New Directions of Non-Historism in Contemporary Bourgeois Literary Studies. A Critical Assessment with a View to the Works of P. K. Yavorov

In the concluding part of his study "The Birth of the Poetic Work," Jean-Paul Weber makes the following self-confident and significant declaration: "In our thematic readings there is nothing reminiscent of the rigid generalizations of psychoanalysts or stylists, of their Oedipus complexes, oral, anal, and genital stages, or of their baroque, classical, romantic, and so on styles."1 Self-confident because, as we will see below, Weber's results differ little from the Freudian ones and because the positive aspects of the "stylists'" concepts are also lightly rejected. Significant because a representative of the latest bourgeois literary criticism is attempting to break with, or at least declaring that he wants to break with, the two most characteristic trends in art and literary criticism's non-historicism in the first half of our century. The stylistism of the formalists and "philologists" and psychologism with all its orthodox and schismatic tendencies are the two poles between which the many nuances of this non-historicism move. What polarizes them is the stylists' transcendence of artistic development beyond the will and peculiarities of the creative personality and the psychoanalysts' complete closure of the determining factors of development within the individual or "collective subconscious." And what connects them is the isolation of artistic development from the class-economic and ideological development of society. In this environment, the French literary critic and psychologist Jean-Paul Weber announced that he had achieved an approach that overcomes the limitations of both stylists and psychoanalysts.