The formal method

realism. The formalists were not against the content of the works, but against the notion that literature is an reason for studying ideology, public consciousness and historical time. The scientists paid great attention to the language of works. The poetic language becomes so because of the "system of receptions" (R. Jacobson). Central to the "formalists" were the concepts of "reception", "construction", "temporary shift", "sharpening", "literary fact", functions, "tightness of the verse series," parodic "(Y. Tynyanov).
The formal method marked the beginning of structuralism and semiotics.

signs - semiotics. The method is considered as one of the structuralist methods [26]. Structuralism (also called the method of structuralism, semiotic school) is an approach that studies the interaction of "structures" (different levels and elements of the text, as well as "external" with respect to the text of the elements). The text of the work is examined from the point of view of structure, sign (semiotics), communicativity and integrity.

XIX- beg. XX centuries. F. de Saussure, C.S. Pierce, C.U. Morris. The first attempt to create a symbolic functional structure of a fairy tale as a narrative was the work of the Russian explorer A. Propp, "Morphology of the Tale," in which he subtracted 31 functions.
The method is presented in the writings of members of the Tartu-Moscow semiotics school (Yu.M. Lotman, ML Gasparov, Yu.I. Levin, Yu.N. Chumakov), in the works of E.M. Meletinsky, B.A. Uspensky, A.K. Zholkovsky, French scientist R. Barth in the second half of the twentieth century
Semiotics adheres to the hypothesis that all cultural phenomena are signs systems, consequently, are connected with communication. The main opposition of semiotics is the opposition of the sign and the thing (the sign replaces the thing). In the literary text, first of all, the meaning-bearing functions of the sign are considered.

/ bad, raw / boiled, weak / strong, etc.), in the text of fiction literature - in opposition to non-fiction literature elements (rhetorical, pragmatic, communicative, graphic). In modern literature, attempts to use rhetorical code as elements of artistry (for example, in the novels of U. Eco "The Island the Day before", V. Pelevin "Generation P") are often used in the postmodern writing practice.
Semiotics are based on the following principles:

sign system (according to F. de Saussure);
- the verbal text structure is considered as meaning, the world model in the work as signified;
- Semiotics initially deals with narrative theory, defining in it common structural elements (motifs, framework and out-of-frame texts, topos, title and finale);
- in communicative connections, three aspects are singled out: syntactic, semantic, pragmatic;
- the syntactic aspect considers the orderliness of the text from the point of view of the rules of language;
- The semantic aspect analyzes the texts in their relation to real or imaginary reality;
- pragmatics is aimed at studying the relationships that link the text to potential or specific contributors and recipients of information (in the literature - it's the author and reader).
Narratology as an independent narrative science was formed from works on the semiotics of the narrative.

is associated with the transition of the humanities from the descriptive-empirical level of research to a strictly theoretical and precise one. This explains the structuralists' interest in logization, mathematization, formalization, and abstraction. The first steps of the method are connected with the activities of the Prague Linguistic Circle (existed from 1926 to the 1950s, the members were Czech philologists V. Mathesius, J. Mukarzhovsky, Russian - N. Trubetskoi, RO Jakobson, P. G. Bogatyrev, GO Vinokur, ED Polivanov, etc.), as well as the Parisian Semiotics School (R. Bart, A.Z. Graimas, J. Zhennet, J. Kristeva et al.).

therefore structuralist poetics proceeds from an immanent (inherent only to it, not connected with the context) study of the literary text. Structure is a set of stable relationships that ensure the preservation of the basic properties of the object. Structuralists are interested in the quality of elements as well as in the relationships between them, therefore the properties of the system, according to their ideas, are not reducible to the sum of the elements properties. As Yu.M. Lotman, "literary reception is not a material element of the text, but an attitude"

single order of elements.
The structuralists consider the text according to the figurative-iconic axis: tradition - text - reality; on the operational-pragmatic axis: the author - the text - the reader.
For example, analyzing the poem KN. Batiushkov "You are awakening, O Bahia, from the tomb", Yu.M. Lotman relies on phonological and metric levels of the structure, that is, on the sound composition and rhythm, focusing on "return", "repetition", "antithesis", "direct and inverse relations", variants, invariants.

masks;
- postmodern text can be read / examined simultaneously as a phenomenon of mass culture and as an elitist work, that is, it has "double coding";
- the basis of the creative act of the writer is nonselection - an arbitrary choice of expressive means, so the leading place is occupied by collage, pastes, intertext, rejection of the principles of determinism, distrust of causal relations of dialectics (epistemological uncertainty);
-the literary image was replaced by a simulacrum (fantasy, according to P. Klosovsky, a perfect diabolical twin, according to J. Deleuze, a cybernetic simulation model, by J. Baudrillard);
- Signs of postmodern "literacy" are corporeality and schizophrenic discourse.

the study of postmodern works. It is called postmodern criticism .
Its basic principles are as follows:
- literature is understood as a discourse, that is, an open, unstable, nonlinear, dynamic self-regulating system in its connection with an extra-literary environment;
- Deconstruction (revealing the internal contradictions of cultural practices of man) is used as the main vector of text analysis - in techniques of parody, travesty, irony, revealing binary oppositions;

and feelings of the reader to the work, to the artistic world of the author. Perceiving the text, the reader reconstructs and recreates it in his own way. This invisible dialogue between the writer and the reader (text and reader) is studied by receptive aesthetics (other names are receptive method, aesthetics of impact).
The basis of the receptive method is the philosophy of E. Husserl and the phenomenological literary criticism of R. Ingarden, who believed that the reader is completing, "concretizes" a work that ideally has a "multitude of guises". The foundations of the receptive method were laid in the twentieth century. German scientists, participants of the "Constant school" V. Izer and H.R. Yauss.