Associations between anthropology and literature are usually expressed in either of the two aspects: as a literary anthropology or anthropology of literature. The present text offers a discussion on a third area where these disciplines can meet - namely, anthropology of literary reading which focuses on empirical readers. The author starts his presentation of this approach from situating anthropology of literary reading amongst other domains dealing with empirical recipient (i.e. psychology and sociology of literature). The following sections methodologically analyse psychological, sociological and anthropological accounts of literary reception, focusing on the manner in which these approaches reciprocally complement one another. He subsequently shows the opportunities provided by anthropology of literature in the field of analysis of reception, owed to inclusion in the research horizon of issues connected with the context of reading and its role in recipients' everyday life. He concludes by considering potential usefulness of such research to literary science.
This article is an account of the emerging revision of views on peculiarity of thinking processes and interpersonal communication acts. The authoress comes to the conclusion that perhaps, it is high time now to reject some highly systemic concepts in favour of intuitive and more commonsensical research/scholarly attitudes, particularly in the area of investigations in reader response.
The essay was published in a collection entitled 'Revenge of the Aesthetic. The Place of Literature in Theory Today' (ed. by M. P. Clark, University of California Press, Berkeley 2000). The author attempts at answering the title questions, assuming the issues of interpretation of culture, as a broad concept, as a starting point; following Geertz, he perceives culture as a constitutive element of the humankind, as opposed to a quality that emerged at a later stage, as an added value of a sort. This changed perspective renders the anthropological dimension of art - and, consequently, of literature - open and, consequently, makes the latter a model and an instrument for describing the mechanisms taking place between a human and his or her surrounding environment. Thus, literature becomes a sui generis founding myth of the mankind, and a method of alleviating tensions between the cultural centre and peripheral areas. The fictions mentioned in the title prove mutually complementary: the first one (explanatory) serves to set the chaos of our surrounding world in an order, whereas the second, or literary (discovery-related, searching) one, enables transgression beyond the sphere of mind and immediate perception, allowing for a rather painless confrontation with the incomprehensible and the inexpressible.
This text is yet another attempt at taking up the immortal question reappearing seasonally in university or college seminars in humanities: Can interpretation be scientific? Can an act of interpreting, understood as responding to the call and meeting the challenge posed by a text (or, by 'texts', in a broad semiotic meaning), aspire to be termed 'scientific', as per the customary explanation of the term? If, namely, there is always someone's subjectivity behind an interpretative gesture, whereas striving for objectivity - or, inter-subjective communicability - is part of the essence of science, then, is it not so that the notion of 'scientific interpretation' proves to be a classical example for quadrature of the circle? The author also attempts at responding the question of why science - understood for the purpose as codified rules of a methodological game - is so much afraid of interpretative subjectivity, and, at the end of the day, why it strives so insistently for taming any interpretative passion.
Combination of Word and Image has been recently made part of literary works, with increasing frequency (e.g. novel narratives or lyrical monologues). In such cases, image becomes part of the utterance itself, finding a place for itself in a certain sender-receiver relationship arrangement, thus also becoming a pole of various meaning-generating tensions and an integral part of the entire work. The article aims at discussing the role that images, i.e. iconic signs, play in the structure of artistic pieces of this sort. The main focus is on the multiple semiotic games whose basis is the clash of differing sign-based orders, world-representing forms and communicative conventions. Analysis of selected pieces aims at showing the multiplicity of possible functions ascribed to visual elements as part of verbal text. A comparison of the achievements of a few selected writers is also convincing of how mutually remote positions were assumed by artists against the significative value of iconic sings (from affirmation, criticism, through to problematisation). The condition for the reader to understand the arrangement s/he comes across is, therefore, to find its suspected motivations, to discover the premises providing the grounds for such a course of presentation, and, to formulate a hypothesis restoring the coherency of a text being based upon two incommensurable orders of meaning.
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