Sąsajos tarp idealistinės stilistikos ir literatūros fenomenologijos B. Ciplijauskaitės kritikoje

Abstract

This article presents parts of the intellectual biography of Birutė Ciplijauskaitė, a Lithuanian diaspora scholar, comparativist, and translator heretofore little-known in the Lithuanian context. It briefly reviews her academic environment and the critical thinking that she might have developed under the influence of scholars, thinkers, and exiles from the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) who found themselves in the United States. Hence this review affords a glimpse into the little-researched context of the Spanish-speaking Lithuanian diaspora in the U. S. and their formal and non-formal, academic and non-academic interactions. The article also discusses and analyzes the literary criticism that the émigré Lithuanian literary scholar and Spanish language expert B. Ciplijauskaitė, teaching at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, engaged in during the 1970s and 1980s. The focus of the analysis is on her critical texts in Spanish, though the Lithuanian and English ones are kept in mind as well. The hypothesis advanced is that aspects of the idealist Spanish stylistics so evident in her early criticism (published up to the 1970s) are supplemented in her later criticism by insights from literary phenomenology. A detailed comparative analysis of representatives of idealist Spanish stylistics and literary phenomenology is undertaken; it reveals many parallels between these critical schools and allows us to position B. Ciplijauskaitė’s criticism as multi-methodological, i.e., as based on differing critical attitudes. An analysis of concepts close to, and comprehending, both idealist stylistics and literary phenomenology in her texts shows the essential affinity of these two worldviews. Proceeding from conceptions of meta-criticism, historical description, and history of ideas, the article takes literary criticism to be an episode of the history of ideas, allowing us to recreate models of the identity, cultural self-understanding, and behavior of persons finding themselves in exile. The assumptions guiding this article are taken from the dissertation research entitled B. Ciplijauskaitės literatūrologijos paradigmos, thereby revealing a Lithuanian emigration figure of exceptional stature as well as the importance of her work not only in a Spanish context but also in an international one. Deeper acquaintance with B. Ciplijauskaitė and her essays of literary criticism discloses new, international horizons for Lithuanian studies beyond those of the better-known figures of Algirdas Julius Greimas and Vytautas Kavolis. The conceptions of literary criticism deveoped by B. Ciplijauskaitė have received much attention and are still considered to be among the most important ones in Spanish studies today.