LITERARY-AESTHETIC CATEGORIES IN LITERARY STUDIES

Abstract

This article examines literary-aesthetic categories as a core conceptual apparatus of literary studies and as an analytic language for describing how artistic meaning is generated, experienced, and evaluated in texts. Literary-aesthetic categories are treated not as fixed labels, but as historically variable forms of aesthetic consciousness that mediate between authorial intention, textual organization, cultural memory, and the reader’s horizon of expectations. The study clarifies the theoretical status of key categories widely used in philological analysis—such as the beautiful, sublime, tragic, comic, grotesque, lyrical, elegiac, heroic, and everyday aesthetic—showing how they function simultaneously as philosophical concepts, poetics-oriented tools, and interpretive frames. Particular attention is paid to the interaction between aesthetic categories and genre, modality, imagery, and narrative voice, as well as to the ways categories become culturally specific in national literatures. On the material of representative Uzbek literary discourse and university-level interpretive practice, the article argues that the productive use of aesthetic categories requires contextualization: the same category can shift its semantic and value load depending on period, ideology, and stylistic system. The research proposes an integrative analytical model that combines historical poetics, hermeneutic reading, and discourse-sensitive interpretation to operationalize aesthetic categories for classroom and scholarly work. The expected outcome is a refined typological and functional description of literary-aesthetic categories that supports philology students in conducting coherent textual analysis and building academically grounded interpretations of literary works.