Contextual analysis of precedent texts for scholarly discourse in theoretical and practical literary studies

The article continues the conceptual description of theoretical and applied literary criticism as an academic discipline and focuses on its historical and methodological aspects. The purpose of the work is to present a strategy for selecting precedent texts of Russian literary criticism and their contextual analysis. The authors consider modern approaches to the definition of scholarly discourse and characterize the special status of the literary studies, on the one hand, striving for a discursive synthesis with linguistics and logic, and on the other – giving greater importance to the subjective sides of personality, which brings it closer to philosophy and fiction. The use of the concept of “precedent texts” (Yu.N. Karaulov) has been clarified in relation to the description of scholarly discourse. The authors substantiate the prospects of a historical and methodological approach to identification of precedent texts in Russian literary criticism of the 20th century, presented as a dynamic semiotic system (Yu.M. Lotman), the scientific “canon” of which undergoes constant transformations in the process of development. They consider the works of A.P. Skaftymov, A. Lezhnev (A.Z. Gorelik), N.Ya. Berkovsky, M.A. Shcheglov, A. Terts (A.D. Sinyavsky), A.P. Chudakov, Yu.A. Karabchievsky as examples of precedent texts. It is proved that the key methodological role in their selection belongs to the concept of context as a set of extra-textual connections of a work, which forms a background for its perception. At the same time, the study of a scholarly text proceeds from the priority of objective contexts over subjective ones, in contrast to the study of fiction. An algorithm of contextual analysis is presented, which includes a consistent consideration of historical, scientific, biographical and bibliographic contexts, which are closely related and influence each other. Their reconstruction has an interdisciplinary character and forms students’ skills of critical selection of contextual information, identification of its factual and heuristic value while observing the principle of historicism. Anticipating the immanent analysis of a scholarly text, contextual analysis also allows a literary researcher to come to a more rational understanding of the role of his own personality in research activities.