О чем "помнит" жанр"? (Генетический аспект жанра)
Streszczenie
The goal of this article is to establish the meaning of the genre as a mechanism intended
for the artistic completion. For this purpose, we discuss the genetic aspect of the genre;
starting with mythological foundations of art, the article revisits main parameters of
mythological archetypes. After a critical analusis of theoretical approaches to the
transition from the mythological to literary world-modeling (Olga Freidenberg and
Northrop Frye) we move to the discussion of Mikhail Bakhtins famous idea of "the
undying archaic nature of the genre”. Our research suggests that the "genres memory” is
not a theoretical fiction, but a basic category crucial for the understanding of the genres
structure and functions it acquires in the creative act. "The genre memory” is a system of
signals that connects the readers mind with the model of the world that had petrified in
the generic archetype. Thanks to "the genre memory”, the genre can fulfill its main
function - to serve as the mechanism that translates a limited continuum of a literary text
into the cosmos, a "condensed Universe”.