About the Concept of Literature Applied in the Research of the Heritage of Our Spirit

Abstract

The author in his paper points out the numerous problems which arise in the research of the hentage ofspirit of the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and especially of the heritage of spirit of the Moslems. This heritage belongs to the different culturaly-historical circles, it is written in different languages, and so, the researches of its sources, as well as the researches of the continuity and interdependence of its developingstages, requires the knowledge of different languages (Arabic, Persian, Ottoman-Turkish, Latin, Old Church Slavonic and Serbo-Croatian), a lot of different alphabets (Cyrillic, Glagolitic, Latin letters and Arabic letters), and also knowledge of the traditions which have their main trees to which the heritage of our spirit simultaneously belongs and distinguish itself from them.

Even when the problem of the research of the heritage of spirit is reduced to the research of the literature in its written form, i.e. when oral tradition is excluded and only written belletristic literature and its different kinds are studied, a lot of the problems arise. Beside the problems which arise form the fact that inside the different traditions during the long period of development the different structure of the literary tradition is formed, and because of that it is very hard to establish the unique criteria for its evaluation, the basic problem is insufficiant preciseness of the concept »literature« when it denotes such long and such heterogeneous tradition of the written expression.

In analysing this problem the author discusses the definition of literature. He ascertains that the notion of literature as: „the expression of spirit expressed in stable forms with the intention to produce the effect of aesthetic pleasure“, does not exist until the middle of the last century. He also states that such concept, Le. the concept of the literature reduced to the belletristic literature, can not be effectively used for the complete, expecially older, literary production and tradition without causing the effect of its too large reduction and impoverishment.

The other concept of literature, i. e. the concept which treats the literature as complete written production in one language or of one nation, also has its weak points. It enlarge too much the scope of literary expressions by including in it all the written texts, so that the literature is equalised with the philology.