The Rhetoric of Aleksandr Veselovskii's 'Historical Poetics' and the Autonomy of Academic Literary Studies in Late Imperial Russia

Abstract

This paper analyses the rhetorical strategies of Aleksandr Veselovskii's 'Historical Poetics' — the most significant body of Russian literary theory before the Formalists. The paper focuses on the way in which Veselovskii negotiated the autonomy of literary studies as an academic discipline, both explicitly, in methodological texts, and implicitly, in his theories of literary evolution and poetic signification. It depicts Veselovskii's discourse as engaged in complex conceptual manoeuvres around five key boundaries — those of 'poetics', 'language', 'poetic form', 'metaphor', and 'tradition', which symbolically delimited the boundaries of literary scholarship itself.The paper relates Veselovskii's construction of particular 'dynamic models' of poetic evolution and signification with the problem of legitimating the autonomy of literary studies as an academic discipline. Although Veselovskii's priority seemed to be to ensure stable boundaries for literary studies, his model of autonomy is exposed as a complex of metaphorical re-descriptions and conceptual doublings that in performative fashion and through rhetorical play continuously both constructed and problematized the autonomous identity of literary studies.