READING
in the Age of Media, Computers, and Internet
CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS
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NORM AND LITERARINESS
The relationship between the normative and the literary provides the key to the study of normative poetics, i.e. all non-aesthetic norms that have been applied to Czech and Bulgarian literature since the 60s of the twentieth century. By literariness we shall mean: 1) the literary potential that leads to the creation of new aesthetic norms and the transformation of familiar ones; and 2) the literary specific capacity to maintain the simultaneous co-existence of the two. The paper comments briefly on three literary history criteria of systematising normative poetics in order to arrive at a new terminological order for the analysis of the relation between norms and literariness. The first criterion is based on the language of the literary text; the second one is related to the role of literary criticism as an institutional intermediary between political power and the reader; while the third criterion treats the methodological unsuitability of the rhetoric of ideology. The paper discusses some of Ian Mukarovsky’s views springing from his interpretation of the aesthetic norm. An alternative approach to the analysis of normative poetics is based on the relationship between fiction and reality which, Iser suggests, should be studied not in terms of confrontation but of communication. The relationship between norm and literariness is a private issue of: 1) the relationship between aesthetic norms and other norms, and 2) the relationship between fiction and reality.