3. Scholarly methods and schools in literary studies

Method in literary studies is a system of scholarly means of cognizing and interpreting a
literary phenomenon, a way of understanding and elucidating it. It is formed in the process of
making sense of works and depends on the worldview and aesthetic tastes of the interpreter. Adherents of a
particular method may unite into a scholarly school.

Basic scholarly methods

• Historical-biographical method Analyzes a work through the prism of the author’s biography and historical context.

• Formal method Focuses on the structure of the text: composition, language, rhythm, genre. Represented by Russian Formalism (Shklovsky, Tynianov).

• Structuralist method Proceeds from the idea that literature is a system of signs. Analyzes the deep structures of the text (Lévi-Strauss, Barthes).

• Hermeneutic method Aimed at interpreting the meaning of a text, taking into account its cultural and philosophical context.

• Psychoanalytic method Uses the ideas of Freud and Jung to analyze the motivation of characters and of the author.

• Mythological and archetypal method Seeks universal myths and archetypes in literature (Campbell, Jung).

• Sociological method Views literature as a reflection of social processes and class relations.

• Feminist and postcolonial analysis Investigates questions of identity, power, gender, race, and culture.

Major schools of literary studies

The mythological school.

At the beginning of the 19th century, when Romanticism dominated
artistic creation in Europe, the mythological school arose in literary studies. The theoretical foundation of the
school was formed by the works of Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, the Schlegel brothers, Johann Gottfried Herder,
and Jacob Grimm, who regarded myth as a universal form of figurative thinking, the essence
of a national worldview. Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, the concept of «myth» was interpreted from various
standpoints. Since ancient times, mythology has been linked with literary creation. Reading such
works presupposes identifying and interpreting mythological elements or structures.
The methodology of mythological analysis is oriented toward recognizing and discovering, within the artistic fabric,
myths or mythological structures; identifying the literary variant of a myth with the invariant
formed in oral literature (folklore); elucidating the artistic function of a mythological
image within the context of the literary work; and investigating the writer’s motive for turning to it.
In contemporary literary studies, the mythological school has been transformed into neo-mythologism and
mythological criticism (myth analysis), represented by the concept of archetypes (Jung) and
the interpretation of myth as a trans-historical factor of artistic creation (Frye, Eliade).
The biographical approach. This is a method of studying a literary work with regard to the biography of the
author. Its essence lies in the careful study of the writer’s biography, which can serve as a key
to reading his works. The sources of such information are the artist’s letters, memoirs, autobiography,
contemporaries’ reminiscences, and variant literary texts. The principal genre of the biographical method
is the literary portrait.

The philological approach.

The specificity of the philological method lies in the collection,
systematization, and interpretation of texts with regard to their linguistic features. The basis of the philological
method is the study of primary sources, on the results of which the understanding
of a literary work can be built. The strategy of the method consists in the description, cataloguing, and linguistic
analysis of texts, in the study of the artistic form of a work — its lexical, syntactic,
and phonetic means. The philological method is associated with the emergence of formalism in the literature
of the avant-garde (constructivism, cubism, futurism, abstractionism). Textual criticism and the study of the
poetics of a literary work are connected with it to a certain degree.
The cultural-historical school. The theoretical foundation of the cultural-historical school was
positivism (of the 1830s). The founder of this school is the French scholar Hippolyte Taine. In the
opinion of representatives of this school, literary phenomena must be studied in strict cause-and-effect relation, taking into account the writer’s biography and psychology, his cultural
milieu, social consciousness, ethnic specificity, and even climate and geographical
location. Only within the framework of a culture does a work of art arise and realize itself as a social
phenomenon that can be accepted and understood. At the basis of the literary process, Taine identified three
factors: race (the national distinctiveness of a literature), milieu (human psychology,
socio-political circumstances, nature, climate, geographical conditions), and moment (the influence on the writer’s
creative concerns of a literature).

The psychological school.

The systemic foundations of the psychological school in literary studies
took shape at the end of the 19th century. In the view of its adherents, the aesthetic nature of creativity should be
sought in psychology, where the word is born as a model of the sense-organ’s perceptions of the realities of
actuality, expressing thought and feeling in the form of an image capable of influencing the consciousness of other
people. The most important element in the structure of the word is its inner form, which is the source
of the formation of new words, the basis of a language’s figurativeness and of a literary work’s artistry. Such
a structure makes it possible to disclose the psychology of creation and the psychology of the perception of a work of art,
and to clarify the particularities of its poetics.

Within the context of the psychological school, intuitionism (H. Bergson, B. Croce)
occupies a notable place — a line of research that elevates the significance of the subconscious, proclaiming intuition
as the principal and determining method of aesthetic cognition.
At the end of the 19th century, the psychoanalytic method took shape, founded by S. Freud.
Its essence lies in interpreting the subconscious in the psychic (creative) activity of a person.
Freudians view artistic creation through the prism of the reconciliation of the «pleasure
principle» and the «reality principle». This process presupposes the transition of subconscious desires into
artistic images, the realization of the soul’s forces, and the resolution of intrapsychic conflicts. They see the sources and
driving forces of artistic creation in a person’s striving to fulfill unsatisfied
desires connected with sexual experience. Such, too, is their account of the motivation behind the actions of literary
heroes.

The theory of archetypes was advanced by Jung. An archetype, according to Jung, is a «universal symbol»,
a «collective unconscious», images, characters, and themes that have existed in literature since their
emergence, constantly being restored in its development. He saw the task of the researcher as
understanding the archetype and the particularities of its functioning in art.
Literary comparativism (comparative literary studies) took shape in the 19th
century. It develops in interaction with literary theory, cultural studies, philosophy, and
psychology. It orients itself toward the methodological foundations of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and
reception aesthetics. At the center of comparativist research are the following problems:
the migration of plots, motifs, and their variants in national literatures; the typology of artistic
forms (the comparison of artistic phenomena of different periods and literatures with a view to identifying common features and
regularities of development); the historical evolution of artistic forms (genres, styles, stylistic
varieties, types of creative work) in the verbal art of different peoples, the reproduction of the worldwide
(regional) dynamics of literary development; and the cultural context of individual literary-mythic
phenomena.

Phenomenology.

At the beginning of the 20th century, phenomenology spread in philosophy and subsequently in literary studies —
a scholarly method of literary-critical interpretation of verbal works,
based on elucidating its linguistic-semantic sources and the psychological preconditions of its emergence.
The artistic perception of a work appears as an act of co-creation, as an act of «recognizing the work».
The phenomenological doctrine is applicable to disclosing the psychology of literary
creation.

Literary hermeneutics.

Hermeneutics is the science of interpreting an artistic text. The foundations of modern hermeneutics
were laid by M. Heidegger, H.-G. Gadamer, and P. Ricoeur. Its key concept is the understanding of the text. The basis of
human being is speech; but in actuality, speech is realized only in an utterance. Hermeneutics presupposes an individual reading, an assimilation of the text, resting on the reader’s prior
aesthetic experience. A dialogue arises between the work and the interpreter. Interpretation is
fundamentally open (there can be a multiplicity of interpretations of a text) and is never final. P. Ricoeur distinguished three stages in understanding a literary text:

1) analysis of the content and form of the work;

2) the process of reading, which conditions a certain reaction on the part of the reader;

3) the ascription of meaning to the text.

Reception aesthetics. What matters most for reception aesthetics is the active role of the reader in the
process of coming to know a literary text. Reception aesthetics regards the artistic text as an
open structure oriented toward the reader, studying readers’ reactions and evaluations. Within the system «author –
work – reader», the emphasis falls on the last component. The problem of the reception of a literary work
must be resolved from the standpoint of the aesthetic nature of the artistic word, taking into account the following
fundamental particulars:

1. The receptive approach presupposes a dialogue between the work and the reader;
the structure of a verbal work is designed for a potential dialogue, and is therefore dialogic by its
very nature.

2. A work of art, although it has its own invariant (the realized authorial intent),
is, in artistic perception, many-faced, many-sided, that is, it is characterized by receptive
variance.

3. The character of reception depends on what is depicted in the work, on the emotional-psychological state of the reader at the moment of perceiving the work (mood), on the level of culture, aesthetic
experience, and understanding of literature, and on the capacity to be transformed by, and to be susceptible to the suggestion of, the word.

4. The recipient is a co-participant in the creative process.

5. No reception should depend on the opinion of the
author, a literary critic, or any other interpreter.

6. Artistic language is the language of play.
The reception of a work of art is likewise a game played by certain rules.

7. Reception is always a new reading of the work of art.

Structuralism and semiotics.

Structuralism as a theoretical current was inaugurated by F. de
Saussure, who conceived of language as a system of signs. Structuralism in literary studies (Iu. Lotman,
R. Barthes, M. Bakhtin) centers on the concept of the text: it interprets the text as a system of signs;
it clarifies what makes linguistic information a work of art; it investigates the poetic functions of language.
Iu. Lotman regarded the poetic text as a complex hierarchical system whose elements
are interconnected with one another. Every literary text is formed out of several systems (rhyme,
metrics, lexicon, syntax).
Poststructuralism is an intellectual current of the Western humanistic worldview, characterized
by a semiotic treatment of reality and a distrust of the positive. Its representatives
rejected the traditional notion of the author as the source of the text, considering the reader a creative
co-participant in the interpretation of the text. One of the currents of poststructuralism – deconstructionism
— advanced the idea of the «decentralization» of structure and developed a view of writing as a play of
"presence" and "absence".

Postcolonial criticism.

An understanding of the postcolonial in culture is impossible without
grasping the essence of cultural colonialism – a set of measures, in any form of popular
or high culture, directed at supporting political and economic power. Among the devices
of cultural colonialism belongs the metropole’s appropriation of the cultural values of the colonies.
Resistance to cultural colonialism is anticolonial in form — the debunking of imperial
myths and the counterposing to them of the idea of national liberation — and postcolonial (the recognition
of the interdependence of the colonial and the anticolonial) and liberation from political
allegiance and imperial thinking.

Self-check questions.

1. Identify the basic scholarly principles of the mythological school.
2. Has the biographical method become outdated for use in contemporary literary studies?
3. In what does the limitation of the philological method consist?
4. How does the cultural-historical method relate to contemporary cultural studies?
5. Present a psychoanalytic interpretation of Lesia Ukrainka’s poem «Contra spem spero».
6. How can comparativism be applied to versification?
7. In what respects are psychoanalysis and phenomenology similar?
8. Formulate the principal tasks of hermeneutics.
9. What is the «horizon of expectation» in the perception of a literary work?
10. How are structuralism and semiotics related to one another?