For a theory of the rhythm of verses and proses: Henri Meschonnic’s “historical anthropology of language” and Reuven Tsur’s “cognitive poetics”

The article presents a brief comparative study of two epistemologically different approaches to the problem of poetic rhythm whose authors, paradoxically, have much in common. Both of them were born in 1932, in families originated, respectively, from the region of Bessarabia and Romania, became university professors and contributed a lot to reform the methodology of literary analysis, with particular interest to the questions of poetic rhythm, studied Bible texts from the poetic viewpoint, inherited from Russian Formalists, paid special attention to such aspects of literary works which could be investigated only through oral performance, and, nevertheless, have developed two almost opposite visions of poetry and literature as a verbal art. In our study, we aim to reconstruct the main conceptual and methodological assumptions of their theories in order to explain the reasons of such unexpected final divergence and, probably, outline ways to synthesize their approaches. Our hypothesis consists to see in Henri Meschonnic’s “historical anthropology of language” and Reuven Tsur’s “cognitive poetics” two radically different, but not incompatible, visions of “literary fact”, respectively, from the viewpoint of humanities and natural sciences.