Jan Mukarovsky's Structural Poetics and Esthetics

Jan Mukaiovsky (1891-1975) was one of the greatest theoreticians of literature and estheticians of his time. He was among the leading architects of the original structural conception of language, literature, art, folklore and culture which was produced by the so-called Prague School (the Prague Linguistic Circle). He outlined a coherent semiotic theory of art as early as 1934 and many of his essays, on subjects as diverse as sound and meaning in both poetry and prose, versification, the unit of sense and the context, dialogue, the plurality of views in sculpture, time in the film, the esthetic function, norm and value, the phenomenology of functions, the relations between art, culture and society or the role of the individual in the history of art, remain unsurpassed to this day. Among the many factors that influenced Mukai~ovskf's thought three were particularly important the tradition of Czech esthetics, modern linguistics and the Russian formalist school of literary theory. Czech esthetics had pursued a vigorous and quite original course ever since the period of the Enlightenment, unlike the other related disciplines to which only a few Czech scholars made original contributions during the 19th and early 20th century. It developed in a sort of symbiosis with the study of literature and language, and while it set out to construct systematic theories, it also produced a great many studies of specific problems by philologists, ethnographers, philosophers, psychologists and sociologists, as well as critics and artists. This tradition culminated in the work of Mukaiovskf's teacher, Otakar Zich, who was both a scholar and an artist in his own right. His contributions to musicology, poetics and the theory of dramatic art (Zich, 1910, 1918, 1931), though practically unknown abroad because of the language obstacle, had their place among the best work that was being done in those fields anywhere in the world (Mukaiovsky, 1934b, 1935). Mukatovsky inherited Zich's determination to develop esthetics as a scholarly discipline free from any taint of metaphysics

Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Poetics · Poetry · Education, Psychology, and Social Research · Philosophy

• Continuity in Discontinuity

  Open Access•Marek Skovajsa•Cultural Sociology•2021

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