Narratological Perspectives of Kos’ Work on Literary Theory

Abstract

The article treats Kos’ contributions to narratology within his literary theory as a representative corpus, which sheds light on typical features, the extent and method of introducing more recent tendencies into Slovene literary studies in the process of their modernization, and the discarding of historical empiricism. The paper starts from the assumption that Kos introduced theoretical concepts of narratology as a supplement to other theoretical and methodological tendencies which he promoted in his work, and not as a starting-point for an immanent interpretative procedure, or as a holistic theoretical model or systematic autonomous narrative theory. – The article attempts to show that such an articulation of the problems concerning the theoretical aspects of narratology is (implicitly) grounded in Kos’ principal views on the subject and tasks of literary studies themselves, while a comparison is made between his achievements and other similar tendencies in Slovene literary studies up to the mid-1980s. The development of the apparatus pertaining to the theoretical issues of narratology is traced from the first explicit thematization in the form of a theoretical outline for Kos’ university courses in the mid-1970s, where his work correlates primarily to that of Kayser, Anglo-American new criticism, German pre-war literary theory and also, in part, linguistics, to his later work. He included it in Morfologija literarnega dela (A Morphology of Literary Work, 1981), but later upgraded these tools and placed them within the system of literary theory as proposed in his Očrt literarne teorije (An Outline of Literary Theory, 1983), in which he carried out a theoretical improvement on Anton Ocvirk’s (1907–1980) work on literary theory, and made some further corrections, until the most recent version of the topic was published in his Literarna teorija (Literary Theory, 2001). The article observes Kos’ tendencies in his recent book towards supplementing formal-analytical and immanent conceptions with those that deal more with “content” and are idea-valued, and an increasing tendency towards introducing abstract philosophical and geistesgeschichtlich perspectives into literary morphology.