V.

Senthil Nathan
Asst.Prof. of English
Sri Vidya Mandir Arts and Science College
Uthangarai : Krishnagiri (DT)
Tamilnadu – 636902. India

The Object, Task and Methods of Literary History

- P.N.Medvedev and M.M. Bakhtin
P.N. Medvedev was a Russian Literary scholar. He was a professor, Social critic and friend of
Mikhail Bakhtin. After 1917 revolution, he published a great deal of his own writing on literary,
Sociological and Linguistic area. His most famous work is “The Formal method in Literary
Scholarship: a critical introduction to sociological poetics”. Mikhail Bakhtin was a Russian
philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics and the
philosophy of language. He was active in in the debates on aesthetics and literature and formed a
group called “Bakhtin Cricle”. He introduces the concepts, ‘Carivalesque’, ‘architectonic’,
‘heteroglossia’ and ‘Chronotope’ into literature. Some of his famous works are “Towards a
philosophy of the Act”, “Problems of Destoyevsky’s poetics” and “Rabelais and His
world”.

These Russian Formalists P.N. Medvedev and M.M.Bakhtin make great contribution to
the object, tasks and methods of literary history among others, concerning the term “Literary
environment”. In this, they discussed that the literary work is an immediate part of the literary
environment that collect the incidents and social active into it. From the historical point of view,
the individual literary work is a dependent and therefore actually inseparable element of the
literary environment. Furthermore, the literary environment is a part of the larger ideological
environment. In its turn, the ideological environment is an element that is likewise a dependent
element of the socioeconomic environment. Thus, literary texts are in a complex system of
interconnections and mutual influences.

The literary work can not be understood outside the unity of literature. Because each
element of the system is defined within several unique but interrelated unites. Therefore, it is
difficult to reveal and define the literary features without revealing its general ideological
features and socioeconomic features. One does not exist without the other. The genuine concrete
history study of the literary work is only possible when all these conditions are observed.
Therefore, the literary historian should not forget for a minute that the literary work is doubly
connected to the ideological environment through the reflection of the socio-economic
environment.

Thus the extremely complex aims and methods of literary history are defined by all the
above. When literature is studied in living interaction with other areas and deals with the unity of
socioeconomic life, it does not lose its individuality. In fact, its individuality is seen in the
interaction with others.
 On the other side, this theory should not disturb the Marxist literary historian who
believes that the literary work is primarily and most directly identified by literature itself.
Marxism allows the influence of the other ideologies on literature. However, this effect of
literature on literature is still a sociological effect. Literature like other arts is social through and
through. If the individual work of art does not reflect the base and it does not do its own sake, it
will be isolated and separated from all the rest of literature.

The external factor which acts on literature evokes a purely literary effect, and this factor
becomes a fixed intrinsic factor for the literary development. In addition, this internal factor itself
becomes an external factor for literature. This completely dialectal opposition of factors takes
place within the bounds of the unified sociological laws of development. Thus, the truly
scholarly study of literary history can be seen on the basis of this dialectical conception of the
individuality and interaction of various ideological experience or fact.

Literary scholarship has other aims besides those of literary history such as
a) What is the literary works?
b) What is its structure?
c) What are the elements of this structure and what are their artistic functions? and
d) What is genre, style, plot, theme, motif, hero, meter, rhythm, melody, etc?
All these questions put forth the ideas of sociological poetics.

It can be said that criticism in Soviet Union at present comes under the term so called
‘formalism’ or ‘morphological method’. In their short history, the formalists have managed to
cover a wide area of theoretical poetics.

On the other side, Marxism cannot leave the work of the formalists without complete
critical analysis. However, the techniques of formalism are directly opposed to Marxism.
Formalist totally defends their work on non-social nature of the artistic structure. So according to
Marxist, if the formalist are wrong, their theory will able be absurd to taken into account for
interpreting literature.

The critics conclude their criticism by stating that if literature is a social phenomenon,
then the formal method, which denies this, will be inadequate to literature because it provides
false statement and wrong interpretations on literature. Therefore, for this reason Marxist
Criticism of the formal method cannot be engaged to interpret literature. Thus, the object, tasks
and method of literary history bring out Marxist views of interpretation on literature that deals
with ideological language.

Thus P.N.Medvedev and Bakhtin analysis the object, tasks and methods of literary history from
Marxist point of view and oppose the Formalist method of interpreting literature.
Reference:

Sethuraman. v.s , Contemporary Criticism: An Anthology, Edited. 1989, MacMillian

Publishers India Limited.