Descriptive Poetics among the Contemporary Literary Studies

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to present the position of descriptive poetics among various literary studies after the postmodernist turn. This problem is depicted as a methodological one, and relating to several important debates concerning: the specific character of the humanities, the validation of empirical cognition (including the issue of perceiving the cognition of the literary work as empirical one), the meaning of linguistic expressions (and the meaning of text), as well as the epistemological status of categories applied in science. The article outlines changes in the understanding of the cognitive status of literary studies, as affected by the modern philosophical discourse. These changes include: questioning of the existence of the literary fact, questioning of the existence of intersubjective area of research, perceiving the researcher’s language as a personal one, placing the literary thought at the meta-level of thinking of non-existence of coherent literary text and the human inability to understand it. These features of the contemporary literary studies push poetics out of its traditional research area, that is the descriptive studies which observe the literary text and lead to the formation of the sphere of intersubjective notions which are confirmed by the text analysis and assist in aesthetic perception of the artistic works (Polish: postaciowanie - the term used by Stanisław Ossowski). Further, the author of the article presents the categories used by descriptive poetics not only as a language of scientific description, but also as components of the former and the present-day literary communication. She also points to the negative effects of the decline of the language of descriptive poetics, which include: the difficulties in understanding the work of art, the recipient’s inability to describe their own reading experience, the loss of the connection with literary tradition. Changes in the categories applied in descriptive poetics are desirable but such transformations would also entail certain fundamental difficulties.