AESTHETICS OF IDENTIFICATION AND FOLKLORE

Abstract

Structuralism is a transdisciplinary branch of science that has shown development in the study of literature. The dialectical concept of structuralism from the Soviet school of semiotics in general and Jury Lotman in particular was an improvement on Formalism as well as Czech Structuralism. The Formalists were often onesided in their approach with the attention focussed on isolated parts with the resultant neglect of the whole. The Czech Structuralists, on the other hand, concentrated too strongly on the whole or the system, often at the cost of the constituent parts. The literary work to Lotman, is constituted by the text in its relations with the text-external reality. If text-external relations do exist, one may ask: how adequately is the literary work received? Knowledge of the code of the literary work now becomes important. With regards to folklore genres Lotman defines a collection of principles as the aesthetics of identification. The expectation of the public (audience) is confirmed by the structure of the whole work because the rules for the author (narrator) and his public (audience) are similar. Opposed to this is the aesthetics of contrast when the code of the sender and the receiver may differ considerably. An adequate structural study therefore, becomes impossible principally if the text-external relations are negated.