SUMMARY

The book is a collection of materials created during the first year of the independent philological seminar Third Literary Research, held in Ufa and oriented at methodological problems of humanitarian knowledge. The name of the seminar implies the direction of searching for ways of text research different from positivist narrow-mindedness and postmodernist arbitrariness. In a free discussion, philologists, linguists, philosophers and pedagogues discuss the theoretical grounds of analysis, terminology, collisions of methods and interpretations, and principles of teaching the resulting approaches in high schools. Presentations of the participants and papers by correspondents of the seminar touch upon general and particular literary research problems.

The first session deals with the indirect polemic between M. L. Gasparov and M. M. Bakhtin, which covers the issue of the subject and boundaries of philology and methodology of humanitarians in general. The outstanding philologist M. L. Gasparov, protesting in this way against the popular manner of some literary scholars to make vulgar and uncontrollable use of Bakhtin’s ideas, sets Bakhtin beyond the boundaries of philology, speaking of him as a philosopher. At the same time, Gasparov, in categorical terms of Bakhtin himself, makes a "monologic" structure of his, rather sketchy, vision of Bakhtin’s ideas.

The second session is a sort of a methodological experiment, an attempt of reconstructing Gasparov’s and Bakhtin’s analytical methods based on specific literary material such as a fragment from The Station Master by A. Pushkin.

The third session sums up the three-part cycle of discussions on Bakhtin and Gasparov. The discussion is based on the paper by S. Y. Danilin titled "Philosophic and Aesthetic Backgrounds of M. M. Bakhtin’s Literary Research Concept".

The fourth session deals with the popular term "concept", its essence, boundaries and practicability of its use when analyzing literary works. Though often used needlessly, this notion can be of help in a number of cases when describing cultural characteristics not described in bilingual dictionaries and posing difficulties for translation.

Participants of the fifth session of the seminar touch upon the fundamental problems of literary research methodology and come to the conclusion that the two ways text researchers have in stock today, that is, positivism and post-modernism, are not efficient enough. The discussion has to go back to M. L. Gasparov, who is in sympathy with positivism, and M. M. Bakhtin who, though indirectly, paved the way for post-modernist interpretations implying uncontrollable arbitrariness on the part of those who interpret texts.

The sixth session is again an opportunity for a methodological experiment. This time, participants of the seminar and correspondents from other countries (Estonia, Croatia, Ukraine, the USA and the UK) and cities share their independent analyses of one literary work, a poem by S. Gandlevsky "Vsyo gromko tikaet, pod spichechnye marshi…" ("Everything’s ticking loudly, to the marches of matches…").

The seventh session, the last session of the first year of the seminar, brings forth the problem of teaching the history of literature. As teaching of this discipline is usually associated with a number of everyday-life problems, which is an obstacle to clearing the question of what the conceptual background of such a course should be like, participants of the seminar tried to turn away the details and imagine an ideal world where nothing would

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prevent from studying the literary history material. The attempt of developing universal principles for such a course was not successful, but it became clear that the personality of the pedagogue plays a key part in teaching such an academic course.

«Третье литературоведение» — это независимый уфимский филологический семинар, ориентированный на методологические проблемы гуманитарного знания. Название семинара обозначает направление поиска путей исследования текста, отличных от позитивистской ограниченности и  постмодернистского произвола. В свободной дискуссии литературоведами, лингвистами, философами, педагогами обсуждаются теоретические основания анализа, терминология, столкновение методов и интерпретаций, принципы преподавания в вузе получившихся результатов. В выступлениях участников и сообщениях корреспондентов семинара затрагиваются общие и частные литературоведческие проблемы.

Координатор семинара: Борис Орехов