Gustav Shpet's Literary and Theatre Theory

Abstract

In his paper, Shpet's Literary and Theatre Theory, Galin Tihanov focuses on the literary and theatre theory of Gustav Shpet (1879-1937), Russia's foremost phenomenologist. Shpet's work on literary and theatre theory comes into view as a complex amalgam of innovation and regression. He foreshadowed important tenets of semiotics and structuralism while remaining critical of Russian formalism. At the same time, his knowledge of aesthetics and the philosophy of art, as well as his distrust of historical poetics, barred him from keeping pace with significant contemporary developments in literary theory. Moreover, his work remained in the end skeptical of the self-assertion of literary theory as an autonomous field of enquiry in the late 1910s and the early 1920s. Instead, Shpet preferred to see literary theory in the sanctuary of aesthetics, allied with a neo-Humboldtian philosophy of language. His interpretation of the novel points to his deeper roots in an artistic and philosophical tradition largely alien to the new departures in literature, art, and theory heralded and stimulated by the efforts of the avant-garde. This regressive entrenchment is even more salient in Shpet's theatre theory. Tihanov examines Shpet's contribution in intersecting areas and assesses his contribution to literary and theatre theory in 1920s Russian culture. Galin Tihanov, Shpet's Literary and Theatre Theory page 2 of 10 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 9.4 (2007):