Introduction

Literary analysis that pays greater attention to the text itself than to more or less intuitive ideas about its meaning is a fairly recent invention. Its origin goes back to the famous Cours de Linguistique Générale published in 1916, three years after Ferdinand de Saussure's death. The book became an inspiration for specialists in literature convinced that literary studies should be scientific rather than essayistic in nature and who strived to provide literary scholars with tools that would enable them to be more scientific. These theoreticians of literature wanted to analyze texts having at their disposal objective, verifiable methods. Thus, the concept of structure was born, a notion that stems from the belief that literature is a system, because it stems from language, which is also an organized entity. As Sturrock (2003: 99) observes: “literary structuralism is not the novelty which its opponents claim it to be. It is, rather, the latest, unusually sophisticated stage (–) form of literary criticism that has existed since Aristotle.” This way of approaching literature, highly sophisticated indeed, had been developing largely unchallenged until the last decade of the 20th century, when a new school was born, namely, cognitive poetics. Although again not quite revolutionary and openly acknowledging its resemblance with structuralist poetics (Gavins and Steen 2003: 5–8), cognitive poetics offers a markedly distinct way of approaching the text based on cognitive linguistics, itself a more recent development in the study of language.

Although the sources of inspirations for the two approaches to literary texts are different, not to say antithetical, it seems that in many respects they arrive at quite similar results, even if obtained within distinct paradigms.