From slovesnost to literaturnost: Russian Formalism and Nineteenth-Century Philology
Speakers): Jessica Merrill, Mellon Fellow èצӰ
The Russian Formalists are often cited as the founders of modern literary theory. They influentially defined the field’s object of study as the “devices” of literature. Literary analysis, the Formalists argued, was to focus on literariness (literaturnost’); on how rather than what literary language communicates. The talk will attempt to explain why modern literary theory emerged when and where it did. That is, how it was that these ideas were first articulated by a group of recent university graduates in St. Petersburg and Moscow in the 1910s. Central explanatory factors lead us back to the development of Russian academic literary study in the late 19th c. The talk will focus on the role of comparative philology in the Russian academy, the definition of the object of philological study as slovesnost’ (the verbal arts), and the legacy of the philologists A. N. Veselovsky and A. A. Potebnia. The Russian Formalists’ foundational statements can be seen to remain within the paradigm established by Russian philology. This is significant in that it allows us to challenge the common perception that modern literary theory begins with Saussurean structural linguistics.
JESSICA MERRILL holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California-Berkeley. Her current book project focuses on the intellectual history of modern literary theory and the emergence of the Russian Formalist and Czech Structuralist movements. In addition to literary theory, her scholarly interests include Russian and Czech modernisms, Slavic folklore, and folklore theory. Her project, Between Language and Literature: The Role of Folklore Study in the Rise of Modern Literary Theory, draws on intellectual biography and archives of scholarly societies to trace the development of modern literary theory between 1890 and 1945 as it was informed by the traditions of Russian philology and the institution of the scholarly circle. The book will show how these traditions enabled pioneering theorists such as Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukařovský to conceptualize literature in way which brought it closer to oral tradition or language.