However, the stumble-block in achieving tangible progress in this enterprise was that the object of research in humanities appeared to be rebellious, capricious, passionate and not at all measurable in physical and mathematical terms. It explains at least in part the failure of the 20th century structuralism. It could not cope with the living and ever changing object. The schemes, models and structures built and shaped by structural scholars were nice, but the most original part of literary creation nearly always managed to escape their grasp by means of individuality, subjectivity and personality.
The deception was then reflected in post-structuralism. The current initiated in the 1980s may still have some influence, but its first charm seems to be rapidly fading. In my opinion, its nihilist theoretical seeds strongly contradicted the nature of primary literary creation itself. Postmodern theory clearly underestimated literature’s role and function both in society and our individual lives. Thus, one of the claims of postmodernism was that lofty aesthetic and philosophical aspirations of modernist writers were old-fashioned and that literature could hardly aspire to more than simply rewriting already existing previous texts, in the paradigm of intertextuality. Literature became viewed as just one more product in the profit-orientated market economy. Furthermore, it was claimed that authors or writers were incapable of knowing the true value of their work, as the value was really created by the meta-textual-theoretical genius of criticism, rather than by the original authors themselves.
There was thus a transparent attempt to bridle primary literary creation and make it submissively follow the theoretical precepts and signals emitted above all from Parisian and US academia and then echoed by numerous adepts both in the centric and peripheral areas. Ethical or moral categories seldom entered that reign; these were considered as something ingenuous, inferior, if not altogether inappropriate for intellectual-theoretical reasoning.
Differently from the linguistic-rhetorical line, the sociological trend (thus, postcolonial scholarship, gender studies) did pay attention to ethical questions, but its scope was mainly limited to the exterior contours of literary creation. Individuality and especially the aesthetic dimension of a creative act often became consciously neglected.
The challenge to fill axiological-ethical voids, and the “other”
My conclusion from the above is that in the present world as it is, with its endless violence, wars, economic as well as ecological crisis, there is an obvious void in social as well as private axiology. The void in humanities becomes above all visible, as contrasted with a continuity of primary literary creation around the world, once with more, once with less luck aspiring to novelty (originality) of expression and imagery. There is continuity also in the fact that practically every outstanding literary work of our days and the recent past, by discussing fundamental axiological relations and attitudes, reveals its strong ethical or moral nucleus.
Contrary to this continuity in primary literary creation, literary and cultural scholarship under the banner of postmodernism has greatly failed to meet one of its principal functions and tasks: to explain the axiology as well as moral-spiritual dimension of literary works. Instead, scholars waste a lot of their energy discussing different formal aspects in works of mass and trivial literature, as if trying to convince us that higher goals of literary creation have become obsolete.
Building up an axiology in which spiritual values are involved can hardly be achieved without ethics. The wide complex of axiology, as well as ethics, seems to have intrinsic liaison with the ontology of “self” and “other” and the ever-vital need of reaching a kind of a dialogue or elementary understanding between both. Ideally it would presuppose a “self’s” admittance of the “other” as a different “self”, and the traditional “other” developing its conscience as a “self”.