Levchuk T. The Criteria of Artistic Merit of Literature: The Content-Form Dichotomy in the Contexts of the Epochs

The dissertation is focused on the investigation of the criteria of fictionality in terms of phenomenology of literature. A narrow inquiry is made into the development of the concept of literature along with the generation of the criteria of fictionality in the 40 context of cultural and historical epochs, art phenomena and national characteristics. The aesthetic categories determine the criteria of fictionality within a framework of a cultural and historical epoch. These categories vary and get updated as a function of a historical context, ongoing artistic practice and the development of the appropriate scholarly introspection. We have revised such criteria of fictionality as make-belief and integrity. An attempt is made to reveal the extent of their universality in terms of a content-form symbiosis. The interface of the credible and the fictitious in the artistic representation of the facts of reality makes us think about the role of genres while and when the concept of literature was being moulded. The aesthetic potentials of a genre are proved and demonstrated due to a long-lasting development of literature. The very notion of “genre” is probably the most conspicuous criterion of literariness. What are the criteria for attesting this or that text (with specific generic characteristics) as fiction? Remarkably, this question is intermittently brought up, especially regarding the functional genres, i.e. those related to the other (non-literary) types of human activities – politics, history, science, law. Such genres as utopia / anti-utopia, essay, biography, testament manifest the blurred boundaries between genres. We have explored the gravitation of a European literature to formalism in poetry, which manifested itself in two routes: versified aestheticism and visual poetry. While the former contributed to the evolution of linguistic norms in fiction, the latter demonstrated an insatiable desire for a constant exposure of one‟s technique of writing poetry. Formalism in Ukrainian literature was revealed both at a methodological level and at a level of poetic discourse. Apart from explicitly bombastic experiments of a futurist poetry-type the Ukrainian classics – Ivan Franko and Lesya Ukrainka – displayed cardinally new formalistic approaches to poetry. The aesthetic and creative dissonance of the two authors reflected a polemic between the aesthetic systems of two movements in literature: modernism and realism. Closer to our times a specific attribute of literariness has become more prominent. This attribute is verbal imagery, a universal means of artistic representation of subjectivity. We have studied the works of a few outstanding figures of Ukrainian modernism with due regard to their linguistic level. B. I. Antonych, V. Svidzinskij, B. Shults, V. Stus became the main characters of their own works, lyrical and autobiographical at their core. Owing to a creative deployment of a metaphorical language these writers achieved the effect of integrating disparate realities into a new unity (Antonich, Svidzinskij and Shults were surrealists), or mould different (sometimes radically different) styles out of one verbally expressed image (Stus is an expressionist). The artists of this caliber opened up new vistas for poetry. Summing up, taking into account the cultural and historical framework of the criteria of fiction is the major methodological tenet providing the assessment of the art value of a literary work. The criteria of a literary critic have to be correlated with the criteria used to judge the value of fiction at the time the literary work was written.