Literárna veda a zákonitosti (Kapitolka z dejín vedy)
Literary Science and Patterns

Summary/Abstract: Over the years of its troubled evolution literature has shown a high degree of repetition: individual literary texts have mutually identical as well as different properties. What dominates in literary science is the structural, systematic and typological process of establishing patterns of regularity in form i.e. structural types, and the result of the process is literary forms, genres, movements and types of narrative structures, types of composition, chronotopes etc. Jakobson´s structuralism with its universalist ambition establishes isomorphic phenomena typical of literature as a whole – it aspires to define literariness and poetic function through the model of its mechanism. In the course of its history literary science has attempted at formulating diachronic patterns. E.g. within Darwin´s theory of evolution Ferdinand Brunetière attempted to disclose the „laws and conditions controlling genre evolution“. The Darwinesque pattern is also used by Franco Moretti in the process of establishing patterns of competition of literary genres trying to acquire their share in the book market. What was formulated by Russian formalists as a pattern of literary evolution is the principle of tension between automatization and de-automatization of literary techniques. Then, there is Jakobson´s productive conception of invariants as a constant scheme in relation to fluctuations, variants. It focuses on investigating the different within the same (different variants in various literary works by the same writer) and the same within the different (invariants in different literary works by the same writer or different writers of the same literary movement). We analyze the methods of establishing patterns of repetition and schemes in selected literary scientific works: for instance in that by Northrop Frye the subject was repetition on the highest level – the whole literature seen as a specific system – to repetitions on lower levels of subsystems, where texts are grouped into particular classes, e.g. genres.

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