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Marin Laak. Critical Writing in the Space of Literary History: Problems of Text and Context on the Example of the 1920s |
2007, nr. 12 |
In the Estonian culture the term kriitika
is traditionally interpreted somewhat differently from its Anglo-American
counterpart "criticism". Estonian literary history bears
strong traces of the German tradition, which differentiates between
criticism and literary scholarship and regards criticism in its
narrower sense as a source of literary history. In modern Estonia,
literary criticism (with its numerous genres such as review, problem
article, essay, lampoon, feuilleton etc.) receives continuous
attention, but the content and volume of the concept has historical
implications. The Soviet period, for example, served to amplify
the institutional role of criticism as ideological interpreter
and medium.
Drawing on R. Barthes' discussion of work and text the article
regards criticism as a text resulting from a general process of
interpretation. The article suggests that the critic could be
regarded as a historical reader who has presented his interpretation
in the form of verbal text and critical writing. Such a text could
be analyzed by simultaneous consideration of meaning-creating
contexts, which could be attained by implementing the concept
of "context field". Analysis of the context fields of
a historical text of criticism requires a context-sensitive approach
to the critical text regardable as a reception process and
ècriture coming from a certain socio-cultural environment.
Considering the small size of the Estonian cultural field and
its having been investigated quite thoroughly, such a complex
approach even looks feasible enough, in particular if the semantic
relationships taken from the cultural sphere are used in the most
up-to-date software developments and if the earlier texts of literary
criticism are made accessible in digital form.
Keywords: text of criticism, R.
Barthes' theory, reception history, Estonian literary history
of the 1920s.
Marin Laak (b. 1964), PhD, Estonian Literary
Museum, senior researcher
marin.laak@gmail.com
| 2007 |
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