О чем "помнит" жанр"? (Генетический аспект жанра)

Abstract

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”.