Structuralism of the Prague School

Abstract

The groundwork of structural poetics laid by the Russian Formalists was developed into the first system of twentieth-century literary structuralism by scholars of the Cercle linguistique de Prague (Prague Linguistic Circle – PLC). The personal and theoretical links between the Russian and the Prague schools are well known. Jan Mukařovský, the most prominent literary theorist of Prague, acknowledged that the conceptual system of his first major work – the May monograph of 1928 – originated with the Russian Formalists ( Kapitoly , II, p. 12). Later on, in his review of the Czech translation of Shklovsky's Theory of Prose (published in 1934) Mukařovský summed up not only the Czech indebtedness to, but also the Czech criticism of, early Russian Formalism (‘K ceskemu překladu’, Kapitoly , I, pp. 344–50; Steiner, The Word , pp. 134–42). The first president of the PLC, Vilem Mathesius, surveying the first ten years of the Circle's activities in 1936, highly commended the contribution of Russian scholars, but emphasized the domestic sources of Prague School thought. He strongly protested the claim that the work done in Prague was nothing more than an application of Russian linguistic and literary-theoretical trends; the ‘working symbiosis’ achieved in the Circle is a ‘mutual give and take’ (‘Deset let’, pp. 149ff.; cf. Renský, ‘Roman Jakobson’, p. 380). In the same year, Roman Jakobson, who was a member of both Schools, spoke as well of a ‘symbiosis of Czech and Russian thought’, but pointed also to influences from Western European and American science.