The article is an analysis of René Wellek’s contribution to the theory of comparative literature. It draws on his characterization of the crisis of comparative literature presented at the 2nd Congress of ICLA in the USA, and continues with the interpretation of some of his other opinions concerning the situation in which literary studies in the USA found itself at the end of the 20th century. They are included especially in his articles “The Attack on Literature” and “Destroying Literary Studies.” René Wellek’s theoretical opinions are analysed especially in the context of emerging cultural studies and their ideologization of literature in general, formally expressed, for example, in the Bernheimer Report for the American Association of Comparative Literature. The author points out that the future of the comparative literature lies not in its use of ideological contexts but in its ability to draw attention to universal principles and values, perhaps thorough the conceptions of inter-literariness and world literature, and thus overcome the harmfulness of separatist tendencies fed by particularisms of various types.
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Work on cognitive literary studies has been one of the approaches revealing new aspects of literary phenomena for some time. The article attempts to use a cognitive terminological framework to discuss the concept of imagination, which is perhaps the phenomenon most frequently associated with the nature of literature. It sets out some basic features of the imagination developed throughout history, ending in Romanticism, i.e. in the period during which imagination saw its greatest flourishing, first in the theoretical work of T. S. Coleridge, and then in the poetry of William Wordsworth and the other Romantic poets. Wordsworth’s imagination is characterized as greatly determined by the temporality of his poetic seeing of the world, and is illuminated through the concept of the episodic memory and its role in the construction of the present and the future. It is claimed that the poet selectively re-imagined elements of the past to build an ethically and spiritually charged present and future resulting in the creation of the wholeness of his life. Cognitive analysis of Wordsworth’s poems can thus show the author in a more realistic light, free of the transcendental aura that has often been attributed to him.
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The article is an attempt to approach the poetry of Emily Dickinson through some of the principles of cognitive literary studies. In the first part the focus is placed on the first approaches to literary cognition in Slovak literary theory and on the nature of cognitive literary studies. The second part is a reading of some of the poems of the 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson from the point of view of traditional criticism as well as cognitive literary studies, with a particular emphasis on the way the writer cognises the world around herself. Her poetic vision is presented as iconic expressions of mental experiences aimed at gnomic compression of the final image. She is characterised as a poet who “thinks through images” and her poetry as a fusion of the conceptual and figurative search for the truth.
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