Abstract

This paper attempts to reveal anthropological structures in the following categories: text and writing; the categories that nowadays require cultural, historical and institutional rel-ativization. The paradigm being maintained is that writing is a mental, individualistic cre-ation and a freely chosen way of life which is a result of late modernity. Moreover, even to-day it is not the only paradigm and nor is it universally acceptable. This is emphasized and developed upon in the text by using examples from current school exercise books. School – as the main institution of literate initiation, where one experiences one'sfirst mass contact with literature – is an institution in which the practice of writing is regulated by school breaks and is specifically managed for capitalist society's dual division of time. Writing is specifically a tool which is a well-defined, perceptual and social discipline. However, this discipline does not exclude creativity, as long as we go by its late-modern definition.

Key words: text and writing, anthropological perspective, school, creation, exercise books

What we understand first in discourse, as Paul Ricoeur wrote in reference to Heidegger's Being and Time, is not another person, but a „pro-ject, that is, the outline of a new way of being in the world. Only writing […] in freeing itself, not only from its author and from its original audience, but from the narrowness of the dialogical situation, reveals this destination of discourse as projecting the world (Paul Ricoeur 1976: 37). Writing as technology, as Walter J. Ong wrote, „is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of Fuller, interior, human potentials” […] Writing heightens consciousness.[…] The use of technol-ogy can enrich the human psyche, enlarge the human spirit, intensify its interior life (Ong 1991: 82–83).