Gustav Shpet's Contribution to Philosophy and Cultural Theory

O granitsakh nauchnogo literaturovedeniia (On the Limits of Scientific Literary Scholarship)

248 O granitsakh nauchnogo literaturovedeniia (On the Limits of Scientific Literary Scholarship) Gustav Shpet Translated from the Russian by Dušan Radunović and Galin Tihanov 1. The object of literary scholarship does not belong among the objects of the natural sciences; in defining the tasks of literary scholarship, analogies from the natural sciences are methodologically illicit [nezakonomerny]. 2. The givenness of the object of literary scholarship is significative [signifikativnaia ], and not perceptive. 3. Literary scholarship is part of the encyclopaedia of philology and employs the heuristic methods of criticism and interpretation. 4. Detaching itself within philology from material history, and more generally from the so-called realia, literary scholarship, as a science of the "word," aligns itself with linguistics, which is what defines the problematic of literary scholarship. 5. The word, as an object of literary scholarship, is carved out from the linguistic word by way of delimitation: it is a word turned trope (as opposed to the word made term), an artistic word (as opposed to the pragmatic word), and a written one (as opposed to the spoken word). 6. The immanent necessity of the literary word is revealed in the analysis of the object of literature itself, the latter being a collective consciousness sui generis. Literary consciousness is the cultural self-consciousness of a nation; it surmounts the ethnic diversity of the dialects by creating a common literary language. 7. In respect of content, literature serves the purpose of preserving the cultural past of a nation; in respect of form, it serves the purpose of protecting the artistic form of the word from its degeneration in folklore [v ustnoi slovesnosti]. O granitsakh nauchnogo literaturovedeniia 249 8. In its content, literature provides material for the social sciences in general; in order to make this material its object, literary scholarship requires a specific principle of selection. 9. The criteria of form define the problematic of literary scholarship; these criteria should be derived from an analysis of the structure of the word in its linguistic functions . 10. This problematic is distributed as follows: A) external forms: (i) indicative-signi ficative forms (predominantly compositional and dispositional) are the subject of technical poetics (which comprises technical rhetoric); (ii) external expressive forms are the concern of stylistics (which is based on syntax as the doctrine of intonationrelated coordinating [intonatsionno-uporiadochivaiushchikh] forms of the word); B) the entire content of these forms (Gehalt): (i) plot [siuzhet], as the ultimate matter, is the problem of comparative study ("historical poetics"); (ii) plot in its inner and dialectical forms of literary processing [obrabotki] is the problem of the interpretive history of literature and the theory of literature corresponding to it (literary scholarship proper or theoretical poetics, rhetoric) as a system of terms, nomenclature, and categories. 11. Literary scholarship naturally exceeds its own boundaries; on the one hand, in the direction of its empirical foundations, from where the farthest transition is towards general philosophical principles; and on the other hand, in the direction of the explanatory hypotheses of material history, from where the transition is towards metaphysical anticipations and world-view constructions. 12. The problem of the primary foundations and the methodology of literary scholarship is a particular problem of the philosophy and methodology of scientific knowledge . ...