“Social disease” and how to treat it: a narrative argument in the 1860s literary criticism

The article deals with the issue of the potentiality of investigating the role of narrative structures in the aspect of argumentation. This role is disclosed in various types of humanities discourse - from scholarly discourse (historical and sociological) to publicistic discourse and literary criticism. Departing from the epistemology of the narrative, worked out by Paul Ricoeur, the author analyzes the processes of conceptual scalability of the plot while interpreting a literary text in literary criticism. In M.N. Katkov’s article “On Our Nihilism About Turgenev’s Novel” (1862) the strategies of enhancing the efficiency of argumentation in the literary and critical publicistic discourse of the 1860s are revealed. The hypothesis in question states that while studying a work of literature, a critic and/or a publicist aims at observing the lines of argument construction. Firstly, in interpreting a novel’s plot there is a simultaneous generalization of it, so that it becomes an abstract conceptual scheme, retaining its narrative structure. Secondly, in establishing correlations between an imaginary plot of a novel and its social “reality”, the aesthetic perspective for text interpretation is retained, thus providing us with a significant source for producing hypotheses concerning the theme of a “probable” world realized in the novelistic narrative. Balancing between the edges of narration and argumentation, between fiction and conceptualization of “reality” provides a critical discourse with additional logical and rhetorical potential.