Text-oriented approaches

The formal method (V. Shklovsky, R. Jakobson, V. Zhirmunsky, V. Vinogradov, B. Tomashevsky) is based on the assumption that literature is a set of devices, its development lies in their renewing regardless to the personality and biography of its creator. Formalists consider literature as a deviation from the conventional language rules: stylistic devices help defamiliarise our perception of common things. Y. Tynyanov and J. Propp contributed to the method development by introducing the notion of literary function; they proved that elements of a literary work should not be summed up, but relate. Formalists comment on the functional roles of agents in stories and the function of the plot, which rearranges the temporal sequence of a story. R. Jakobson developed an influential model of communication, according to which language has six functions which are of various importance in different utterances and texts: the emotive (expressive), referential (conveying information), conative (convincing the addressee), phatic (maintaining the contact with the adressee), aesthetic (reflecting on the structure and diction), and metalingual function (referring to the codes). Yury Lotman defined literature as a secondary modelling system, which uses elements from the primary modelling system, that is the way ordinary language and culture construct reality.

Among the weaknesses of such approach is its descriptive statistical method that neglects broad contexts. Russian formalism and structuralist linguistics caused a shift from content to form, from meaning to text arrangement.

The aesthetic approach (T.S. Eliot, Alfred Alvarez, Northrop Frye) is based on the conception of “the meaningful form”. A work of literature is considered as an autonomous aesthetic object.

Neocriticism is based on a wide range of literary analysis methods. Being influential from the end of the 1930s on into the 1950s it revolutionized the teaching of literature. The New Critics (J.C. Ransom, I. Richards, R. Brooks, A. Tate, Kenneth Burke, R.P. Blackmoore, Y. Winters, W.K. Wimsatt) focus on the inner structures of the text, special features of literary language. Each literary text is considered as a timeless, unique and autonomous artifact, self-sufficient verbal object. Literature was regarded as an autonomous aesthetic object independent of authorial intention, historical circumstances, and its emotional effect upon the reader. Rhetoric, poetics, and metrics serve the close reading of a text (the term is introduced by I. Richards), which is scrutinised for the aesthetic arrangement of its elements into an organic whole. While the text is closely read, all the formal evidence provided by the language is taken into account – the images, symbols, metaphors, rhyme, meter, point of view, setting, characterization, plot, etc. For Neocriticism, the complexity of a text is created by the multiple and often conflicting meanings woven through it. And these meanings are a product primarily of four kinds of linguistic devices: paradox, irony, ambiguity, and tension. The limitations of neocritical approach are its formalism and dehistorisation of the text.

The method of semantic analysis (A. Richardson, W. Empson, J.C. Ransom) puts perception of a literary work in connection with analytical brain work, taking into account polysemy and semantic associations, tension between the semantic elements of the text (A. Tate), “poetic paradox” (C. Brooks), “texture” (J. Ransom), etc.

Susanne Katherine Langer, K. Burke and some others use the ideas of psychoanalysis and Neocriticism as well as the method of symbolic interpretation. The method involves consideration of the key words, metaphors, symbols, images. Literary symbol is considered not only as verbal but as constructed by the rhythm and structure of the text.

The existential and phenomenological approaches (E. Husserl, M. Heidegger, K. Jaspers, J. Poule, J.-P. Richar) deny the necessity of typological generalisations, emphasise transcendental and human character of literature. A work of literature is regarded as closed in itself, outside its context.

Structuralism and narrative poetics (Roman Jacobson, Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Algirdas J. Greimas, Tzvetan Todorov, Gerard Genette) draw an analogy between language systems and social systems, focus on the abstract system of signs and the status of words in society. Structuralist approaches to literature have tended to focus on three specific areas of literary studies: the classification of literary genres, the description of narrative operations, and the analysis of literary interpretation. Structuralists identify the fundamental semantic, syntactic, rhetorical, and poetic binary oppositions and the way they are interrelated; how these elements and their functions relate to the conventions of the genre. Structures are not physical entities; they are conceptual frameworks that we use to organize and understand physical entities. Structuralism shows that a work of literature possesses wholeness (the system functions as a unit), transformation (the system is not static), and self-regulation (the elements belong to the system and obey its laws). Structuralists devised all-encompassing theory of narrative discourse.

Post-structuralists and deconstructivists (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Julia Kristeva) question all philosophical assumptions, hierarchical thinking in which one term is privileged over another (for instance, culture vs nature, men vs women), consider life phenomena through the prism of the text. Deconstruction is a controversial mode of textual analysis that can reveal hidden ideological assumptions. Deconstruction draws on thought of French theorist Jacques Derrida, who elaborated on linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s vision of language as a system of differences. Jacques Derrida claims that there is nothing outside the text. Roland Barthes claimed that texts can hardly be reduced to binary oppositions but reveal multiple and indeterminate meanings. The reader employs codes to unfold the meaning of the text, which are potentially endless because each text is intertextual in a wide sense. Deconstructivistslook for ambiguities and contradictions, shifts in perspective and judgement, subversive information in the text, self-referential statements and intertextual links that undermine the basic assumptions. The main purpose in deconstructing a literary text is to reveal the complex operations of the ideologies of which the text is constructed.

Intertextual approach originated from understanding literary development as constant interaction of the texts and outlooks – as the result each new text incorporates and processes the previous literary and cultural material. The approach is based on M.M. Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism and was further developed by J. Kristeva, R. Barthes, C. Levi-Strauss, M. Foucault, U. Eko, A. Zholkovsky, I. Arnold, B.M. Kasparova, Z. Turaeva. The intertextual method presupposes scrutinising the text for borrowings, quotations, reminiscences, allusions, parallel structures and images, comparing and contrasting typologically similar phenomena.

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