Abstract
Anthologies of literary theory, the backbone of courses on literary criticism, rely on viktor Shklovsky's “Art as a Device” or Boris Eikhenbaum's “The Theory of the ‘Formal Method‘” to broach the subject of Russian formalism. The canonical status of these essays is well deserved. Written when the author was merely twenty-four, Shklovsky's 1917 essay bristles with a polemical fervor, wit, and knack for example that announce him as a critical prodigy. Marked by the mixture of embittered pride, rigor, and self-conscious malaise typical of later formalism, Eikhenbaum's dense history of the formal school is remarkable for its titanic effort to marry historical considerations to a systematic analysis of the evolution of key formalist doctrines.
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