Studia Litterarum (Jun 2021)
Cognitive Aspects of Reception of Popular Literary Genres and Their Historical Variability
Abstract
In the article, the author investigates connections between historical variability of literary genres and readers’ ability to recognize them. Following J.-M. Schaeffer, the author understands genre as a semiotic sign constituted of a “generic name” and “generic notion.” The author interprets Schaeffer’s theory from the perspective of cognitive poetics and treats genres as “prototypes.” Their nature is both individual and collective—it derives from a person’s individual experience and skills of aesthetic reception, but also from social imaginary and stereotypes. The author focuses on a noncanonical genre of popular literature—science fiction—and argues that social and receptive aspects of the genre are interconnected. In the final part, the author analyses the image of “generation starship” in science fiction and concludes that changes of poetic techniques used to create fictional space of science-fictional starships—which has no correlation with readers’ empirical surroundings—formed a new “reading paradigm”, i.e., addressed mechanisms of reception that were not relevant previously in the history of the genre.
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