THEORETICAL BASIS OF THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACH IN LITERARY STUDIES

Abstract

The article deals with the theoretical foundations of literary anthropology and its significance for the analysis of literary texts. It is noted that literary anthropology arises as a result of an attempt to understand a person from anthropological, literary, philosophical, ethnographic, and cultural points of view; the methodological perspectives used by literary anthropology for a better understanding of literary texts derive precisely from “human studies” since the recognition of a person as a unique being who is capable of creating his world is the basis of anthropological theory. Based on the analysis of the works of Ukrainian and foreign researchers, literary anthropology is interpreted as one of the possible methodological perspectives or one of the possible options for interpreting artistic tests. In literary anthropology, two different argumentative directions are combined, since, on the one hand, more attention is paid to knowledge about man, and on the other hand, to the reflection of man in literature. Guided by the conviction that literary studies exists for literature, and not the other way around, it is more about proposals for interpretation than about the creation and defense of theoretical positions as an end in itself. It is noted that literature is doubly significant from an anthropological point of view: it depicts a person, examines him and aesthetically organizes, forms a person’s attitude to the world. To make sense of this in literary anthropology, what is needed is not so much a «method» in the strict sense of the word, as a combination of literary, scientific-historical, scientific-theoretical, as well as receptive and hermeneutic approaches. Anticipating an individual-human, humanistic view of literary texts, literary anthropology thereby sets a new prism for their research. Recognition of the primary role of a person in an artistic text is an impulse not only for a quantitative reassessment of values but also for a rethinking of the phenomenon of the person himself. Through the anthropological principle, literary science tries to explain man and the surrounding world, to understand man as a creator of culture and history, and the role of literature is to give man «different» knowledge about himself, to be a commentary on his cultural and historical development.