Abstrakt
The aim of this article is to advert to the precarious position of the history of literature and some other literary theories. The history of literature describes literary texts as dead historical objects.
Although it's a human science, it only categorizes technically literary texts into different groups, disregarding human beings and their life-world. As a result, the history of literature as well as many other branches of literary science solve their own abstract problems through abstract theories, which fail to interpret the literary text as a specific experience for a reader.
I propose phenomenological philosophy as another type of approach to interpretation, which strives to understand our living world through a literary text. I argue that literary science must be eager to understand the specific experience we can get through literary text if it doesn't want to miss the basic reader's contact with literary text.
The article doesn't put forth "the right interpretation", but it enquires into the traditional concepts of the history of literature and poetics and their relevance for the process of understanding.