Kriitika kirjandusajaloo kosmoses: teksti ja konteksti probleeme 1920. aastate näitel
Critical Writing in the Space of Literary History: Problems of Text and Context on the Example of the 1920s

Summary/Abstract: In the Estonian culture the term kriitika is traditionally interpreted somewhat differently from its Anglo-American counterpart "criticism". Estonian literary history bears strong traces of the German tradition, which differentiates between criticism and literary scholarship and regards criticism in its narrower sense as a source of literary history. In modern Estonia, literary criticism (with its numerous genres such as review, problem article, essay, lampoon, feuilleton etc.) receives continuous attention, but the content and volume of the concept has historical implications. The Soviet period, for example, served to amplify the institutional role of criticism as ideological interpreter and medium. Drawing on R. Barthes' discussion of work and text the article regards criticism as a text resulting from a general process of interpretation. The article suggests that the critic could be regarded as a historical reader who has presented his interpretation in the form of verbal text and critical writing. Such a text could be analyzed by simultaneous consideration of meaning-creating contexts, which could be attained by implementing the concept of "context field". Analysis of the context fields of a historical text of criticism requires a context-sensitive approach to the critical text regardable as a reception process and ècriture coming from a certain socio-cultural environment. Considering the small size of the Estonian cultural field and its having been investigated quite thoroughly, such a complex approach even looks feasible enough, in particular if the semantic relationships taken from the cultural sphere are used in the most up-to-date software developments and if the earlier texts of literary criticism are made accessible in digital form.

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