| Abstract [eng] |
The research works submitted for the habilitation procedure (the monograph Hostage and Partner of Time: Soviet and Post-Soviet Lithuanian Literary Criticism (1945–2000) and articles) analyse the development of Soviet and post-Soviet Lithuanian literary criticism from 1945 to 2000. The first part of the research deals with Soviet-era literary criticism and highlights the most important tendencies in its development, reveals the factors that influenced that development, discusses the phenomenon of Socialist Realism, and examines the methodological orientation of literary criticism. The analysis focuses on the first post-war decade, when literary criticism was forced to become a tool for the propagation of the Communist Party ideology. Later, beginning with the mid-1950’s, the analysis concentrates on the relative liberation of literary criticism and its modernisation, which came about as a result of the most skilled critics choosing alternative methodologies rather than the sociological art interpretation: phenomenology, structuralism, and reception theory. The second part of the research surveys the process of literary criticism in the first decade of Lithuanian independence, accenting attempts at methodological renewal, discussing new tasks, and summarising the results. Having stated the methodological innovations in academic criticism (postcolonialism, cultural studies, feminism), inspired by the experience of the Lithuanian émigré researchers and the Western humanities in general, attention is focussed on the potential and actual dialogue among different methods. The peculiarities of the non-academic critics of this period are also discussed, holding essayism to be their most distinctive characteristic. The last part of the research provides the extended portraits of some literary critics, who chose a method other than the sociological one during the Soviet era: Vytautas Kubilius, representing the psychological tradition of literary interpretation, Albertas Zalatorius, relying on the reception theory, Viktorija Daujotytė, practising literary phenomenology, and Kęstutis Nastopka, introducing structuralism and semiotics. The fifth portrait presents a Lithuanian émigré critic, Rimvydas Šilbajoris, a representative of New Criticism (the Anglo-American school of literary criticism). His works on Lithuanian literature were relatively well-known in Lithuania during the Soviet era and had a significant moral and aesthetic influence. The close analysis reveals not only the methodological affiliations of these critics, but also their stylistic individualities, treating literary criticism as literature, i.e. as “primary texts”. |
