The concept of poetics. Theoretical foundations of the poetics of self-portrait
The task of poetics (in other words, the theory of literature or literature) is the study of methods for constructing literary works. The object of study in poetics is fiction. The method of study is the description and classification of phenomena and their interpretation.
Literature, or literature, - as this last name shows - is part of the verbal, or linguistic, activity of man. It follows from this that in a number of scientific disciplines, the theory of literature closely adjoins the science that studies language, i.e. to linguistics. Available whole line borderline scientific problems, which can be equally attributed to both the problems of linguistics and the problems of literary theory. However, there are special questions that belong specifically to poetics. We use the language, the word constantly in the hostel for the purpose of human communication. The practical scope of the language is ordinary "conversations". In conversation, language is the medium of communication, and our attention and interests are turned exclusively to what is being communicated, "thought"; we usually pay attention to verbal formulation only insofar as we strive to accurately convey to the interlocutor our thoughts and our feelings, and for this we look for expressions that are most appropriate to our thoughts and emotions. Expressions are created in the process of pronunciation and are forgotten, disappear after they reach the goal - suggestion to the listener of what is required. In this respect, practical speech is unique, because it lives in the conditions of its creation; its character and form are determined by the circumstances of the given conversation, the relationship of the speakers, the degree of their mutual understanding, the interests that arise in the course of the conversation, and so on. Inasmuch as the conditions that give rise to conversation are unique on the whole, so is the conversation itself unique. But in verbal creativity there are also such verbal constructions, the meaning of which does not depend on the circumstances of their pronunciation; formulas that, once they have arisen, do not die off, are repeated and preserved so that they can be reproduced again and do not lose their original meaning when reproduced again. Such fixed, the preserved verbal constructions we call literary works. In its elementary form, every successful expression, remembered and repeated, is a literary work. These are sayings, proverbs, sayings, etc. But usually, literary works mean constructions of a slightly larger volume.
To fix the system of expressions of the work - in other words, its text- can be different. You can fix the speech in writing or printed - then we get written literature; it is possible to memorize the text by heart and transmit it orally - then we get oral literature, which develops mainly in an environment that does not know writing. The so-called folklore - folk oral literature - is preserved and arises mainly in layers that are alien to literacy.
Thus, a literary work has two properties: 1) independence from random everyday conditions of pronunciation and 2) fixed immutability of the text. Literature is self-valuable fixed speech.
The very nature of these signs shows that there is no firm boundary between practical speech and literature. Often we fix our practical speech, which is random and temporary, according to the conditions of its transmission to the interlocutor. We are writing a letter to someone to whom we cannot directly address with a lively speech. A letter may or may not be a literary work. On the other hand, a literary work may remain unfixed; created at the moment of its reproduction (improvisation), it can disappear. Such are impromptu plays, poems (impromptu), oratorical speeches, etc. Playing in human life the same role as purely literary works, fulfilling their function and assuming their meaning, these improvisations are part of literature, despite their accidental, transient character. On the other hand, the independence of literature from the conditions of its emergence should be understood in a restrictive way: we must not forget that all literature is unchanged only within more or less wide limits. historical era and is understandable for segments of the population of a certain cultural and social level. I will not multiply examples of borderline linguistic phenomena; With these examples, I only want to point out that in sciences like poetics, there is no need to strive to strictly legally delimit the areas under study, there is no need to look for mathematical or natural scientific definitions. It is enough if there are a number of phenomena that undoubtedly belong to the area under study - the presence of phenomena, only more or less having a marked feature, so to speak, standing on the borders of the area under study, does not deprive us of the right to study this area of phenomena and cannot discredit the chosen definition.
The field of literature is not united. In literature we can outline two broad classes of works. The first class to which they belong scientific treatises, journalistic works, etc., always has a clear, unconditional, objective goal of the statement, which lies outside the purely literary activity person. A scientific or educational treatise aims to communicate objective knowledge about something really existing, a political article aims to induce the reader to some action. This area of literature is called prose in the broadest sense of the word. But there is a literature that does not possess this objective, on the surface, explicit goal. typical feature of this literature is the interpretation of fictitious and conditional objects. Even if the author has the goal of communicating scientific truth to the reader (popular scientific novels) or influencing his behavior (propaganda literature), then this is done through excitation of other interests, closed in the literary work itself. Whereas in prose literature the object of direct interest always lies outside the work, in this second area the interest is directed to the work itself. This area of literature is called poetry(in a broad sense).
The interest awakened in us by poetry, and the feelings arising from the perception of poetic works, are psychologically akin to the interest and feelings aroused by the perception of works. art, music, painting, dance, ornament - in other words, this interest is aesthetic or artistic. Therefore, poetry is also called fiction as opposed to prose non-fiction. We will use these terms mainly, in view of the fact that the words "poetry" and "prose" have another meaning, which will often have to be used in what follows.
The discipline that studies the construction of non-fiction works is called rhetoric; discipline that studies the design of works of art, - poetics. Rhetoric and poetics are composed in general theory literature.
Not only poetics studies fiction. There are a number of other disciplines that study the same subject. These disciplines differ from each other in their approach to the studied phenomena.
The history of literature provides a historical approach to works of art. The historian of literature studies every work as an indecomposable, integral unity, as an individual and intrinsically valuable phenomenon in a number of other individual phenomena. Analyzing individual parts and aspects of the work, he seeks only to understand and interpret the whole. This study is supplemented and unified by the historical illumination of what is being studied, i.e. establishing links between literary phenomena and their significance in the evolution of literature. Thus, the historian studies the grouping literary schools and styles, their change, the significance of tradition in literature and the degree of originality individual writers and their works. Describing the general course of the development of literature, the historian interprets this difference, revealing the reasons for this evolution, which lie both within literature itself and in relation to literature to other phenomena of human culture, in the midst of which literature develops and with which it is in constant relationship. The history of literature is a branch of the general history of culture.
Another approach is theoretical. At theoretical approach literary phenomena are subject to generalization, and therefore are considered not in their individuality, but as the results of the application general laws construction of literary works. Each work is consciously decomposed into its component parts; in the construction of the work, tricks similar construction, i.e. ways of combining verbal material into artistic units. These devices are the direct object of poetics. If attention is paid to the historical genesis, to the origin of these devices, then we have historical poetics, which traces historical destinies such isolated techniques in the study.
But in general poetics origin is not studied poetic devices, and their artistic function. Each technique is studied from the point of view of its artistic expediency, i.e. it is analyzed: why this technique is used and what artistic effect it achieves. In general poetics, the functional study of a literary device is the guiding principle in the description and classification of the studied phenomena.
Nevertheless, although the methods and tasks of theoretical study differ significantly from the methods and tasks of historical disciplines, an evolutionary point of view must always be present in poetics. If the question of the historical significance of a literary work as a whole, considered as some organic system, is not essential in poetics, then the study and interpretation of a direct artistic effect should always be carried out against the background of the usual, historically established application of this technique. The same device changes its artistic function depending, for example, on whether it is a sign of literary modernism and is felt as unusual, breaking tradition, or whether it is an element of this tradition, a sign of the "old school".
There is another approach to literary works, presented in normative poetics. The task of normative poetics is not an objective description of existing methods, but a value judgment about them and the prescription of certain methods as the only natural ones. Normative poetics aims to teach how literary works should be written. Each literary school has its own views on literature, its own rules and, consequently, its own normative poetics. Literary codes, expressed in literary manifestos and declarations, in directed criticism, in belief systems professed by various literary circles, represent various forms of normative poetics. The history of literature is partly a revelation of the real content of the normative poetics that defines being individual works and the evolution of this content in the shifts of literary schools.
What was called "poetics" by the beginning of the 19th century was a mixture of problems of general and normative poetics. The "rules" were not only described, but prescribed. This poetics was essentially the normative poetics of French classicism, established in the 17th century. and dominated literature for two centuries. Given the relative slowness of literary evolution, this poetics could seem unshakable to contemporaries, and its demands could seem inherent in the very nature of verbal art. But in early XIX V. there was a literary split between the classics and romantics, who led the new poetics; after romanticism came naturalism; then at the end of the century symbolism, futurism, etc. The rapid change of literary schools, which is especially noticeable at the present time, which is revolutionary in all areas of human culture, proves the illusory nature of the desire to find a universal normative poetics. Any literary norm put forward by one trend usually meets with rejection in the opposite literary school. Despite the fact that every literary school usually claims that it is its aesthetic principles that are universally binding, with the fall literary influence schools are falling and its principles are being replaced by new ones in a new trend that is replacing the old one. It is impossible now to build any kind of normative poetics that claims to be stable, since the crisis of art, expressed in a rapid change literary movements and in their mutability, has not yet passed.
Here we will not set ourselves normative tasks, being content with an objective description and interpretation of literary material, i.e. confine ourselves to questions of general poetics.
In choosing material, we will turn mainly to the literature of the XIX century. as the closest to us. We will, as far as possible, avoid resorting to literary material before the 17th century, for it was precisely from the 17th century that history begins in Europe new literature, the continuous transmission of the literary tradition from generation to generation begins, and only a few works created earlier have an impact on creativity later eras, and even these works (such as, for example, ancient literature, the literature of Eastern peoples) are so modified, refracted through the conditional interpretation of modern times, that it is difficult to talk about their direct and holistic impact on the literary tradition.
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The relationship between literature and utterance will be elucidated later.
If the genesis of techniques and works is considered within the limits of individual creativity, we have a "psychology of creativity", decisive questions how and why the writer created.
Poetics is the science of the system of means of expression in literary works, one of the oldest disciplines of literary criticism. In the extended sense of the word, poetics coincides with the theory of literature, in the narrowed sense, with one of the areas of theoretical poetics. As a field of literary theory, poetics studies the specifics literary genera and genres, trends and directions, styles and methods, explores the laws of internal connection and correlation of different levels of the artistic whole. Depending on which aspect (and scope of the concept) is put forward in the center of the study, one speaks, for example, of the poetics of romanticism, the poetics of the novel, the poetics of the work of a writer as a whole or of one work. Since all means of expression in literature ultimately come down to language, poetics can also be defined as the science of the artistic use of the means of language (see). The verbal (that is, linguistic) text of a work is the only material form of existence of its content; according to it, the consciousness of readers and researchers reconstructs the content of the work, seeking either to recreate its place in the culture of its time (“what was Hamlet for Shakespeare?”), or to fit it into the culture of changing eras (“what does Hamlet mean for us?”); but both approaches are ultimately based on the verbal text studied by poetics. Hence the importance of poetics in the system of branches of literary criticism.
The purpose of poetics is to highlight and systematize the elements of the text involved in the formation of the aesthetic impression of the work. Ultimately, all elements of artistic speech are involved in this, but to varying degrees: for example, in lyrical verse, plot elements play a small role and rhythm and phonics play a large role, and vice versa in narrative prose. Every culture has its own set of tools that distinguish literary works from the background of non-literary ones: restrictions are imposed on rhythm (verse), vocabulary and syntax (“poetic language”), themes (favorite types of characters and events). Against the background of this system of means, its violations are no less strong aesthetic stimulus: “prosaisms” in poetry, the introduction of new, non-traditional themes in prose, etc. A researcher who belongs to the same culture as the work under study feels these poetic interruptions better, and the background takes them for granted; the researcher of a foreign culture, on the contrary, first of all feels common system techniques (mainly in its differences from what he is accustomed to) and less - the system of its violations. The study of the poetic system "from the inside" of a given culture leads to the construction of normative poetics (more conscious, as in the era of classicism, or less conscious, as in European literature of the 19th century), the study "from the outside" leads to the construction of descriptive poetics. Until the 19th century, while regional literatures were closed and traditionalistic, the normative type of poetics dominated; the formation of world literature (beginning with the era of romanticism) highlights the task of creating descriptive poetics. Generally, there is a distinction between general poetics (theoretical or systematic - "macropoetics"), private (or actually descriptive - "micropoetics") and historical.
General poetics
General poetics is divided into three areas who study the sound, verbal and figurative structure of the text, respectively; the goal of general poetics is to compile a complete systematized repertoire of devices (aesthetically effective elements) covering all these three areas. In the sound system of a work, phonics and rhythm are studied, and in relation to verse, metrics and strophics are also studied. Since the predominant material for study here is provided by poetic texts, this area is often called (too narrowly) poetry. In the verbal system, the features of the vocabulary, morphology and syntax of the work are studied; the corresponding area is called stylistics (to what extent stylistics as a literary and linguistic discipline coincide with each other, there is no consensus). Features of vocabulary (“selection of words”) and syntax (“combination of words”) have long been studied by poetics and rhetoric, where they were taken into account as stylistic figures and tropes; features of morphology ("poetry of grammar") have become a subject of consideration in poetics only very recently. In the figurative structure of the work, images (characters and objects), motives (actions and deeds), plots (connected sets of actions) are studied; this area is called "topics" (traditional name), "themes" (B.V. Tomashevsky) or "poetics" in the narrow sense of the word (B. Yarkho). If poetry and stylistics were developed into poetics from ancient times, then the topic, on the contrary, was developed little, since it seemed that the artistic world of the work was no different from the real world; therefore, even a generally accepted classification of the material has not yet been developed here.
Private poetics
Private poetics deals with the description of a literary work in all the aspects listed above, which allows you to create a "model" - an individual system of aesthetically effective properties of the work. the main problem private poetics - composition, that is, the mutual correlation of all aesthetically significant elements of the work (phonic, metric, stylistic, figurative and plot composition and general, uniting them) in their functional reciprocity with the artistic whole. Here the difference between a small and a large literary form is essential: in a small (for example, in a proverb), the number of connections between elements, although large, is not inexhaustible, and the role of each in the system of the whole can be shown comprehensively; this is impossible in a grand form, and, therefore, some of the internal connections remain unaccounted for as aesthetically imperceptible (for example, connections between phonics and plot). At the same time, it should be remembered that some connections are relevant during the first reading of the text (when the reader's expectations are not yet oriented) and are discarded during re-reading, while others are vice versa. The final concepts to which all means of expression can be raised in analysis are the “image of the world” (with its main characteristics, artistic time And art space) and the “image of the author”, the interaction of which gives a “point of view” that determines everything that is important in the structure of the work. These three concepts have come to the fore in poetics on the basis of the experience of studying the literature of the 12th-20th centuries; before that, European poetics was content with a simplified distinction between three literary genres: drama (giving the image of the world), lyric (giving the image of the author) and the epic intermediate between them (as in Aristotle). The basis of private poetics (“micropoetics”) is the description of a single work, but more generalized descriptions of groups of works (one cycle, one author, genre, literary movement, historical era) are also possible. Such descriptions can be formalized to a list of initial elements of the model and a list of rules for their connection; as a result of the consistent application of these rules, the process of the gradual creation of a work from the thematic and ideological design to the final verbal design (the so-called generative poetics) is imitated, as it were.
Historical poetics
Historical poetics studies the evolution of individual poetic devices and their systems with the help of comparative-historical literary criticism, revealing common features poetic systems of different cultures and reducing them either (genetically) to a common source, or (typologically) to the universal patterns of human consciousness. The roots of literary literature go back to oral literature, which is the main material of historical poetics, which sometimes makes it possible to reconstruct the course of development. individual images, stylistic figures and poetic sizes to deep (for example, common Indo-European) antiquity. The main problem of historical poetics is the genre in the broadest sense of the word, from fiction in general to such varieties as “European love elegy”, “classic tragedy”, “secular story”, “psychological novel”, etc. there is a historically formed set of poetic elements of various kinds, not derived from each other, but associated with each other as a result of a long coexistence. Both the boundaries separating literature from non-literature, and the boundaries separating genre from genre, are changeable, and the eras of relative stability of these poetic systems alternate with eras of decanonization and form creation; these changes are studied by historical poetics. There is a significant difference between close and historically (or geographically) distant poetic systems: the latter are usually presented as more canonical and impersonal, while the former are more diverse and peculiar, but this is usually an illusion. In traditional normative poetics, genres were considered by general poetics as a universally significant, naturally established system.
European poetics
With the accumulation of experience, almost every national literature (folklore) in the era of antiquity and the Middle Ages created its own poetics - a set of its traditional "rules" of poetry, a "catalog" of favorite images, metaphors, genres, poetic forms, theme deployment methods, etc. Such "poetics" (a kind of "memory" of national literature, fixing artistic experience, instruction to posterity) oriented the reader towards following stable poetic norms, consecrated by centuries of tradition - poetic canons. The beginning of the theoretical understanding of poetry in Europe dates back to the 5th-4th centuries BC. - in the teachings of the sophists, the aesthetics of Plato and Aristotle, who first substantiated the division into literary genera: epic, lyrics, drama; ancient poetics was brought into a coherent system by the "grammars" of the Alexandrian time (3-1 centuries BC). Poetics as the art of "imitation" of reality (see) was clearly separated from rhetoric as the art of persuasion. The distinction between "what to imitate" and "how to imitate" led to a distinction between the concepts of content and form. Content was defined as "imitation of events, true or fictional"; in accordance with this, “history” (a story about real events, as in a historical poem), “myth” (the material of traditional legends, as in epic and tragedy) and “fiction” (original plots developed in comedy) were distinguished. Tragedy and comedy were classified as "purely imitative" types and genres; to "mixed" - epic and lyrics (elegy, iambic and song; later genres, satire and bucolic were sometimes mentioned); Only the didactic epic was considered “purely narrative”. The poetics of individual genera and genres has been described little; classic pattern such a description was given by Aristotle for tragedy (“On the Art of Poetry”, 4th century BC), highlighting in it “characters” and “tale” (i.e., a mythological plot), and in the latter - the plot, denouement and between them a "break" ("peripetia"), a special case of which is "recognition". Form was defined as "speech enclosed in meter". The study of "speech" was usually relegated to the purview of rhetoric; here the “selection of words”, “combination of words” and “decorations of words” (tropes and figures with a detailed classification) were distinguished, and various combinations of these techniques were first reduced to a system of styles (high, medium and low, or “strong”, “flowery” and “simple”), and then into a system of qualities (“stateliness”, “severity”, “brilliance”, “liveness”, “sweetness”, etc.). The study of "meters" (the structure of a syllable, foot, combination of feet, verse, stanza) constituted a special branch of poetics - a metric that fluctuated between purely linguistic and musical criteria of analysis. The ultimate goal of poetry was defined as "delight" (Epicureans), "teach" (Stoics), "delight and teach" (school eclecticism); accordingly, "fantasy" and "knowledge" of reality were valued in poetry and the poet.
On the whole, ancient poetics, unlike rhetoric, was not normative and taught not so much to predestinately create, but to describe (at least at the school level) works of poetry. The situation changed in the Middle Ages, when the composition of Latin verse itself became the property of the school. Here poetics takes the form of rules and includes separate points from rhetoric, for example, on the choice of material, on distribution and reduction, on descriptions and speeches (Matthew of Vandom, John of Harland, etc.). In this form, it reached the Renaissance and here it was enriched by the study of the surviving monuments of ancient poetics: (a) rhetoric (Cicero, Quintilian), (b) Horace's Science of Poetry, (c) Aristotle's Poetics and other works of Aristotle and Plato . The same problems were discussed as in antiquity, the goal was to consolidate and unify the disparate elements of the tradition; Yu.Ts.Scaliger came closest to this goal in his "Poetics" (1561). Poetics finally took shape in a hierarchical system of rules and regulations in the era of classicism; the programmatic work of classicism - "Poetic Art" by N. Boileau (1674) - was not accidentally written in the form of a poem imitating Horace's "Science of Poetry", the most normative of ancient poetics.
Until the 18th century, poetics was mainly poetic, and, moreover, "high" genres. From the prose genres, the genres of solemn, oratorical speech were smoothly involved, for the study of which there was rhetoric, which had accumulated rich material for classifying and describing the phenomena of the literary language, but at the same time had a normative-dogmatic character. Attempts at a theoretical analysis of the nature of artistic and prose genres (for example, the novel) initially arise outside the field of special, "pure" poetics. Only the enlighteners (G.E. Lessing, D. Diderot) in the fight against classicism deal the first blow to the dogmatism of the old poetics.
Even more significant was the penetration into poetics historical ideas associated in the West with the names of J. Vico and I. G. Herder, who approved the idea of the relationship between the laws of development of language, folklore and literature and their historical variability in the course of development human society, the evolution of its material and spiritual culture. Herder, I.V. Goethe, and then the romantics included the study of folklore and prose genres in the field of poetics (see), laying the foundation for a broad understanding of poetics as a philosophical doctrine of the universal forms of development and evolution of poetry (literature), which, on the basis of idealistic dialectics, was systematized by Hegel in the 3rd volume of his Lectures on Aesthetics (1838).
The oldest surviving treatise on poetics, known in Ancient Rus', is “On Images” by the Byzantine writer George Hiroboscus (6-7 centuries) in Svyatoslav’s handwritten “Izbornik” (1073). In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, a number of school "poeticians" appeared in Russia and Ukraine for teaching poetry and eloquence (for example, Feofan Prokopovich's De arte poetica, 1705, published in 1786 in Latin). A significant role in the development of scientific poetics in Russia was played by M.V. Lomonosov and V.K. Trediakovsky, and at the beginning of the 19th century. - A.Kh. Vostokov. Of great value for poetics are judgments about literature by A.S. Pushkin, N.V. Gogol, I.S. Turgenev, F.M. Dostoevsky, L.N. Tolstoy, A.P. .I. Nadezhdin, V. G. Belinsky (“Division of poetry into genera and types”, 1841), N. A. Dobrolyubov. They paved the way for the emergence of poetics in Russia in the second half of the 19th century as a special scientific discipline, represented by the works of A.A. Potebnya and the founder of historical poetics, A.N. Veeelovsky.
Veselovsky, who put forward the historical approach and the very program of historical poetics, opposed the speculative and a prioriism of classical aesthetics with "inductive" poetics, based solely on the facts of the historical movement of literary forms, which he made dependent on social, cultural-historical and other non-aesthetic factors (see) . At the same time, Veselovsky substantiates a very important position for poetics about the relative autonomy of poetic style from content, about its own laws of development of literary forms, no less stable than the formulas of ordinary language. The movement of literary forms is considered by him as the development of objective givens, outside the concrete consciousness.
In contrast to this approach, the psychological school considered art as a process that takes place in the mind of the creative and perceiving subject. The theory of the founder of the psychological school in Russia, Potebnya, was based on the idea of V. Humboldt about language as an activity. The word (and works of art) not only reinforces a thought, does not “shape” an already known idea, but builds and shapes it. The merit of Potebnya was the opposition of prose and poetry as fundamentally different ways of expression, which (through the modification of this idea in the formal school) had a great influence on modern theory poetics. At the center of Potebnya's linguistic poetics is the concept of the inner form of the word, which is the source of figurativeness of the poetic language and the literary work as a whole, the structure of which is similar to the structure of a single word. The purpose of the scientific study of a literary text, according to Potebnya, is not an explanation of the content (this is a matter literary criticism), but the analysis of the image, the unities, the stable givenness of the work, with all the infinite variability of the content that it evokes. Appealing to consciousness, Potebnya, however, sought to study structural elements the text itself. The followers of the scientist (A.G. Gornfeld, V.I. Khartsiev and others) did not go in this direction, they turned primarily to the “personal mental warehouse” of the poet, “psychological diagnosis” (D.N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky), expanding the Potebnian theory of the emergence and perception of the word to the unsteady limits of the “psychology of creativity”.
The antipsychological (and, more broadly, antiphilosophical) and specific pathos of the poetics of the 20th century is associated with trends in European art history (since the 1880s), which considered art as an independent, isolated sphere of human activity, the study of which should be dealt with by a special discipline, delimited from aesthetics with its psychological, ethical, etc. categories (H. von Mare). “Art can only be known on its own paths” (K. Fiedler). One of major categories a vision is proclaimed that is different in each era, which explains the differences in the art of these eras. G. Wölfflin in the book "Basic Concepts of the History of Art" (1915) formulated the basic principles of typological analysis artistic styles, proposing a simple scheme of binary oppositions (contrasting the Renaissance and Baroque styles as artistically equal phenomena). The typological oppositions of Wölfflin (as well as G. Simmel) were transferred to literature by O. Walzel, who considered the history of literary forms in an impersonal way, suggesting "for the sake of creation, forget about the creator himself." On the contrary, the theories associated with the names of K. Vossler (who was influenced by B. Croce), L. Spitzer, in the historical movement of literature and the language itself assigned a decisive role to the individual initiative of the poet-legislator, then only fixed in the artistic and linguistic usage of the era.
The most active demand for considering a work of art as such, in its own specific patterns (separated from all non-literary factors) was put forward by the Russian formal school (the first speech was the book by V.B.
Already in the first speeches (partly under the influence of Potebnya and the aesthetics of futurism), the opposition of practical and poetic language was proclaimed, in which the communicative function is reduced to a minimum and “in the bright field of consciousness” there is a word with an orientation towards an expression, a “self-worthy” word, where linguistic phenomena that are neutral in ordinary speech (phonetic elements, rhythm melodics, etc.). Hence the orientation of the school not towards philosophy and aesthetics, but towards linguistics. Later, the problems of the semantics of verse speech were also involved in the scope of research (Yu.N. Tynyanov. "The problem of poetic language", 1924); Tynyanov's idea of the profound impact of verbal construction on meaning influenced subsequent research.
The central category of the “formal method” is the derivation of a phenomenon from the automatism of everyday perception, estrangement (Shklovsky). It is connected not only with the phenomena of poetic language; This position, common to all art, also manifests itself at the level of the plot. This is how the idea of isomorphism of the levels of the artistic system was expressed. Rejecting the traditional understanding of form, the formalists introduced the category of material. Material is something that exists outside of a work of art and that can be described, without resorting to art, to tell “in your own words”. Form, on the other hand, is “the law of the construction of an object”, i.e. the real arrangement of the material in the works, its construction, composition. True, at the same time it was proclaimed that works of art "are not material, but the ratio of materials." The consistent development of this point of view leads to the conclusion about the insignificance of the material (“content”) in the work: “the opposition of the world to the world or a cat to a stone are equal to each other” (Shklovsky). As is known, in the later works of the school, there has already been an overcoming of this approach, which was most clearly manifested in the late Tynyanov (the relationship between social and literary series, the concept of function). In accordance with the theory of automation-deautomatization, the concept of the development of literature was built. In the understanding of the Formalists, it is not a traditional continuity, but, above all, a struggle, the driving force of which is the demand for constant novelty inherent in art. At the first stage of literary evolution, the erased, old principle is replaced by a new one, then it spreads, then it becomes automated, and the movement is repeated on a new turn (Tynyanov). Evolution proceeds not in the form of a "planned" development, but moves in explosions, jumps - either by putting forward a "junior line", or by fixing random deviations from the modern artistic norm (the concept arose not without the influence of biology with its trial and error method and fixing random mutations). Later, Tynyanov (“On Literary Evolution”, 1927) complicated this concept with the idea of systemicity: any innovation, “falling out” occurs only in the context of the system of all literature, i.e. first of all systems literary genres.
Claiming to be universal, the theory of the formal school, based on the material of modern literature, however, is inapplicable to folklore and medieval art, just as some of Veselovsky’s general constructions, based, on the contrary, on the “impersonal” material of the archaic periods of art, are not justified in the latest literature. . The formal school existed in an atmosphere of continuous controversy; VV Vinogradov, BV Tomashevsky and VM Zhirmunsky, who at the same time held close positions on a number of issues, actively argued with her - mainly on questions of literary evolution. MM Bakhtin criticized the school from philosophical and general aesthetic positions. At the center of Bakhtin's own concept, his "aesthetics of verbal creativity" is the idea of dialogue, understood in a very broad, philosophically universal sense (see Polyphony; in accordance with the general evaluative nature of the monological and dialogic types of world comprehension - which are hierarchical in Bakhtin's mind - the latter is recognized by him higher). All other topics of his scientific work are connected with it: the theory of the novel, the word in various literary and speech genres, theory of chronotope, carnivalization. A special position was occupied by G. A. Gukovsky, as well as A. P. Skaftymov, who, back in the 1920s, raised the question of the separation of the genetic (historical) and synchronous-holistic approach. The concept, which had a great influence on modern folklore, was created by V. L. Propp ( approach to folklore text as a set of definite and countable functions of a fairy-tale hero).
Vinogradov created his own direction in poetics, which he later called the science of the language of fiction. Focusing on Russian and European linguistics (not only on F. de Saussure, but also on Vossler, Spitzer), however, from the very beginning he emphasized the difference between the tasks and categories of linguistics and poetics (see). With a clear distinction between synchronic and diachronic approaches, it is characterized by their mutual adjustment and mutual continuity. Historicism requirement ( main line Vinogradov's criticism of the formal school), as well as perhaps a more complete account of poetic phenomena (including critical and literary responses of contemporaries) becomes the main one in theory and one's own research practice Vinogradov. According to Vinogradov, the "language of literary works" is broader than the concept of "poetic speech" and includes it. The central category in which the semantic, emotional and cultural-ideological intentions of a literary text intersect, Vinogradov considered the image of the author.
The creation of the theory of skaz and narration in general in the works of B.M. Eikhenbaum, Vinogradov, Bakhtin is connected with the works of Russian scientists of the 1920s. For the development of poetics recent years great importance have the works of D.S. Likhachev, devoted to the poetics of ancient Russian literature, and Yu.M. Lotman, who uses structural-semiotic methods of analysis.
The word poetics comes from Greek poietike techne, which means creative art.
Share:The task of poetics (in other words, the theory of literature or literature) is the study of methods for constructing literary works. The object of study in poetics is fiction. The method of study is the description and classification of phenomena and their interpretation.
Literature, or literature, - as this last name shows - is part of the verbal, or linguistic, activity of man. It follows from this that in a number of scientific disciplines, the theory of literature closely adjoins the science that studies language, i.e. to linguistics. There are a number of borderline scientific problems that can be equally attributed to both the problems of linguistics and the problems of literary theory.
However, there are special questions that belong specifically to poetics. We use the language, the word constantly in the hostel for the purpose of human communication. The practical scope of the language is ordinary "conversations". In conversation, language is the medium of communication, and our attention and interests are turned exclusively to what is being communicated, "thought"; we usually pay attention to verbal formulation only insofar as we strive to accurately convey to the interlocutor our thoughts and our feelings, and for this we look for expressions that are most appropriate to our thoughts and emotions.
Expressions are created in the process of pronunciation and are forgotten, disappear after they reach the goal - suggestion to the listener of what is required. In this respect, practical speech is unique, because it lives in the conditions of its creation; its character and form are determined by the circumstances of the given conversation, the relationship of the speakers, the degree of their mutual understanding, the interests that arise in the course of the conversation, and so on. Inasmuch as the conditions that give rise to conversation are unique on the whole, so is the conversation itself unique.
But in verbal creativity there are also such verbal constructions, the meaning of which does not depend on the circumstances of their pronunciation; formulas that, once they have arisen, do not die off, are repeated and preserved so that they can be reproduced again and do not lose their original meaning when reproduced again. We call such fixed, preserved verbal constructions literary works.
In its elementary form, every successful expression, remembered and repeated, is a literary work. These are sayings, proverbs, sayings, etc. But usually, literary works mean constructions of a slightly larger volume.
To fix the system of expressions of a work - in other words, its text - can be different. You can consolidate speech in writing or in print - then we get written literature; it is possible to memorize the text by heart and transmit it orally - then we get oral literature, which develops mainly in an environment that does not know writing. The so-called folklore - folk oral literature - is preserved and arises mainly in layers that are alien to literacy.
Thus, a literary work has two properties: 1) independence from random everyday conditions of pronunciation and 2) fixed immutability of the text. Literature is self-valuable fixed speech.
The very nature of these signs shows that there is no firm boundary between practical speech and literature. Often we fix our practical speech, which is random and temporary, according to the conditions of its transmission to the interlocutor. We are writing a letter to someone to whom we cannot directly address with a lively speech. A letter may or may not be a literary work. On the other hand, a literary work may remain unfixed; created at the moment of its reproduction (improvisation), it can disappear. Such are impromptu plays, poems (impromptu), oratorical speeches, etc.
Playing in human life the same role as purely literary works, fulfilling their function and assuming their meaning, these improvisations are part of literature, despite their accidental, transient character. On the other hand, the independence of literature from the conditions of its origin should be understood in a restrictive way: we must not forget that all literature is unchanged only within a more or less wide range of a historical epoch and is understandable for sections of the population of a certain cultural and social level.
I will not multiply examples of borderline linguistic phenomena; With these examples, I only want to point out that in sciences like poetics, there is no need to strive to strictly legally delimit the areas under study, there is no need to look for mathematical or natural scientific definitions. It is enough if there are a number of phenomena that undoubtedly belong to the area under study - the presence of phenomena that only more or less have a marked feature, so to speak, standing on the boundaries of the area under study, does not deprive us of the right to study this area of phenomena and cannot discredit the chosen definition.
The field of literature is not united. In literature we can outline two broad classes of works. The first class, to which scientific treatises, journalistic works, etc., belong, always has an explicit, unconditional, objective goal of utterance, which lies outside the purely literary activity of man. A scientific or educational treatise aims to communicate objective knowledge about something really existing, a political article aims to induce the reader to some action. This area of literature is called prose in the broad sense of the word.
But there is a literature that does not possess this objective, on the surface, explicit goal. A typical feature of this literature is the treatment of fictitious and conditional objects. Even if the author aims to communicate scientific truth to the reader (popular scientific novels) or to influence his behavior (propaganda literature), this is done by arousing other interests locked in the literary work itself.
Whereas in prose literature the object of direct interest always lies outside the work, in this second area the interest is directed to the work itself. This area of literature is called poetry (in a broad sense).
The interest aroused in us by poetry, and the feelings arising from the perception of poetic works, are psychologically related to the interest and feelings aroused by the perception of works of art, music, painting, dance, ornament - in other words, this interest is aesthetic or artistic. Therefore, poetry is also called fiction, as opposed to prose - non-fiction. We will use these terms mainly, in view of the fact that the words "poetry" and "prose" have another meaning, which will often have to be used in what follows.
The discipline that studies the construction of non-fiction works is called rhetoric; the discipline that studies the structure of works of art is poetics. Rhetoric and poetics are combined into a general theory of literature.
Not only poetics studies fiction. There are a number of other disciplines that study the same subject. These disciplines differ from each other in their approach to the studied phenomena.
The history of literature provides a historical approach to works of art. The historian of literature studies every work as an indecomposable, integral unity, as an individual and intrinsically valuable phenomenon in a number of other individual phenomena. Analyzing individual parts and aspects of the work, he seeks only to understand and interpret the whole. This study is supplemented and unified by the historical illumination of what is being studied, i.e. establishing links between literary phenomena and their significance in the evolution of literature.
Thus, the historian studies the grouping of literary schools and styles, their succession, the significance of tradition in literature, and the degree of originality of individual writers and their works. Describing the general course of the development of literature, the historian interprets this difference, revealing the reasons for this evolution, which lie both within literature itself and in relation to literature to other phenomena of human culture, in the midst of which literature develops and with which it is in constant relationship. The history of literature is a branch of the general history of culture.
Another approach is theoretical. With a theoretical approach, literary phenomena are generalized, and therefore are considered not in their individuality, but as the results of applying the general laws of the construction of literary works.
Each work is consciously decomposed into its constituent parts; in the construction of the work, the methods of such construction are distinguished, i.e. ways of combining verbal material into artistic units. These devices are the direct object of poetics. If attention is paid to the historical genesis, to the origin of these methods, then we have a historical poetics that traces the historical fate of such methods isolated in the study.
But in general poetics, it is not the origin of poetic devices that is studied, but the non-artistic function. Each technique is studied from the point of view of its artistic expediency, i.e. it is analyzed: why this technique is used and what artistic effect it achieves. In general poetics, the functional study of a literary device is the guiding principle in the description and classification of the studied phenomena.
Nevertheless, although the methods and tasks of theoretical study differ significantly from the methods and tasks of historical disciplines, an evolutionary point of view must always be present in poetics. If the question of the historical significance of a literary work as a whole, considered as some organic system, is not essential in poetics, then the study and interpretation of a direct artistic effect should always be carried out against the background of the usual, historically established application of this technique.
The same device changes its artistic function depending, for example, on whether it is a sign of literary modernism and is felt as unusual, breaking tradition, or whether it is an element of this tradition, a sign of the "old school".
There is another approach to literary works, represented in normative poetics. The task of normative poetics is not an objective description of existing methods, but a value judgment about them and the prescription of certain methods as the only natural ones. Normative poetics aims to teach how literary works should be written.
Each literary school has its own views on literature, its own rules and, consequently, its own normative poetics. Literary codes, expressed in literary manifestos and declarations, in directed criticism, in belief systems professed by various literary circles, represent various forms of normative poetics. The history of literature is partly a revelation of the real content of normative poetics, which determines the existence of individual works and the evolution of this content in the shifts of literary schools.
What was called "poetics" by the beginning of the 19th century was a mixture of problems of general and normative poetics. The "rules" were not only described, but prescribed. This poetics was essentially the normative poetics of French classicism, established in the 17th century. and dominated literature for two centuries.
Given the relative slowness of literary evolution, this poetics could seem unshakable to contemporaries, and its demands could seem inherent in the very nature of verbal art. But at the beginning of the XIX century. there was a literary split between the classics and romantics, who led the new poetics; after romanticism came naturalism; then at the end of the century symbolism, futurism, etc. The rapid change of literary schools, which is especially noticeable at the present time, which is revolutionary in all areas of human culture, proves the illusory nature of the desire to find a universal normative poetics.
Any literary norm put forward by one trend usually meets with rejection in the opposite literary school. Despite the fact that each literary school usually claims that it is its aesthetic principles that are generally binding, with the decline of the literary influence of the school, its principles also fall, being replaced by new ones in a new trend that replaces the old one. It is impossible to build now any kind of normative poetics that claims to be stable, since the crisis of art, expressed in the rapid change of literary trends and in their changeability, has not yet passed.
Here we will not set ourselves normative tasks, being content with an objective description and interpretation of literary material, i.e. confine ourselves to questions of general poetics.
In choosing material, we will turn mainly to the literature of the XIX century. as the closest to us. We will, as far as possible, avoid resorting to literary material before the 17th century, for it was precisely from the 17th century that in Europe, the history of new literature begins, the continuous transmission of literary tradition from generation to generation begins, and only a few works created earlier have an impact on the work of later eras, and even these works (such as ancient literature, the literature of Eastern peoples) are so are modified, refracting through the conditional interpretation of modern times, which is difficult to talk about their direct and holistic impact on the literary tradition.
Tomashevsky B.V. Theory of Literature. Poetics - M., 1999
I. THE SUBJECT OF POETICS
Poetics (Greek poiētiké téchnē - poetic art) is the science of the system of means of expression in literary works, one of the oldest literary disciplines. In antiquity (from Aristotle (IV century BC) to the theorist of classicism N. Boileau (XVII century), the term “poetics” denoted the doctrine of verbal art in general. This word was synonymous with what is now called “literary theory” .
As a field of literary theory, poetics studies the specifics of literary types and genres, currents and trends, styles and methods, explores the laws of internal connection and correlation of different levels of the artistic whole. Depending on which aspect (and scope of the concept) is put forward in the center of the study, it is customary to talk, for example, about the poetics of romanticism, the poetics of the novel, the poetics of the work of a writer as a whole or of one work.
Since all means of expression in literature ultimately come down to language, poetics can also be defined as the science of the artistic use of the means of language.
The purpose of poetics is to highlight and systematize the elements of the text involved in the formation of the aesthetic impression of the work.
Poetry is usually distinguished general(theoretical or systematic - “macropoetics”) private(or actually descriptive - "micropoetics") and historical.
General poetics, which explains the universal properties of verbal and artistic works, is divided into three areas that study the sound, verbal and figurative structure of the text, respectively.
Private poetics is engaged in the study of literary texts in all of the above aspects, which allows you to create a "model" - an individual system of aesthetically effective properties of the work.
The main problem of private poetics is composition, that is, the mutual correlation of all aesthetically significant elements of the work.
Historical poetics studies the evolution of individual poetic devices and their systems with the help of comparative historical literary criticism. The main problem of historical poetics is genre in the broadest sense of the word, from fiction in general to such varieties as “European love elegy”, “classic tragedy”, “psychological novel”, etc. The boundaries separating literature from non-literature, and the boundaries separating genre from genre, changeable, and the epochs of relative stability of these poetic systems alternate with epochs of decanonization and form creation;
The purpose of poetics is to highlight and systematize the elements of the text involved in the formation of the aesthetic impression of the work. Every culture has its own set of tools that distinguish literary works against the background of non-literary ones.
The study of the poetic system "from within" a given culture leads to the construction normative poetics(more conscious, as in the era of classicism, or less conscious, as in the European literature of the 19th century), research "from the outside" - to the construction descriptive poetics. Until the 19th century, while regional literatures were closed and traditionalistic, the normative type of poetics dominated. Normative poetics focused on the experience of one of the literary trends and justified it. The formation of world literature (beginning with the era of romanticism) puts forward not the first plan the task of creating descriptive poetics.
The task of normative poetics is not an objective description of existing methods, but a value judgment about them and the prescription of certain methods as the only natural ones. Normative poetics aims to teach how literary works should be written. Each literary school has its own views on literature, its own rules and, consequently, its own normative poetics.
What was called "poetics" by the beginning of the 19th century. , was a mixture of problems of general and normative poetics. "Rules" were not only described, but prescribed. This poetics was essentially the normative poetics of French classicism, established in the 17th century. and dominated literature for two centuries. But at the beginning of the XIX century. there was a literary split between the classics and romantics, who led the new poetics; after romanticism came naturalism; then, at the end of the century, symbolism, futurism, etc. The rapid change of literary schools, especially noticeable at the present time, which is revolutionary in all areas of human culture, proves the illusory nature of the desire to find a universal normative poetics.
Descriptive P. aims to recreate that path from conception to completion. text, through which the researcher can fully penetrate the author's intention. At the same time, different levels and parts of the work are considered as a whole.<...>Historical P. studies the development of both individual artists. techniques (epithets, metaphors, rhymes, etc.) and categories (artistic time, space, main oppositions of signs), as well as entire systems of such techniques and categories characteristic of a particular era. “Poetics, which focuses its attention on the properties of specific works and draws conclusions on the basis of a review of texts, is usually called descriptive” .
Historical poetics.
Along with the theoretical system of poetics in the history of the development of this science, we find attempts to construct "historical" poetics. The history of literature as the history of the evolutionary development of literary forms is, in essence, the core of "historical" poetics, of which A. N. Veselovsky is rightfully considered the most prominent and prominent representative. The starting point in the work of this scientist is the desire "to collect material for the methodology of the history of literature, for inductive poetics, which would eliminate its speculative constructions, to clarify the essence of poetry - from its history." With the help of such an inductive study, in a purely empirical way, the implementation of the grandiose plan of "historical" poetics, which would embrace the development of literary forms of all times and peoples, is conceived. However, the case of A. N. Veselovsky had many successors, among whom it is worth mentioning, first of all, Yu. N. Tynyanov, M. M. Bakhtin, V. Ya. Propp.
IP studies the variability of historical and literary categories:
1. The author - the hero - the reader and their ratio in various sources. periods. Initially, the author builds the text and puts meanings into it. In this case, Biographical Author = Intratext Author (Old Russian Literature)
Creation method artistic image- a metaphor that has been treated differently at different times.
German enlighteners metaphors were avoided for the sake of simplicity.
Baroque: literature - only for the elite, deliberate complication. (Lope de Vega)
Classicism: a means of illustration and simplification.
19th century: one metaphor illustrates one trait
20th century: clusters of metaphors in Mayakovsky, Pasternak.
According to Veselovsky, the method of historical poetics is historical and comparative. For Veselovsky, an example of one-sided and non-historical generalizations was Hegel's aesthetics, incl. his theory of literary genera, built only on the basis of the facts of ancient Greek literature, which were taken as "the ideal norm of literary development in general." Only a comparative historical analysis of all world literature makes it possible, according to Veselovsky, to avoid the arbitrariness of theoretical constructions. approaches will remain a defining feature new science. After Veselovsky, new impulses for the development of historical poetics were given by the works of Freidenberg, M. M. Bakhtin and Propp. One of the first tasks of historical poetics is to single out large stages or historical types of artistic integrity, taking into account the “great time”, in which the slow formation and development of an aesthetic object and its forms takes place. Veselovsky singled out two such stages, calling them the eras of "syncretism" and "personal creativity." On slightly different grounds, Yu.M. Lotman singles out two stages, calling them "aesthetics of identity" and "aesthetics of opposition".
theoretical poetics.
Theoretical ("general", "systematic") poetry (or "macropoetics") deals with a systematic description of the laws of construction of various levels of art. the whole, the structure of the verbal artist. image and individual aesthetic means of text organization. Theoretical painting explores the relationship between literary and non-literary reality, the connection between the "internal" and "external" artistic. form, the laws of translating reality and material into art. (poetic) world of the work, organization of art. time and space, as well as ways to embody the writer's intention in the text of the work - depending on the stage of the historical and cultural process, direction, literary kind and genre.
General (or theoretical) poetics, which explains the universal properties of verbal and artistic works, is divided into three areas that study the sound, verbal and figurative structure of the text, respectively.
The goal of general poetics is to compile a complete, systematized repertoire of devices (aesthetically effective elements) covering all these three areas.
Theoretical poetics, mutually connected, of course, with the history of literature, is further represented by a large number of researchers of the 19th-20th centuries, starting with Humboldt, his theory of the epic in the book about Hermann and Dorothea. The linguistic foundations of Humboldt's poetics are outlined in the preface to Kawi-Sprache. Potebnya (Thought and Language, From Notes on the Theory of Literature, etc.) continues the Humboldt line, developing it independently, who created an entire school. A different line of poetics, coming from the objectively idealistic school of Dilthey, is given by the philosophical-formalistic method, presented by one of the largest German literary critics - Walzel (German) Russian .. Highlighting the study of form as a necessary way to comprehend the essence of art, Walzel did not limited to the external aspects of the work, focusing on the analysis internal composition, on the arrangement of the emotional side of the work, on the disclosure of internal symmetry, etc. Assuming that in all the arts in a given era the same formal law dominates the composition, Walzel considers the method of parallel study of the arts to be very fruitful.
Over the past century, poetics (or theoretical poetics) has been called the branch of literary criticism, the subject of which is the composition, structure and functions of works, as well as the types and genres of literature. Distinguishable are normative poetics (focusing on the experience of one of the literary movements and substantiating it) and general poetics, explaining the universal properties of verbal and artistic works.
In the XX century. There is another meaning of the term "poetics". This word fixes a certain edge literary process, namely, the installations and principles of individual writers, as well as artistic movements and entire eras, implemented in the works. Our well-known scientists own monographs on the poetics of ancient Russian, early Byzantine literature, on the poetics of romanticism, the poetics of Gogol, Dostoevsky, Chekhov. At the origins of this terminological tradition is the study of A.N. Veselovsky creativity V.A. Zhukovsky, where there is a chapter "Zhukovsky's Romantic Poetics".
In our country, theoretical poetics began to take shape (to some extent based on the German scientific tradition, but at the same time independently and creatively) in the 1910s and consolidated in the 1920s. Throughout the 20th century, it has been intensively developed in Western countries. And this fact marks a serious, epoch-making shift in the comprehension of literature.
In the last century, the subject of study was mainly not the works themselves, but what was embodied and refracted in them (social consciousness, legends and myths; plots and motives as the common property of culture; biography and spiritual experience writer): scientists looked, as it were, through the works, and did not focus on them.
IN XIX century they were primarily interested in the spiritual, world-contemplative, general cultural prerequisites for artistic creation: “The history of literature was so busy studying the conditions in which works were created that efforts were expended on analyzing the works themselves.”
In the XX century. the picture has changed radically. In the repeatedly reprinted book of the German scientist W. Kaiser “Verbal and artistic work. Introduction to Literary Studies ”it is rightly said that the main subject modern science about literature - the works themselves, everything else (psychology, views and biography of the author, social genesis literary creativity and the impact of works on the reader) is auxiliary and secondary.
Theoretical literary criticism of the 1920s is heterogeneous and multidirectional. The formal method (a group of young scientists headed by V.B. Shklovsky) showed itself most clearly. But there was at that time another layer of the science of literature, marked by undoubted achievements in the field of theoretical poetics. It is represented by the works of M.M. Bakhtin (most of which were published relatively recently), articles by A.P. Skaftymova, S.A. Askoldova, A.A. Smirnov, which did not attract sufficient attention of contemporaries.
These scientists inherited the tradition of hermeneutics and to a greater or lesser extent relied on the experience of Russian religious philosophy at the beginning of the century.
The situation in our country in the 1930s and subsequent decades was extremely unfavorable for the development of theoretical poetics. The legacy of the 10s-20s was intensively developed and enriched only starting from the 60s. The Tartu-Moscow school headed by Yu.M. Lotman.
Structuralist poetics
Lotman: Language is the material of literature. It follows from this very definition that, in relation to literature, language acts as a material substance, like paint in painting, stone in sculpture, sound in music.
Being a means of transmitting information, language, as it seems to modern linguistics, which develops the well-known position of F. de Saussure, consists of two principles. One is a set of signal signs that have a certain physical nature. In the process of implementing a speech act, a certain part of the signals is realized. For information to be possible, it is necessary that the same, but potential, unrealizable signals correspond to the signals realized in the process of transmitting information [In modern linguistic literature, these two (real and potential) sides are called speech (or language activity) and language ability] . However, in order for the speaker to be understood by the listener, a third principle is also necessary: a code that would allow us to classify language signals and set their meaning.
Descriptive versification and descriptive poetics proceed from the idea of artistic construction as a mechanical sum of a number of separately existing “techniques”. Wherein artistic analysis is understood as an enumeration and ideological and stylistic assessment of those poetic elements that the researcher discovers in the text. A similar method of analysis has become stronger in school practice. Teaching aids and textbooks are full of expressions: “we will choose epithets”, “find metaphors”, “what did the writer want to say with such and such an episode?” and so on.
The structural approach to a literary work implies that this or that “technique” is considered not as a separate material entity, but as a function with two, or more often many, generators. Any enumeration of methods will not give us anything, since, entering into various structures of the whole, one and the same material element text inevitably acquires a different, sometimes opposite, meaning. This is especially evident when using negative tricks, “minus tricks”. Let's take an example.
Let's take Pushkin's poem "Again I visited ...", which has already attracted us. It, from the point of view of descriptive poetics, almost defies analysis. If it is still possible to apply a similar technique to a romantic poem: to select abundant metaphors, epithets and other elements of the so-called “reverse speech” and on the basis of them to evaluate the ideological system and style, then it is absolutely inapplicable to works like Pushkin’s lyrics of the 1830s. There are no epithets, no metaphors, no rhymes, no emphasized “rhythm”, and the researcher can only state the absence of “artistic techniques”.
Structural analysis Lets approach the question in a different way: artistic technique- not a material element of the text, but a relation. In an era when the reader's consciousness, brought up in the poetic school of Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, the young Pushkin, identified romantic poetics with the very concept of poetry, art system“Again I visited ...” gave the impression not of the absence of “receptions”, but of their maximum saturation. But these were “minus tricks”, a system of consistent and conscious, reader-perceivable rejections. In this sense, in 1830 a poetic text, written according to the already generally accepted norms of romantic poetics, would have produced a more “naked” impression, would indeed have been devoid of elements of artistic structure to a greater extent.
Descriptive poetics is like an observer who has fixed a certain life scene (for example, “ naked man”). Structural poetics always proceeds from the fact that the observed phenomenon is only one of the components of a complex whole. She is like an observer who invariably asks, "In what situation?"
The settlement had three main geographical centers: Paris, Tartu, and Moscow. The most important property of systemicity, or structurality, was considered to be the hierarchy of structure levels. This position was taken from structural linguistics. The levels were as follows (their number and sequence varied depending on which researcher took up the case): phonics (the level of sounds that could acquire a specifically poetic, poetic purpose, for example, alliterate-stanza, vocabulary (metaphor, metonymy, etc.) , grammar (for example, a game of contrasting the first person with the third - syntax (the least developed in S. p.); semantics (the meaning of the text as a whole). If it was about prose work, then phonics, metrics and stanzas were removed, but plot, plot, space, time were added (that is, special artistic modeling of space and time in artistic text). It must be said that the favorite genre of S. p. was the analysis of a small lyrical poem, which really in the hands of a structuralist began to resemble crystal lattice. One of the most important slogans of S. p. was a call for the accuracy of research, the application of the foundations of statistics, information theory, mathematics and logic, the compilation of frequency dictionaries of the language of poets and indices of poetic meters was welcomed.
