«Жанр»: номадический концепт или эстетическая универсалия?

Abstract

The article raises the problem of the metadisciplinary interpretation of the term “genre”, which can be equally well defined as a nomadic concept or as an artistic universal. The author focuses on the question of the configuration of features defining the concept of genre in philology, art history, and musicology. Taking as a basis the general aesthetic principles of genre specification – functional, thematic, and structural – the author analyzes their genre-forming potential in various artistic forms and comes to the conclusion that understanding genre as a communicative and formally meaningful category provides an interdisciplinary dialogue, but at the same time, genre dominants can be different. For speech genres, such a dominant is a communicative goal, for painting genres – a subject content. The semantic parameter of the genre is interpreted in a similar way in literary criticism and musicology. The division into primary and secondary genres is a common feature for both philology and musicology. The structural parameter includes compositional features and elements of genre style, and the specific weight of this parameter is especially high in canonical (protoliterary and literary) and primary musical genres. The meaning of the structural features of the genre is inversely proportional to the visualization of an artistic form. This parameter is least significant for the genre identification of a painting.