The popular as a category of literary studies

In the article, the author gives an overview of the field of popular fiction studies. The author understands literature as a social institution where relations between authors (producers), readers, and texts are mediated by the oppositions of “high” and “low”, quantity and quality, aesthetics and commerce. From the perspective of historical analysis, the opposition of “high” and “low” literature is a historical and changeable construction-its formation in the Western European tradition of the 19th and 20th centuries is connected to the emergence of the social institution of literature. Historical development of popular fiction studies relates to the scholarly reflection upon the problem of cultural hierarchy and the role of the subject (reader) in culture. From the sociological perspective, cultural hierarchy is understood as a projection of social hierarchy, and the subject as a function of the context of socioeconomic relations which determine readers’ preferences and aesthetic reception. In the semiotics of reading, the focus is on readers’ competence needed for the reception of texts from different levels of cultural hierarchy. Consequently, the dichotomy of “high” and “low” is interpreted from the point of view of reading skills that various texts require from their “ideal reader.” In the vein of cultural studies, the subject is less a function of social context or of a text which determines its reception, but rather an active participant of culture who forms the matrix of aesthetic preferences in accordance with personal and collective needs and interests. As a result, in the dialectical model popular fiction is neither purely commercial (installed from “above”), nor belongs solely to the “grassroots” (developed from “below”), but emerges in the interaction and exchange between these two levels. “Subjective turn” in the humanities of the second half of the 20th century led to the rise of the interest towards aesthetic reception and the phenomenon of “popular reading” which is investigated from the perspective of genre analysis. The category of genre is one of the central in the studies of popular fiction since it allows analysis of texts in collective acts of reception, and, therefore, it problematizes the interrelation between groups of texts with common formal and thematic properties and groups of readers with common preferences, strategies of reading and interpretation. At the same time, the author indicates the ambiguity of the functions of popular genres which are connected to the communicative context and, thus, serve as symbolic forms for solving real social tensions, and simultaneously they function as cognitive mechanisms of reception. In conclusion, the author posits the importance of complex studies of popular genes and “popular reading” for further understanding of the phenomenon of popular fiction, its dynamics and cultural functions. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

Keywords

Authors

References