Selected issues of the metodology of literature study WH-FP-K-WPMBL.1
Course contents:
1) Anti-Positivism breakthrough in the humanities.
Methodological and epistemological separation of science of nature (Naturwissenschaften) and the science of the spirit (Geisteswissenschaften) / science of culture (Kulturwissenschaften). The birth of modern science of literature (in Central and Eastern Europe). Criticism of scientism, evolutionist mechanism, and natural history nomotetism for idiographic approaches. Main fields of anti-Positivism humanities
2) "Heremeneutics of understanding" by Wilhelm Dilthey.
The place of "hermeneutics of reproducing" on the map of Western and Central Europe of anti-Positivism. Interaction of philosophical hermeneutics and the knowledge of the literature. The subject and scope of the "science of the spirit" and how to learn "spirit figures" (the experience and understanding). The concepts of explanation and understanding. The concept of literature as a "letter of evidence," author's "world of life", objectivized expression of the subject's experience.
3) Phenomenological philosophy of literature as a current of the antipositivist humanities. Phenomenology in philosophy and science on literature. Anti-psychologism, antigenetism, antihistorism, recognition of the aesthetic autonomy of the literary work and its intentional existence. Methods of cognition of the literary work. The Ingarden literary ontology of the literary work as intentional, intersubjective, and two-dimensional (layer-phase) notion of places not possible to be defined, concretization, a quasi-judicial.
4) Psychoanalysis in literary studies.
Main topics of Sigmund Freud's ideas (psychoanalysis, the theory of drives, repression, sublimation and suppression, the theory of the mental apparatus). Analysis of Freud's dreams and interpretation of literature. The importance of Freudianism for the science about literature. The theory of the creative process: literature as a socially sanctioned neurosis.
5) Concepts of theoretical,literary, and historical studies in the circle of the Russian formal school.
Formation of the Russian Formal School: Opojaz and the Moscow Linguistic Club. Formalists and Futurists. Concepts of a grip, unusuallity, the literary evolution, correlation of "the range of literature" and "the range of life", a plot and "sjużet".
6) Prague structuralism. Formation of the Prague Linguistic Club. Linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and "the Kazan School of Linguistics" of Baudouin de Courtenay as a base of the Prague structuralism. Contribution of the Prague Structural School to the development of poetics. Jan Mukařovsky's concepts (the concept of functional style, aesthetic function, the model of linguistic and literary communication, the levels of the structure of poetic language, problems of poetic semantics). Roman Jakobson's theory (a model of linguistic and literary communication and literary creation, the concept of the poetic function).
7) Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics
Background of the Tartu school and the main areas of research exploration and its representatives. The significane of the Russian semiotics for the knowledge about literature and culture. Yuri Łotman's theory (the notion of text, text within the cultural codes, the text as a statement, a complex sign and a model of reality, the concept of "secondary modeling systems").
8) French structural semiology
Development of narrationology. The importance of structural ethnology inspiration of Claude Levi-Strauss. Semiotic-structural discovery of 'Morphology of the Folktale by Vladimir Propp as "the first generative narrative grammar". Impact of transformational-generative grammar of Noam Chomsky. Attempts to construct generative "narrative grammars"
Assessment methods:
Credit on the basis of the active participation in classes, exam
Subject level
Learning outcome code/codes
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