Juri Lotmani kunstiteksti lugemise õpetus
How to Read Yuri Lotman's Artistic Texts

Summary/Abstract: The article is focused on Yuri Lotman's methodology of teaching literature and his textbooks for Estonian schools, which part of his legacy has hitherto received relatively less attention. Lotman's basic idea was that at high school level Russian should be taught by using original literature, as texts of high aesthetic merit introduce language as a mediator of the underlying culture. That idea was applied in his "Chrestomathy for Analytic Reading in Grade 9" (1982), used in Estonian schools in the 1980s. The article represents an attempt to demonstrate how the textbook instructions for reading poetry relate to Lotman's general ideas pertaining to structural analysis of an artistic text and to literary communication in general. In addition, both the textbook analysed and Lotman's publications in the press reflect the author's views of the Estonian cultural situation in the 1970s and 1980s.

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