History of Theory/Theory of History

Abstract

It has been more than a year since my Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics was published by Cornell University Press and the first reviews have now appeared. As might have been expected, the book has received a far from uniform response. I myself have questions about some of its conclusions and yet I think that most of its critics have misunderstood my theoretical intentions. No doubt, I am partially to blame for not making my assumptions clear and I would like to take this opportunity to correct some problems. I shall begin with a short description of the main goals and methods of the book. It grew out of my earlier comparative study of Russian and Prague Structuralism. The juxtaposition of these schools, I was surprised to find, pointed up their fundamental difference much more than their similarity. The Prague School, with its single organizational center, shared frame of reference and unified epistemological stance, could easily be conceived as a coherent movement. But its Russian counterpart was far more resistant to synthesis. I began to see Formalism, in fact, not as a school in the ordinary sense of the word but as a peculiar developmental stage in the history of Slavic literary theory. This fact is reflected in the relative agreement among students of Prague Structuralism about the coherence of their subject matter and the corresponding lack of a consensus among scholars of Formalism. It was this feeling of discord that I wished to convey in the first chapter of my book. Because of the great variety of meanings that the label Formalism has attracted in the course of time, it seemed legitimate to question its utility and to offer my own understanding of the term as a historical concept.