit and nature, events, stories, deeds, actions, external and internal states,” poetry is a “universal art.” At the same time, in this comprehensive content of literature, the German thinker saw its significant drawback: it is in poetry, according to Hegel, that “art itself begins to disintegrate and for philosophical knowledge finds a point of transition to religious ideas as such, as well as to the prose of scientific thinking.” However, it is unlikely that these features of literature deserve criticism. The appeal of Dante, W. Shakespeare, I.V. Goethe, A.S. Pushkin, F.I. Tyutchev, L.N. Tolstoy, F.M. Dostoevsky, T. Mann to religious and philosophical issues helped create literary masterpieces. Following Hegel, V. G. Belinsky also gave the palm to literature over other types of art.

“Poetry is the highest kind of art. Poetry is expressed in the free human word, which is a sound, a picture, and a definite, clearly spoken idea. Therefore, poetry contains within itself all the elements of the other arts, as if it suddenly and inseparably uses all the means that are given separately to each of the other arts.” Moreover, Belinsky’s position is even more literary-centric than Hegel’s: the Russian critic, unlike the German esthetician, does not see anything in literature that would make it less significant than other forms of art

The approach of N.G. Chernyshevsky turned out to be different. Paying tribute to the capabilities of literature, a supporter of “real criticism” wrote that, since, unlike all other arts, it acts on fantasy, “in terms of the strength and clarity of the subjective impression, poetry is far below not only reality, but also all other arts " In fact, literature has its own weaknesses: in addition to immateriality, the conventionality of verbal images, it is also the national language in which literary works are always created, and the resulting need for their translation into other languages.

A modern literary theorist evaluates the possibilities of the art of words very highly: “Literature is the “first among equals” art.”

Mythological and literary plots and motifs are often used as the basis for many works of other types of art - painting, sculpture, theater, ballet, opera, pop, program music, cinema. It is precisely this assessment of the possibilities of literature that is truly objective.

Conclusion

Works of art constitute a necessary accessory to the life of both an individual and human society as a whole, because they serve their interests.

We cannot point out a single person in modern society who would not love to look at pictures, listen to music, or read works of fiction.

We love literature for its sharp thoughts and noble impulses. She reveals to us the world of beauty and the soul of a person fighting for high ideals.

The science of literature is literary criticism. It covers various areas of the study of literature and at the present stage of scientific development is divided into independent scientific disciplines such as literary theory, literary history and literary criticism.

Literary criticism often becomes a sphere of intervention, ideology and formulates ideas dictated by the interests of leaders, parties, and government structures. Independence from them is an indispensable condition for being scientific. Even in the most difficult times, it was the independence that distinguished the works of M. Bakhtin, A. Losev, Yu. Lotman, M. Polyakov, D. Likhachev, which guaranteed scientific character and testified to the possibility of living in society and being free even from a totalitarian regime.

Bibliography

1. Borev Yu.B. Aesthetics: In 2 volumes. Smolensk, 1997. T. 1.

2. Lessing G.E. Laocoon, or about the boundaries of painting and poetry. Moscow, 1957.

3. Florensky P.A. - Analysis of spatiality and time in artistic and visual works. - Moscow., 1993.

4. L.L. Ivanova - lessons, literary studies - Murmansk, 2002.

5. N. Karnaukh - literature - Moscow

6. E. Erokhina, E. Beznosov-bustard; 2004, - a large reference book for schoolchildren and students

7. Theory of literature encyclopedia-Astrel-2003,

8. A. Timofeev-dictionary of literary terms - Moscow enlightenment-1974,

9. N. Gulyaev - theory of literature - textbook - Moscow - higher school - 1985,

10. www. referul. ru

11. www. bankreferatov. ru

12. www. 5ballov. ru

13. www. ytchebnik. ru

14. www. edu-zone. net

Basic and auxiliary disciplines of literary criticism

Basic literary disciplines

1. History of literature solves several main problems. Firstly, she studies the connections between literature and life reality. For example, when we talk about what social and philosophical problems brought to life “Woe from Wit” by A. S. Griboyedov or “Crime and Punishment” by F. M. Dostoevsky, we find ourselves in the bosom of the historical-literary approach. Secondly, literary history builds a chronology of the literary process. For example, the fundamental “History of World Literature” - the fruit of the joint work of many outstanding philologists - not only describes how literature developed in different eras in different countries, but also offers comparative tables that allow the philologist to clearly see general and different trends in world literatures different eras. Thirdly, the history of literature examines the chronology of the life and work of individual authors. For example, the historical and literary type of publications includes the multi-volume dictionary “Russian Writers. 1800 – 1917”, containing a wealth of factual material about the life and work of most Russian writers of the 19th – early 20th centuries.

Any philological study in one way or another affects the sphere of literary history.

2. Literary theory designed to solve completely different problems. The most important question that determines the sphere of interest of literary theory is the following: what are the features of a literary text that distinguish it from all other texts? In other words, literary theory studies the laws of construction and functioning of a literary text. Literary theory is interested in the problem of the emergence of fiction, its place among other forms of human activity, and most importantly, the internal laws by which a work of fiction lives. The study of these laws constitutes the scope poetics- the main part of literary theory. Distinguish general poetics(the science of the most general laws of text construction), private poetics(the artistic features of the texts of an author or group of authors are studied, or particular forms of organization of a literary work are analyzed, for example, verse), historical poetics(the science of the origin and development of individual forms and techniques of verbal art). In addition, the field of literary theory is sometimes, not without reason, attributed to rhetoric- the science of eloquence, although more often (at least in the Russian tradition) rhetoric is considered as an independent discipline.

Of course, there is no strict boundary between types of poetics; this division is rather arbitrary. There is no strict boundary between theory and literary history. For example, if we say: “The novel in verse by A. S. Pushkin “Eugene Onegin” was written mainly in the 20s of the 19th century,” then in this phrase “novel in verse” clearly refers to theory (since we say about the genre), and the second part of the phrase - to the history of literature.

At the same time, the absence of clear boundaries does not mean that these boundaries do not exist at all. There are many publications and studies that have either a pronounced theoretical orientation (for example, the theory of genres) or a historical and literary one (for example, biographical dictionaries). Of course, a serious philologist must be equally prepared both historically and literaryly, and theoretically.

3. Literary criticism Not everyone recognizes it as a part of literary criticism. As already mentioned, in many traditions, primarily in the English language, the words “criticism” and “literary science” are synonymous, with the term “criticism” dominating. On the other hand, in Germany these words mean completely different things and are partly opposed to each other. There, “criticism” is just evaluative articles about modern literature. In the Russian tradition, “criticism” and “literary criticism” are also often opposed to each other, although the boundaries are less defined. The problem is that a “critic” and a “literary scholar” may turn out to be one and the same person, which is why in Russia criticism often merges with literary analysis, or at least relies on it. In general, criticism is more journalistic, more focused on topical topics; literary criticism, on the contrary, is more academic, more focused on aesthetic categories. As a rule, literary criticism deals with texts that have already won recognition, while the field of criticism deals with the latest literature. Of course, it is not so important whether we consider criticism a part of literary studies or a separate discipline, although in reality this affects the nature of literary education. For example, in Russia philologists not only actively use the achievements of critics, but even study a special course “History of Criticism”, thereby recognizing the kinship of these two spheres. More distant areas related to verbal culture, for example, journalism, actually find themselves outside the standards of philological education.

And yet, we repeat, the question of the place of literary criticism in the structure of literary criticism (or, conversely, beyond it) is partly of a scholastic nature, that is, we are arguing for the sake of arguing. It is more important to understand that the ways of approaching literary texts can vary greatly, and there is nothing wrong with that. These approaches also differ radically within “classical” literary criticism.

So, main disciplines literary criticism can be considered history of literature, literary theory and (with certain reservations) literary criticism.

Auxiliary disciplines of literary criticism

Auxiliary disciplines of literary criticism are those that are not directly aimed at interpreting the text, but help in this. In other cases, the analysis is carried out, but is of an applied nature (for example, you need to understand the writer’s drafts). Auxiliary disciplines for a philologist can be very different: mathematics (if we decide to conduct a statistical analysis of text elements), history (without knowledge of which historical and literary analysis is generally impossible) and so on.

According to the established methodological tradition, it is customary to talk about three auxiliary disciplines of literary criticism, most often highlighted in textbooks: bibliography, historiography, and textual criticism.

1. Bibliography - the science of publishing. Modern literary criticism without bibliography is not only helpless, but simply unthinkable. Any research begins with the study of bibliography - accumulated material on a given problem. In addition to experienced bibliographers who can give the necessary advice, the modern philologist is helped by numerous reference books, as well as the Internet.

2. Historiography. Due to inexperience, students sometimes confuse it with the history of literature, although these are completely different disciplines. Historiography does not describe the history of literature, but the history of the study of literature(if we are talking about literary historiography). In private studies, the historiographic part is sometimes called the “history of the issue.” In addition, historiography deals with the history of the creation and publication of a particular text. Serious historiographical works allow one to see the logic of the development of scientific thought, not to mention the fact that they save the researcher’s time and effort.

3. Textual criticism is a common name for all disciplines that study text for applied purposes. A textual scholar studies the forms and methods of writing in different eras; analyzes handwriting features (this is especially true if you need to determine the authorship of the text); compares different editions of the text, choosing the so-called canonical option, i.e. the one that will later be recognized as the main one for publications and reissues; conducts a thorough and comprehensive examination of the text in order to establishing authorship or for the purpose of proving forgery. In recent years, textual analysis has become increasingly closer to literary criticism itself, so it is not surprising that textual criticism is increasingly being called not an auxiliary, but a main literary discipline. Our wonderful philologist D.S. Likhachev, who did a lot to change the status of this science, valued textology very highly.

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:

a) textual criticism – studies the text as such: manuscripts, editions, editions, time of writing, author, place, translation and comments

b) paleography - the study of ancient text carriers, manuscripts only

c) bibliography – an auxiliary discipline of any science, scientific literature on a particular subject

d) library science – the science of collections, repositories of not only fiction, but also scientific literature, union catalogues.

Now literature is considered as the above system, where everything is interconnected. The author always writes for the reader. There are different types of readers, as Chernyshevsky talks about. An example is Mayakovsky, who through his contemporaries addressed his descendants. The literary critic also turns to the personality of the author, his opinion, and biography. He is also interested in the reader's opinion.

Art and its types

Art is the main type of spiritual activity of people, serving to satisfy a person’s aesthetic feelings and his need for beauty.

A type of art is a form of exploration of the world according to the laws of beauty, when an artistic image is created, filled with a certain ideological and aesthetic content.

Functions of art:

Aesthetic – the ability to form artistic tastes, moral values, awakens creative personality traits.

Educational – personal development, impact on a person’s morality and worldview.

Informational – carries certain information.

Cognitive - knowledge of the world with special depth and expressiveness.

Communicative – artistic communication between the author and the recipient; connection to that time and place.

Ethnogenetic - preserving memory, embodies the appearance of the people.

Hedonic – bringing pleasure.

Transformative – stimulates the activity of the individual.

Compensatory – empathy for the hero.

Anticipation - the writer is ahead of his time.

Types of art: theater, music, painting, graphics, sculpture, literature, architecture, decor, cinema, photography, circus. About 400 types of activities.

The synthetic nature of art is the ability to holistically reflect life in the interconnection of all its aspects.

The ancients identified five types of art; the classification is based on a material medium. Music is the art of sounds, painting is the art of colors, sculpture is stone, architecture is plastic forms, literature is the word.

However, already Lesin, in the article “Laocoon or on the boundaries of painting,” issued the first scientific classification: the division into spatial and temporal arts.

From Lesin's point of view, literature is a temporary art.

Expressive and fine arts are also distinguished (sign principle). Expressive expresses emotions, conveys mood, figurative - embodies an idea.

Expressive art is music, architecture, abstract painting, lyrics.

Fine - painting, sculpture, drama and epic.

According to this classification, literature is an expressive art.

8.Origin of art. Totemism, magic, their connection with folklore and literature. Syncretism.

The word “art” has many meanings; in this case, it refers to the actual artistic activity and what is its result (work). Art as artistic creativity was distinguished from art in a broader sense (as skills, crafts). Thus, Hegel noted the fundamental difference between “artfully made things” and “works of art.”

Syncretism - an indivisible unity of different types of creativity - existed at an early stage of human development. This is connected with the ideas of primitive people about the world, with anthropomorphism in the consciousness of natural phenomena - the animation of the forces of nature, their likening to man. This was expressed in primitive magic - the idea of ways to influence nature so that it would favor human life and his actions. One of the manifestations of magic is totemism - a complex of beliefs and rituals associated with ideas about the kinship between genera and certain species of animals and plants. Primitive people painted animals on the walls of caves, made them their intercessors, and in order to appease them, they danced and sang to the sounds of the first musical instruments. This is how painting and sculpture, pantomime and music were born.

Folklore is an oral form of artistic expression.

Gradually, rituals became more diverse, people began to perform ritual actions not only in front of their totems, but also when going hunting, before the arrival of spring. Not only ritual songs appeared, but also ordinary lyrical songs, as well as other genres - fairy tales, legends. This is how folklore began to develop - oral folk art.

The main features that distinguish folklore from fiction: existence in oral form, anonymity, variation, brevity.

9. Fiction as a form of art. Subject and object of literary creativity.

However, already Lesin, in the article “Laocoon or on the boundaries of painting,” issued the first scientific classification: the division into spatial and temporal arts.

From Lesin's point of view, literature is a temporary art.

Expressive and fine arts are also distinguished (sign principle). Expressive expresses emotions, conveys mood, figurative - embodies an idea.

-Expressive art is music, architecture, abstract painting, lyrics.

-Fine - painting, sculpture, drama and epic.

According to this classification, literature is an expressive art.

Literature is the art of words, which differs from other arts in its material.

The word somewhat limits our perception, but painting, sculpture, music are universal. On the one hand, this is a shortcoming of literature, but on the other hand, it is its advantage, because a word can convey plastic, sound, and dynamic. image. Using the word you can describe both a portrait and a landscape (descriptive function).

A word can convey the sound of music; it can only convey the general impression of the music.

A word in literature can also convey dynamics, recreate some kind of dynamic series. Then the word appears in a narrative function.

The word is the most important element in constructing an artistic image in literature, a complete semantic unit.

It is connected with the satisfaction of a person’s aesthetic needs, with his desire to create beauty and enjoy it. These tasks are served by art, presented in various forms.

Fiction is divided into: 1. Content: historical, detective, humorous, journalistic, satirical. 2. By age categories: for preschoolers, primary schoolchildren, students, adults. 3. By implementation in specific forms: poetry, prose, drama, criticism, journalism.

The object of fiction is the whole world.

The subject of fiction is man.

Literature and society. Citizenship, nationality of literature.

As an integral part of national culture, literature is the bearer of features that characterize a nation, an expression of general national properties.

Literature is the art of words, therefore the features of the national language in which it is written are a direct expression of its national identity.

In the early stages of the development of society, certain natural conditions give rise to common tasks in the struggle between man and nature, a commonality of labor processes and skills, customs, way of life, and worldview. Impressions from the surrounding nature influence the properties of the narrative, the features of metaphors, comparisons and other artistic means.

As a nation is formed from a people, national identity manifests itself in the characteristics of social life. The development of class society, the transition from the slave system to the feudal system and from the feudal to the bourgeois system, occurs among different peoples at different times, under different conditions. The external and internal political activities of the state develop differently, which influences the emergence of certain moral norms and the formation of ideological ideas and traditions. All this leads to the emergence of a national characteristic of the life of society. From childhood, people are brought up under the influence of a complex system of relationships and ideas of national society, and this leaves an imprint on their behavior. This is how the characters of people of different nations - national characters - are historically formed.

Literature has an important place in revealing the characteristics of national character. Fiction shows the diversity of national types, their specific class nature, and their historical development.

The characters of people in their national characteristics not only act as an object of artistic knowledge, but are also depicted from the point of view of the writer, who also carries within himself the spirit of his people, his nation.

The first profound exponent of the national Russian character in literature is Pushkin. In it, Russian nature, Russian soul, Russian language, Russian character were reflected in the same purity, in such purified beauty, in which the landscape is reflected on the convex surface of optical glass.

Truly folk literature expresses national interests most fully, and therefore it also has a pronounced national identity. It is through the works of such artists as Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, L. Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, Sholokhov, Tvardovsky that our idea of both the people of art and its national identity is determined.

Rhyme and its functions.

Rhyme is the repetition of more or less similar combinations of sounds that connect the endings of two or more lines or symmetrically located parts of poetic lines. In Russian classical versification, the main feature of rhyme is the coincidence of stressed vowels. Rhyme marks the end of a verse (clause) with a sound repetition, emphasizing the pause between lines, and thereby the rhythm of the verse.

Depending on the location of stress in rhyming words, rhyme can be: masculine, feminine, dactylic, hyperdactylic, exact and inaccurate.

Masculine - rhyme with stress on the last syllable in the line.
Feminine - with emphasis on the penultimate syllable in the line.
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 - with stress on the fourth and subsequent syllables from the end of the line. This rhyme is very rare in practice. It appeared in works of oral folklore, where size as such is not always visible. The fourth syllable from the end of the verse is not a joke!

Main functions: verse-forming, phonic, semantic.

Classification of rhymes.

Several important bases for the classification of rhymes can be identified. Firstly, the characteristics of clauses are transferred to the rhymes: in terms of syllabic volume, rhymes can be masculine (last syllable), feminine (penultimate syllable), dactylic (third from the end), hyperdactylic (fourth from the end). In this case, rhymes ending with a vowel sound are called open (for example: spring - red), with a consonant - closed (hell - garden), with the sound "th" - iotized, or softened (spring - forest).

Secondly, rhymes vary in degree of accuracy. In poetry designed for auditory perception (and this is precisely the poetry of the 19th–20th centuries), exact rhyme presupposes a coincidence of sounds (not letters!), starting from the last stressed vowel to the end of the verse: unbearable - haymaking; cold - hammer (the consonant “d” at the end of the word is deafened); fear - horses (the letter “I” indicates the softness of the consonant “d”); glad – necessary (overstressed “a” and “o” are reduced and sound the same), etc. In poetry of the 19th century. Precise rhymes predominate. Imprecise rhymes greatly replaced accurate ones among many poets of the twentieth century, especially those writing in accented verse.

The third criterion is the richness/poverty of consonances. A rhyme is considered rich if the supporting consonant is repeated in the clauses, i.e. consonant preceding the last stressed vowel: chuzhbina - rowan; grapes - glad. The exception is the male open rhyme (mountain - hole), since “in order for the rhyme to feel sufficient, at least two sounds need to coincide.” Therefore, the rhyme: mountain - hole should be considered sufficient. In other cases, the coincidence in the lines of the supporting consonant, and especially the sounds preceding it, “increases the sonority of the rhyme, enriches it<...>feels like an “unexpected gift.”

By place in the verse:

· End

· Initial

· Internal

By arrangement of rhyme chains (types of rhyme):

· Adjacent - rhyming of adjacent verses: the first with the second, the third with the fourth (aabb) (the same letters indicate the endings of verses that rhyme with each other).

· Cross - rhyme of the first verse with the third, the second with the fourth (abab)

· Ring (girdled, enveloping) - the first verse - with the fourth, and the second - with the third. (abba)

· Finally, woven rhyme has many patterns. This is the general name for complex types of rhyming, for example: abvbv, abvvbba, etc.

Solid forms of verse.

SOLID forms are poetic forms that predetermine the volume, meter, rhyme, stanza of an entire small poem (and partly the figurative structure, composition, etc.). In European poetry from the 13th to the 15th centuries. Mostly solid forms of French and Italian origin are used (sonnet, triolet, rondo, rondel, sextina), from the 19th century. also eastern (ghazal, rubai, tank).

Terzetto - in versification, a stanza of 3 verses (lines). It can have 2 types: all 3 verses rhyme or 2 verses rhyme, the 3rd without rhyme. Did not receive distribution. In the narrow sense of the word, the three-line parts of a sonnet are called terzetto.

Quatrain is a quatrain, a separate stanza of four lines. The rhyme system in the quatrain is abab (cross rhyme), aabb (paired), abba (encircling). Quatrain is used for inscriptions, epitaphs, epigrams, sayings. Four-line stanzas of a sonnet are also called a quatrain.

A sonnet is a solid poetic form: a poem of 14 lines, divided into 2 quatrains (quatrains) and 2 tercets (terzettoes); in quatrains only 2 rhymes are repeated, in terzettos - 2 or 3.

Some “rules” for the content of a sonnet were recommended, but did not become universal: stanzas should end with periods, words should not be repeated, the last word should be “key”, 4 stanzas are related as thesis - development - antithesis - synthesis or as a plot - development - climax - denouement. The most vivid, figurative thought should be contained in the last two lines, the so-called sonnet lock.

Rondel is a solid poetic form (translated from French as a circle). Rondel appeared in the XIV-XV centuries in France. The rondel diagram can be represented as: ABba+abAB+abbaA, in which identical lines are indicated by capital letters. Less common is the double rondel of 16 verses with the rhyme ABBA+abAB+abba+ABBA.

Rondo is a solid poetic form; developed from the rondel in the 14th century by shortening the chorus to a hemistich. It flourished in the 16th-17th centuries. His scheme: aavva+avvR+aavvaR, in which the capital letter P is a non-rhyming refrain repeating the initial words of the first line.

Triolet is a solid poetic form; a poem consisting of 8 lines with two rhymes. The first, fourth and seventh lines are identical (this name comes from the triple repetition of the first verse). The second and eighth are the same. Triolet diagram: ABaAavAB, in which repeating lines are indicated in capital letters. After the second and fourth verses, there was usually a canonical pause (pointe). The verse is almost always in tetrameter - trochee or iambic.

The sextine is a solid poetic form that developed from the canzone and gained popularity thanks to Dante and Petrarch. The classical sextina consists of 6 stanzas of six verses each, usually unrhymed (in the Russian tradition, sextina is usually written in rhymed verse). The words that end the lines in the first stanza end the lines in all subsequent stanzas, with each new stanza repeating the final words of the previous stanza in the sequence: 6 - 1 - 5 - 2 - 4 - 3.

Octave - in versification, a stanza of 8 verses with a rhyme abababcc. It developed in Italian poetry of the 14th century and became a traditional stanza of the poetic epic of the Italian and Spanish Renaissance.

Terts - (Italian terzina, from terza rima - third rhyme), the form of chain stanzas: a series of tercets connected by a rhyme scheme aba, bcb, cdc, ded... yzy z. Thus, terzas provide a continuous rhyme chain of arbitrary length, convenient for works of large forms.

Haiku (hoku) is a three-line (three-line) lyric poem, as a rule, which is the national Japanese form. Haiku usually depicts nature and man in their eternal inseparability. Each Hokku has a certain measure of verses - the first and third verses have five syllables, the second verse has seven, and a total of 17 syllables in a Hokku.

Rubai - (Arabic, lit. quadruple), in the poetry of the peoples of the East, an aphoristic quatrain with the rhyme aaba, aaaa.

Genera, types, genres.

Genus of literature are large associations of verbal and artistic works based on the type of relationship of the speaker (the “speaker”) to the artistic whole. There are three types: drama, epic, lyric.

DRAMA is one of the four types of literature. In the narrow sense of the word - a genre of work depicting a conflict between characters, in a broad sense - all works without author's speech. Types (genres) of dramatic works: tragedy, drama, comedy, vaudeville.

LYRICS is one of the four types of literature that reflects life through a person’s personal experiences, feelings and thoughts. Types of lyrics: song, elegy, ode, thought, epistle, madrigal, stanzas, eclogue, epigram, epitaph.

LYROEPIC is one of the four types of literature, in the works of which the reader observes and evaluates the artistic world from the outside as a plot narrative, but at the same time the events and characters receive a certain emotional assessment from the narrator.

EPOS is one of the four types of literature, reflecting life through a story about a person and the events that happen to him. The main types (genres) of epic literature: epic, novel, story, short story, short story, artistic essay.

TYPES (GENRES) OF EPIC WORKS:

(epic, novel, story, story, fairy tale, fable, legend.)

EPIC is a major work of fiction telling about significant historical events. In ancient times - a narrative poem of heroic content.

A NOVEL is a large narrative work of art with a complex plot, in the center of which is the fate of an individual.

A STORY is a work of art that occupies a middle position between a novel and a short story in terms of volume and complexity of the plot. In ancient times, any narrative work was called a story.

A STORY is a small work of fiction based on an episode, an incident from the life of the hero.

TALE - a work about fictional events and characters, usually involving magical, fantastic forces.

A FABLE (from “bayat” - to tell) is a narrative work in poetic form, small in size, of a moralizing or satirical nature.

TYPES (GENRES) OF LYRIC WORKS:

(ode, hymn, song, elegy, sonnet, epigram, message)

ODA (from Greek “song”) is a choral, solemn song.

HYMN (from Greek “praise”) is a solemn song based on programmatic verses.

EPIGRAM (from Greek “inscription”) is a short satirical poem of a mocking nature that arose in the 3rd century BC. e.

ELEGY is a genre of lyrics dedicated to sad thoughts or a lyric poem imbued with sadness.

MESSAGE - a poetic letter, an appeal to a specific person, a request, a wish, a confession.

SONNET (from the Provencal sonette - “song”) is a poem of 14 lines, which has a certain rhyme system and strict stylistic laws.

Epic as a literary genre.

Epic - (gr. story, narration) - one of the three types of literature, a narrative kind. Genre varieties of epic: fairy tale, short story, tale, short story, essay, novel, etc. Epic as a type of literature reproduces objective reality external to the author in its objective essence. The epic uses a variety of methods of presentation - narration, description, dialogue, monologue, author's digressions. Epic genres are enriched and improved. Techniques of composition, means of depicting a person, the circumstances of his life, everyday life are being developed, and a multifaceted image of the picture of the world and society is being achieved.

A literary text is like a certain fusion of narrative speech and statements of characters.

Everything told is given only through narration. Epic as a literary genre very freely masters reality in time and space. He knows no limitations in the volume of text. Epic novels also belong to the epic.

Epic works include Onorempe de Balzac’s novel “Père Goriot,” Stendhal’s novel “The Red and the Black,” and Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel “War and Peace.”

Epic - the original form is a heroic poem. Occurs when patriarchal society breaks down. In Russian literature there are epics that form cycles.

The epic reproduces life not as personal, but as an objective reality - from the outside. The purpose of any epic is to tell about an event. The dominant content is the event. Earlier - wars, later - a private event, facts of inner life. The cognitive orientation of the epic is an objective beginning. A story about events without evaluation. “The Tale of Bygone Years” - all the bloody events are told dispassionately and matter-of-factly. Epic distance.

The subject of the image in the epic is the world as an objective reality. Human life in its organic connection with the world, fate is also the subject of the image. Bunin's story. Sholokhov "The Fate of Man". Understanding fate through the prism of culture is important.

Forms of verbal expression in the epic (type of speech organization) - narrative. Functions of the word - the word depicts the objective world. Narration is a way/type of speaking. Description in the epic. Speech of heroes, characters. Narration is the speech of the author’s image. The speech of the characters is polylogues, monologues, dialogues. In romantic works, the confession of the main character is required. Internal monologues are a direct inclusion of the characters’ words. Indirect forms - indirect speech, improper direct speech. It is not isolated from the author’s speech.

The important role of the system of reflections in the novel. The hero may be endowed with a quality that the author does not like. Example: Silvio. Pushkin's favorite heroes are verbose. Very often it is unclear to us how the author relates to the hero.

A) Narrator

1) The character has his own destiny. "The Captain's Daughter", "Belkin's Tales".

2) Conventional narrator, faceless in speech terms. Very often – us. Speech mask.

3) Tale. Speech color - says society.

1) Objective. “History of the Russian State” Karamzin, “War and Peace”.

2) Subjective - orientation towards the reader, appeal.

A tale is a special speech manner that reproduces a person’s speech, as if not literary processed. Leskov "Lefty".

Descriptions and lists. Important for the epic. Epic is perhaps the most popular genus.

Novel and epic.

The novel is a large form of the epic genre of literature. The most common features: the depiction of a person in complex forms of the life process, a multi-linear plot covering the fate of a number of characters, polyphony, a predominantly prose genre. Initially, in medieval Europe, the term meant narrative literature in Romance languages (Latin); in retrospect, some works of ancient literature were also called this way.

In the history of the European novel, one can distinguish a number of historically established types that successively replaced each other.

NOVEL (French roman), a literary genre, an epic work of large form, in which the narrative is focused on the fate of an individual in his relation to the world around him, on the formation and development of his character and self-awareness. The novel is an epic of modern times; unlike the folk epic, where the individual and the folk soul are inseparable, in the novel the life of the individual and social life appear as relatively independent; but the “private” inner life of the individual is revealed in him “epicly”, that is, with the revelation of its generally significant and social meaning. A typical novel situation is a clash in the hero of the moral and human (personal) with natural and social necessity. Since the novel develops in modern times, where the nature of the relationship between man and society is constantly changing, its form is essentially “open”: the main situation is each time filled with specific historical content and is embodied in various genre modifications. Historically, the picaresque novel is considered the first form. In the 18th century two main varieties are developing: the social novel (G. Fielding, T. Smollett) and the psychological novel (S. Richardson, J. J. Rousseau, L. Stern, I. V. Goethe). Romantics create a historical novel (W. Scott). In the 1830s. The classical era of the socio-psychological novel of critical realism of the 19th century begins. (Stendhal, O. Balzac, C. Dickens, W. Thackeray, G. Flaubert, L. N. Tolstoy, F. M. Dostoevsky).

Epic is one of the oldest epic genres. An epic appeared in Greece. From Greek, epic is translated as creating, or created. The Greek epics, like most Greek literature, were based on ancient Greek mythology. The most outstanding epics from Greek literature can be called Homer's Odyssey and Hellas. The events of both of these works are so closely intertwined with myths (and many of the events occurring in them are simply continuations) that the plot is complex and confusing. In general, thanks to the themes of the Greek epics, in literary criticism it is generally accepted that the theme of the epic should be:

The basis is the celebration of a certain event

Military and conquest campaigns

The interests of the people, the nation (meaning that the epic cannot but capture problems and issues that are not of interest to the bulk of the population).

Partly, this is so due to the fact that, despite the presence of slavery in Greece, this social system was overcome by the Greeks and, through common efforts, they came to feudal democracy. The main meaning of the Greek epics was that the opinion of the people (the majority) always wins over the opinion of the minority. Thus, judge for yourself that what was not present in Greek prose was individualism. Maybe you remember the lively dialogue between Tristan and Odysseus himself? Tristan seems to be right, but he is in the minority, and therefore Odysseus wins.

Traditionally, epics were written in verse, however, modern stylizations of epics can be found more and more often in prose. In the era of classicism, the epic is regaining popularity, take, for example, Virgil and his Aeneid. For the Slavs, this work is especially noteworthy, since it was on their lands that many parodies of this classic epic circulated.

Lyric epic works.

Lyric-epic genre of literature is a work of art in poetic form that combines epic and lyrical images of life.

In works of the lyric-epic kind, life is reflected, on the one hand, in a poetic narration about the actions and experiences of a person or people, about the events in which they take part; on the other hand, in the experiences of the poet-narrator caused by pictures of life, the behavior of the characters in his poetic story. These experiences of the poet-narrator are usually expressed in works of the lyric-epic kind in so-called lyrical digressions, sometimes not directly related to the course of events in the work; lyrical digressions are one of the types of author’s speech.

Such, for example, are the well-known lyrical digressions in A. S. Pushkin’s poetic novel “Eugene Onegin”, in his poems; These are the chapters “From the author”, “About myself” and lyrical digressions in other chapters of the poem in A. T. Tvardovsky’s poem “Vasily Terkin”.

LYROEPIC TYPES (GENRES): poem, ballad.

POEM (from Greek poieio - “I do, I create”) is a large poetic work with a narrative or lyrical plot, usually on a historical or legendary theme.

BALLAD - a plot song with dramatic content, a story in verse.

TYPES (GENRES) OF DRAMATIC WORKS:

tragedy, comedy, drama (in the narrow sense).

TRAGEDY (from Greek tragos ode - “goat song”) is a dramatic work depicting an intense struggle of strong characters and passions, which usually ends with the death of the hero.

COMEDY (from Greek komos ode - “funny song”) is a dramatic work with a cheerful, funny plot, usually ridiculing social or everyday vices.

DRAMA (“action”) is a literary work in the form of dialogue with a serious plot, depicting an individual in his dramatic relationship with society. Varieties of drama can be tragicomedy or melodrama.

VAUDEVILLE is a genre type of comedy; it is a light comedy with singing verses and dancing.

Literary criticism.

Literary criticism - (Judgment, the art of understanding, judging) - one of the components of literary criticism. Closely connected with the history and theory of literature, which are primarily concerned with determining the nature of verbal creativity, establishing the basic laws of the aesthetic development of reality, and analyzing the classical literary heritage. Literary criticism mainly evaluates contemporary literary development and interprets works of art from the point of view of modernity.

In determining the ideological and aesthetic quality of current book and magazine literary and artistic production, literary criticism proceeds, first of all, from the tasks facing society at this stage of its development.

A work of art that does not expand the reader’s spiritual horizons, does not give a person aesthetic pleasure, that is, is emotionally poor and therefore does not affect the aesthetic sense - such a work cannot be recognized as truly artistic.

The history of literary criticism has its roots in the distant past: critical judgments about literature were born simultaneously with the appearance of works of art. The first readers, from among those who thought, were wise with life experience and endowed with an aesthetic sense, were, in essence, the first literary critics. Already in the era of antiquity, literary criticism was formed as a relatively independent branch of creativity.

Criticism shows the writer the merits and shortcomings of his work, helping to expand his ideological horizons and improve his skill; By addressing the reader, the critic not only explains the work to him, but also involves him in a living process of joint comprehension of what he has read at a new level of understanding. An important advantage of criticism is the ability to consider a work as an artistic whole and recognize it in the general process of literary development.

In modern literary criticism, various genres are cultivated - article, review, review, essay, literary portrait, polemical remark, bibliographic note. But in any case, a critic, in a certain sense, must combine a politician, a sociologist, a psychologist with a literary historian and an aesthetician. At the same time, the critic needs a talent akin to the talent of both the artist and the scientist, although not at all identical with them.

The structure of literary criticism. The main branches of the science of literature.

Literary theory studies the general laws of the literary process, literature as a form

Literary criticism is the science of fiction, its origin, essence and development. Modern literary criticism is a complex and moving system of disciplines. There are three main branches of literary criticism. Literary theory studies the general laws of the structure and development of literature. The subject of literary history is primarily the past of literature as a process or as one of the moments of this process. Literary criticism is interested in the relatively simultaneous, “today’s” state of literature; it is also characterized by the interpretation of the literature of the past from the point of view of modern social and artistic tasks. The affiliation of literary criticism with literary criticism as a science is not generally recognized.

Poetics as part of literary criticism

The most important part of literary criticism is poetics- the science of the structure of works and their complexes, the creativity of writers in general, literary movements, as well as artistic eras. Poetics correlates with the main branches of literary criticism: in the plane of literary theory, it gives general poetics, i.e. the science of the structure of any work; in the plane of literary history, there is historical poetics, which studies the development of artistic structures and their individual elements (genres, plots, stylistic images); the application of the principles of poetics in literary criticism is manifested in the analysis of a specific work, in identifying the features of its construction. In many ways, the stylistics of artistic speech occupies a similar position in literary studies: it can be included in the theory of literature, in general poetics (as a study of the stylistic and speech level of structure), in the history of literature (the language and style of a given direction), as well as in literary criticism (stylistic analyzes modern works). Literary criticism as a system of disciplines is characterized not only by the close interdependence of all its branches (for example, literary criticism is based on data from the theory and history of literature, and the latter take into account and comprehend the experience of criticism), but also the emergence of second-line disciplines. There is the theory of literary criticism, its history, the history of poetics (to be distinguished from historical poetics), and the theory of stylistics. The movement of disciplines from one row to another is also characteristic; Thus, literary criticism over time becomes the material of literary history, historical poetics, etc.

There are also many auxiliary literary disciplines: literary archiving, bibliography of fiction and literary literature, heuristics (attribution), paleography, textual criticism, text commentary, theory and practice of editing, etc. In the mid-20th century, the role of mathematical methods (especially statistics) in literary criticism increased , mainly in poetry, stylistics, textual criticism, where it is easier to distinguish commensurate elementary “segments” of structure (see). Auxiliary disciplines are a necessary base for the main ones; at the same time, in the process of development and complexity, they can reveal independent scientific tasks and cultural functions. The connections of literary criticism with other humanities are diverse, some of which serve as its methodological basis (philosophy, aesthetics, hermeneutics, or the science of interpretation), others are close to it in terms of tasks and subject of research (folklore, general art history), and others have a general humanitarian orientation ( history, psychology, sociology). Multifaceted connections between literary studies and linguistics, conditioned not only by the commonality of the material (language as a means of communication and as the “primary element” of literature), but also by some similarity in the epistemological functions of word and image and some similarity of their structures. The fusion of literary criticism with other humanities disciplines was previously recorded by the concept of philology as a synthetic science that studies spiritual culture in all its linguistic and written forms, incl. literary, manifestations; in the 20th century, this concept usually conveys the commonality of two sciences - literary criticism and linguistics, but in a narrow sense it means textual criticism and text criticism.

The beginnings of art history and literary knowledge originate in ancient times in the form of mythological ideas (this is how the ancient differentiation of art is reflected in the myths). Judgments about art are found in the most ancient monuments - in the Indian Vedas (10-2 centuries BC), in the Chinese “Book of Legends” (“Shijing”, 14-5 centuries BC), in the ancient Greek “Iliad” and "Odyssey" (8-7 centuries BC). In Europe, the first concepts of art and literature were developed by ancient thinkers. Plato, in line with objective idealism, examined aesthetic problems, incl. the problem of beauty, the epistemological nature and educational function of art, gave the main information on the theory of art and literature (primarily the division into genres - epic, lyricism, drama). In the writings of Aristotle, while maintaining a general aesthetic approach to art, the formation of literary disciplines proper takes place - literary theory, stylistics, especially poetics. His essay “On the Art of Poetry,” containing the first systematic presentation of the foundations of poetics, opened a centuries-old tradition of special treatises on poetics, which over time acquired an increasingly normative character (this is already the “Science of Poetry,” 1st century BC, Horace). At the same time, rhetoric developed, within the framework of which the theory of prose and stylistics was formed. The tradition of composing rhetoric, like poetics, survived into modern times (in particular, in Russia: “A Brief Guide to Eloquence”, 1748, M.V. Lomonosov). In antiquity - the origins of literary criticism (in Europe): the judgments of early philosophers about Homer, the comparison of the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides in the comedy of Aristophanes "Frogs". The differentiation of literary knowledge occurs in the Hellenistic era, during the period of the so-called Alexandrian philological school (3-2 centuries BC), when, together with other sciences, literary criticism separated from philosophy and formed its own disciplines. The latter include bio-bibliography (“Tables”, 3rd century BC, Callimachus - the first prototype of a literary encyclopedia), criticism of the text from the point of view of its authenticity, commentary and publication of texts. Deep concepts of art and literature are also emerging in the countries of the East. In China, in line with Confucianism, the doctrine of the social and educational function of art is formed (Xunzi, c. 298-238 BC), and in line with Taoism, the aesthetic theory of beauty in connection with the universal creative principle of “Tao” (Laozi, 6-5 century BC).

In India, problems of artistic structure are developed in connection with the teachings about a special psychology of the perception of art - rasa (the treatise "Natyashastra", attributed to Bharata, around the 4th century, and later treatises) and about the hidden meaning of a work of art - dhvani ("The Doctrine of Echo" by Anandavardhana , 9th century), and since ancient times the development of literary criticism has been closely connected with the science of language, with the study of poetic style. In general, the development of literary criticism in the countries of the East was distinguished by the predominance of general theoretical and general aesthetic methods (along with textual and bibliographic works; in particular, the biobibliographic genre of tazkire became widespread in Persian-language and Turkic-language literatures). Historical and evolutionary studies appeared only in the 19th and 20th centuries. The connecting links between ancient and modern literary studies were Byzantium and the Latin literature of Western European peoples; medieval literary criticism, stimulated by the collection and study of ancient monuments, had a predominantly bibliographic and commentary bias. Research in the field of poetics, rhetoric, and metrics also developed. During the Renaissance, in connection with the creation of original poetics that corresponded to local and national conditions, the problem of language, going beyond rhetoric and stylistics, grew to the general theoretical problem of establishing modern European languages as full-fledged material for poetry (Dante’s treatise “On Popular Speech”, “Defense and glorification of the French language", Du Bellay); the right of literary criticism to address modern artistic phenomena was also asserted (comments by G. Boccaccio to the “Divine Comedy”). However, since new literary criticism grew on the basis of the “discovery of antiquity,” the assertion of originality was contradictoryly combined with attempts to adapt elements of ancient poetics to new literature (transfer of the norms of Aristotle’s doctrine of drama to the epic in “Discourse on the Poetic Art”, T. Tasso). The perception of classical genres as “eternal” canons coexisted with the feeling of dynamism and incompleteness characteristic of the Renaissance. During the Renaissance, Aristotle's Poetics was rediscovered (the most important publication was carried out in 1570 by L. Castelvetro), which, together with J. Ts. Scaliger's Poetics (1561), had a strong influence on subsequent literary studies. At the end of the 16th century and especially in the era of classicism, the tendency to systematize the laws of art intensified; at the same time, the normative nature of artistic theory is clearly indicated. N. Boileau in “Poetic Art” (1674), having put aside general epistemological and aesthetic problems, devoted his efforts to the creation of harmonious poetics as a system of genre, stylistic, speech norms, the isolation and obligatory nature of which turned his treatise and related works (“Essay on criticism", 1711, A. Pope; "Epistole on poetry", 1748, A.P. Sumarokov, etc.) almost into literary codes. At the same time, in literary studies of the 17th and 18th centuries there is a strong tendency towards anti-normativity in understanding the types and genres of literature. In G.E. Lessing (“Hamburg Drama”) it acquired the character of a decisive attack against normative poetics in general, which prepared the aesthetic and literary theories of the romantics. On the basis of enlightenment, attempts also arise to justify the development of literature by local conditions, incl. environment and climate (“Critical reflections on poetry and painting”, 1719, J.B. Dubos). The 18th century was the time of the creation of the first historical and literary courses: “History of Italian Literature” (1772-82) by G. Tiraboschi, built on a historical consideration of the types of poetry “Lyceum, or Course of Ancient and Modern Literature” (1799-1805) by J. Laharpe. The struggle between historicism and normativity is marked by the works of the “father of English criticism” J. Dryden (“An Essay on Dramatic Poetry,” 1668) and S. Johnson (“Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets,” 1779-81).

At the end of the 18th century, a major shift was observed in European literary consciousness, which shook the stable hierarchy of artistic values. The inclusion of folklore monuments in the scientific horizon of medieval European, as well as eastern literatures, called into question the category of a model, whether in ancient art or in the Renaissance. A sense of the uniqueness of artistic criteria of different eras develops, most fully expressed by I. G. Herder (Shakespeare, 1773). The category of the special comes into its own in literary criticism - in relation to the literature of a given people or period, carrying within itself its own scale of perfection. Among the romantics, the feeling of different criteria resulted in the concept of different cultural eras expressing the spirit of the people and the time. Speaking about the impossibility of restoring the classical (ancient) form, contrasting it with the new form (which arose along with Christianity), they emphasized the eternal variability and renewal of art (F. and A. Schlegel). However, justifying modern art as romantic, permeated with Christian symbolism of the spiritual and infinite, the romantics imperceptibly, contrary to the dialectical spirit of their teaching, restored the category of model (in the historical aspect - the art of the Middle Ages). On the other hand, in the actual philosophical idealistic systems, the crown of which was the philosophy of Hegel, the idea of the development of art was embodied in the concept of the progressive movement of artistic forms, replacing each other with dialectical necessity (for Hegel, these are symbolic, classical and romantic forms); the nature of the aesthetic and its difference from the moral and cognitive was philosophically substantiated (I. Kant); the inexhaustible - “symbolic” - nature of the artistic image was philosophically comprehended (F. Schelling). The philosophical period of literary criticism is a time of comprehensive systems, conceived as universal knowledge about art (and, of course, more broadly - about all being), “subduing” the history of literature, poetics, stylistics, etc.

The current of “philosophical criticism” in Russian literary criticism

In Russia in the 1820-30s, under the influence of German philosophical systems and at the same time, pushing away from them, a movement of “philosophical criticism” developed (D.V. Venevitinov, N.I. Nadezhdin, etc.). In the 1840s, V.G. Belinsky sought to link the ideas of philosophical aesthetics with the concepts of civil service of art and historicism (“sociality”). The series of his articles about A.S. Pushkin (1843-46) was essentially the first course in the history of new Russian literature. Belinsky's explanation of the phenomena of the past was associated with the development of theoretical problems of realism and nationality (understood - as opposed to the theory of “official nationality” - in the national democratic sense). By the mid-19th century, the field of literary studies in European countries was expanding: disciplines were developing that comprehensively studied the culture of a given ethnic group (for example, Slavic studies); the growth of historical and literary interests is everywhere accompanied by a switch of attention from great artists to the entire mass of artistic facts and from the world literary process to their national literature (“History of the poetic national literature of the Germans,” 1832 - 42, G.G. Gervinus). In Russian literary criticism, in parallel with this, ancient Russian literature was asserted in its rights; increasing interest in it marked the courses of M.A. Maksimovich (1839), A.V. Nikitenko (1845) and especially “The History of Russian Literature, Mainly Ancient” (1846) by S.P. Shevyrev.

Methodological schools of literary criticism

Pan-European methodological schools are emerging. The interest in mythology and folk symbolism awakened by romanticism was expressed in the works of the mythological school (J. Grimm and others). In Russia, F.I. Buslaev, not limiting himself to the study of the mythological basis, traced its historical fate, incl. interaction of folk poetry with written monuments. Subsequently, “younger mythologists” (including in Russia A.N. Afanasyev) raised the question of the origins of myth. Under the influence of the other side of the romantic theory - about art as the self-expression of the creative spirit - the biographical method took shape (S.O. Sainte-Beuve. Literary-critical portraits). Biographism, to one degree or another, runs through all modern literary studies, preparing psychological theories of creativity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Influential in the second half of the 19th century was cultural-historical school. Focusing on the successes of the natural sciences, she sought to bring the understanding of causality and determinism in literary criticism to precise, tangible factors; this, according to the teachings of I. Taine (“History of English Literature”, 1863-64), is the trinity of race, environment and moment. The traditions of this school were developed by F. De Sanguis, V. Scherer, M. Menendesi-Pelayo, in Russia - N.S. Tikhonravov, A.N. Pypin, N.I. Storozhenko. As the cultural-historical method developed, its underestimation of the artistic nature of literature, considered primarily as a social document, strong positivist tendencies, and neglect of dialectics and aesthetic criteria were revealed. On the other hand, radical criticism in Russia, touching on the problems of the history of literature, emphasized the connection of the artistic process with the interaction and confrontation of various social groups, with the dynamics of class relations (“Essays on the Gogol period of Russian literature”, 1855-56, N.G. Chernyshevsky; “ On the degree of participation of nationalities in the development of Russian literature", 1858, N.A. Dobrolyubova). At the same time, the formulation of a number of theoretical problems (the function of art, nationality) by some revolutionary democrats was not free from normativity and simplification. Back in the 1840s, comparative historical literary criticism emerged within the framework of the study of folklore and ancient literature. Later, T. Benfey outlined the theory of the migration school, which explained the similarity of plots by communication between peoples (“Panchatantra”, 1859).

Benfey's theory stimulated both a historical approach to interethnic relations and interest in the poetic elements themselves - plots, characters, etc., but refused to study their genesis and often led to random, superficial comparisons. In parallel, theories arose that sought to explain the similarity of poetic forms by the unity of the human psyche ( folk psychological school H. Steinthal and M. Lazarus) and the animism common to primitive peoples (E.B. Taylor), which served as the basis for anthropological theory for ALang. Accepting the doctrine of myth as the primary form of creativity, Alexander N. Veselovsky directed the research towards specific comparisons; Moreover, in contrast to the migration school, he raised the question of the prerequisites for borrowing - “countercurrents” in the literature under influence. In “Historical Poetics”, clarifying the essence of poetry - from its history, he establishes the specific subject of historical poetics - the development of poetic forms and those laws according to which certain social content fit into some inevitable poetic forms - genre, epithet, plot (Veselovsky, 54). From the side of the structure of a work of art as a whole, he approached the problems of poetics by A.A. Potebnya (“From Notes on the Theory of Literature,” 1905), who revealed the polysemy of the work, which seems to contain many contents, the eternal renewal of the image in the process of its historical life and the constructive the reader's role in this change. The idea of the “internal form” of a word put forward by Potebnya contributed to the dialectical study of the artistic image and was promising for the subsequent study of poetic structure. In the last third of the 19th century, the cultural-historical method deepened with the help of a psychological approach (with G. Brandes). Arises psychological school(V. Wundt, D.N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, etc.). The intensification of comparative historical study led to the creation of a special discipline - comparative literature, or comparative studies (F. Baldansperger, P. Van Tieghem, P. Azar. In domestic literary criticism, this direction is represented by V.M. Zhirmunsky, M.P. Alekseev, N. I. Conrad and others). The process of development of literary criticism is becoming global, breaking down centuries-old barriers between the West and the East. In the countries of the East, histories of national literatures appeared for the first time, and systematic literary criticism began to emerge. At the end of the 19th century - and especially actively - from the beginning of the 20th century, Marxist literary criticism was formed, which paid main attention to the social status of art and its role in the ideological and class struggle. Although such representatives of this trend as G.V. Plekhanov, A.V. Lunacharsky and especially G. Lukach recognized the relative independence and sovereignty of artistic factors, in practice Marxist literary criticism led to their impoverished interpretations, especially among the ideologists of the so-called vulgar sociologism , which harshly called the writer to one or another class or social stratum.

Anti-positivist tendency

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in Western literary criticism an anti-positivist tendency emerged , which took basically three directions. Firstly, the right of intellectual-rational knowledge was disputed in favor of intuitive knowledge in relation to both the creative act and judgments about art (“Laughter”, 1900, A. Bergson); hence the attempts not only to refute the system of traditional literary categories (types and genera of poetry, genres), but also to prove their fundamental inadequacy to art: they determine not only the external structure of the work, but also its artistry (“Aesthetics...”, 1902, B. Croce ). Secondly, there was a desire to overcome the flat determinism of the cultural-historical school and build a classification of literature based on deep psychological and spiritual differentiations (this is the antithesis of two types of poetry - “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” in “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music”, 1872, F .Nietzsche). V. Dilthey also sought to explain art by deep processes, insisting on the difference between “ideas” and “experiences” and identifying three main forms in “spiritual history”: positivism, objective idealism and dualistic idealism, or “ideologism of freedom.” This theory (see) was not free from the mechanical attachment of artists to each of the forms; in addition, she underestimated the moments of artistic structure, because art dissolved in the flow of the general worldview inherent in the era. Thirdly, the sphere of the unconscious was fruitfully involved in the explanation of art (S. Freud). However, the pansexualism characteristic of Freud’s followers impoverished the research results (such as the explanation of the artist’s entire work by the “Oedipus complex”). Applying psychoanalytic principles to art in a new way, he formulated the theory of the collective unconscious (archetypes) C. G. Jung (“On the relation of analytical psychology to a literary work”, 1922), under whose influence (as well as J. Fraser and the “Cambridge school” his followers) ritual-mythological criticism developed. Its representatives sought to find certain ritual patterns and collective unconscious archetypes in the works of all eras. Promoting the study of the foundations of genres and poetic devices (metaphors, symbols, etc.), this movement, in general rightfully subordinating literature to myth and ritual, dissolved literary criticism in ethnology and psychoanalysis. A special place in Western literary criticism has been occupied by searches based on the philosophy of existentialism. In contrast to historicism in the understanding of literary development, the concept of existential time was put forward, to which great works of art correspond (Heidegger M. Origin of the work of art. 1935; Steiger E. Time as a poet’s imagination, 1939). By interpreting poetic works as self-sufficient, self-contained truth and “prophecy,” the existentialist “interpretation” avoids the traditional genetic approach. Interpretation is determined by the linguistic and historical horizon of the interpreter himself.

“Formal school” in Russian literary criticism

Based on intuitionism and biographical impressionism, on the one hand, and on methods that ignored the specifics of art (cultural-historical school), on the other, arose in the 1910s “formal school” in Russian literary criticism(Yu.N. Tynyanov, V.B. Shklovsky, B.M. Eikhenbaum, to a certain extent close to them V.V. Vinogradov and B.V. Tomashevsky;). She sought to overcome the dualism of form and content by putting forward a new relationship: material (something belonging to the artistic act) and form (the organization of material in a work). This achieved an expansion of the space of form (previously reduced to style or some randomly selected moments), but at the same time, in the sphere of analysis and interpretation, functional ones, incl. philosophical and social, concepts of art. Through the Prague Linguistic Circle, the “formal school” had a significant influence on world literary studies, in particular on the “new criticism” and structuralism (which also inherited the ideas of T. S. Eliot). At the same time, along with further formalization and displacement of aesthetic aspects, there has also emerged a tendency to overcome the noted antinomy, which is insoluble within the framework of the “formal method”. A work of art began to be viewed as a complex system of levels, including both substantive and formal aspects (R. Ingarden). On the other hand, the direction of the so-called objective psychology of art (L.S. Vygotsky) arises, which interprets artistic phenomena as a “system of stimuli” that determine certain psychological experiences. As a reaction to “formal methods” and subjectivist tendencies, a sociological approach to literature developed in the 1960s, but sometimes with a straightforward attribution of literary phenomena to socio-economic factors. The middle of the 20th century is a time of rapprochement and confrontation between various methodological directions; Thus, sociologism, on the one hand, gravitates toward structuralism, and on the other, toward existentialism. In line with post-structuralism, a doctrine is being developed about a text with multiple meanings that hides an infinite number of cultural codes; Moreover, the sphere of intertextuality created in this way also includes factors that arose not only before the creation of the text in question, but also after it (R. Barthes, based on J. Derrida and J. Kristeva). At a new level, the study of ideology in its closest connections with mythopoetic and metaphorical thinking is also being restored (Clifford Geertz). Experiences in the synthesis of formal and philosophical paradigms of art were proposed by new domestic literary studies (M.M. Bakhtin, D.S. Likhachev, Yu.M. Lsggman, V.V. Ivanov, V.N. Toporov, etc.).

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