BЕTWEEN FACT AND INTERPRETATION: CONFIGURING THE FIELD OF LITERARY HISTORY

Abstract

An analysis of the configuration of the field of literary science requires a stance towards the personal research systems. The literary historian resides in the rupture of times, in which the past highlights its layers from the perspective of the present. For Ivan Shishmanov, Boyan Penev, and Mihail Arnaudov, the role of the literary historian is an obligation to a history that is on the verge of disappearing and whose evidence must be preserved. Each of these scholars positions himself between the provision, description, and arrangement of the Bulgarian National Revival archives, between the availability of documents as objects and the constant semantic openness of the facts contained within them to systematization and interpretation. The literary historian's position is to cross the diverging multiplicity in the valid reiteration of basic-level facts and to highlight it in the high levels of abstraction. Life in difference is the focus of the individual literary-historical optics. Each expansion of the context to incorporate additional individual systems or to adopt an alternative perspective produces a rupture. As discursive events, such ruptures must be viewed via a metaperspective.