Yu. M. Lotman and the problems of theoretical literary criticism

• Published in: Filologičeskij klass Vol. 27; no. 1; pp. 50 - 54
• Main Author: Shatin, Yuri Vasilievich
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English; Russian
• Published: Ural State Pedagogical University 01-04-2022
• Subjects: literary studies specialists; literature theory; post-structuralism; rhizome; structuralism; text structure
• DOI: 10.51762/1FK-2022-27-01-05
• EISSN: 2658-5235
• ISSN: 2071-2405

In the article, the author tries to assess the contribution of Yu. M. Lotman to the development of basic concepts of literary theory, which, along with the study of the problems of culture studies and the history of Russian literature, played an extremely important role in philological science. Among the large number of monographs and articles written by the scholar from Tartu, “Lectures on Structural Poetics” (1964) and “Culture and Explosion” (1992) stand out. According to the author of this article, it was in these works that the main break through took place, which put up an end to the rule of dogmatic literary criticism and opened up new opportunities in the field of philology. In particular, in the first book, the concept of structure as an epistemological category was postulated for the first time, in contrast to composition, which represents the material embodiment of the structure in text. In the last study, Lotman largely develops a number of new ideas, in which the text is understood as a field of relationships between systemic and non-systemic elements and suggests the possibility of various options for its development. In “Culture and Explosion”, the scholar presented a set of ideas that largely coincide with the thoughts of European poststructuralists, but differ in the interpretation of the main features of the literary process.