“The pleasure of the text” and the issues of theoretical reflexion on fantastic category

The article deals with the correlation between the essayist notion of “the pleasure of the text” by Roland Bartes and the issues of theoretical reflexion of fantasy and fantastic in contemporary arts. A special attention is paid to the connection of these categories with the communicative and receptive aspects of theoretical and historical poetics, aesthetics and teaching methods, as well as typological and discursive facets of artistic entity. The readers’ attention to fantasy is greatly determined by its chronotope structure, motivating the readers’ pleasure (as hedonistic and psychotherapeutical, as well as aesthetic), and stimulating conscious and/or subconscious perception of the conditionality and livelihood of the genre. As the field of reception of the fantastic in literature has always been related to the field of readers’ imagination, it is important to create the methods for accepting the imaginative mechanisms, both scientific and educational. Crucial here is the understanding of the object of study: either the relevance of particular receptions (a particular reader or a social group) or the imaginative potential of the “pleasure of reading” works of fantasy. The former being psychological and sociological tasks, the latter being literary and aesthetic ones. The article highlights the idea that a theoretical reflexion of the receptive “pleasure of the text” should take into consideration the genre varieties of fantasy. Only in that case it becomes possible to study fantasy and fantastic thoroughly as aesthetic phenomena, as well as to work out productive approaches to place the genre in question within the innovations of education.