二十世纪西方文艺批评理论

Twentieth Century Western Critical Theories 二十世纪西方文艺批评理论

Zhu Gang

朱刚

上海外语教育出版社，2001

2005年第四次印刷

Introduction

This sourcebook comes out of a need for basic texts of the twentieth century Western literary and cultural theories. The current volume is meant solely for pedagogical purposes, i.e., for graduate courses on contemporary Western literary theory. Each unit forms a critical “school” (in the broad sense), starting with a critical survey of the school under discussion. For each critic, the sourcebook provides a sketchy introduction, a selection of the critic?s work, some necessary notes to the texts (reduced to the minimum for a smooth reading.), followed by study questions based on the essay selected for better understanding and class discussion, and finally books and articles recommended for further reading.

The book chooses to examine in a roughly chronological order some major Western critical theories of the twentieth century, from Russian Formalism in the early decades to, for instance, the Cultural Studies in the nineties. In addition to a close reading of some carefully selected texts and a survey of current knowledge in this field, the course seeks to introduce students to the major approaches to literature, to show what kind of knowledge is involved and what forms of inquiry exist in this area, how different means of analysis are used, and what their strengths and weaknesses are.

The chief objective of the book is to raise the students? awareness of the imp ortance of being critical and of the critical theory, discuss with them some influential speculations on and critical approaches to literature, and use them in textual analysis. It will concentrate on a number of questions, such as the locus of literary meaning, the status of the text, the role of the reader, the function of language in literary exegesis, the referentiality of literature, and the relation of literature and society. These questions are of general interest to the students of literature, and of special help to MA students working on their dissertation.

The selection of critics (the so-called “canon”) has been made on the bases of their representative character and their availability in Chinese university libraries. The works selected are among the most discussed by Chinese literary scholars and are helpful to students in interpreting literary texts. The assortment of critics into schools is unavoidably arbitrary. Barthes, for instance, should be more properly put under “Deconstruction”, and Said may also belong to “Cultural Studies.” The best policy is to pay more attention to the ideas expressed in the essays than to the labels assigned them. Owing to limits of space, the selections are too short, and the notes too scanty, to ensure good understanding. It is recommended that MA students who are going to write on theory or Ph.D. students of literature read the original work in its entirety.

To understand our field of inquiry, a concise, tentative definition of terminology is necessary at the outset, however insufficient any such definition may seem to be today.

First and foremost, what is literature? The question is extremely difficult to answer since literature seems to include everything verbally or orally recorded. But this is an important question because contemporary critical theory started with efforts at such a definition. That definition is a negative one: i.e., what is it that sets literature apart from non-literature? In other words, contemporary literary theory started with identifying specific qualities that make a piece of work literary, and all contemporary approaches to literature are answers, in one way or another, to the question of what literature is.

Next, what is “theory”? As a field of intellectual inquiry, theory may be taken to be “a body of generalizations and principles, or an ideal or hypothetical set of facts and circumstances, developed in association with practice in a field of activity and forming its content as an intellectual discipline.” In other words, “theory” deals with things on abstract level (generalizations and principles), not in their concrete forms, though this abstraction is based on the actual practices. For instance, literary “theory”

develops out of interpretation of concrete works of art. I t is an independent “discipline” because it has its own nature, scope of investigation, and methodology, though it is more and more difficult to identify what these really are. Most importantly, “theory” invites criticism and inquiry, itself being “ideal or hypothetical.”

What is literary theory then? Simply put, it is “speculative discourse on literature and on practice of literature.” It may include reflections on or analysis of general principles and categories of literature, such as its nature and function; its relation to other aspects of culture; the purpose, procedures and validity of literary criticism; relation of literary text to their authors and historical contexts; or the production of literary meaning.

But what is the difference between “literary theory” and “literary criticism?” A most concise answer would be: one is concerned with “theory” while the other “practice.” Wellek in fact defines “criticism” as “study of concrete works of art.” “Criticism,” we might say, includes “describing, interpreting and evaluating the meaning and effect that literary works have for competent but not necessarily academic readers.” Since “criticism” deals with the experience of reading, it is “not exclusively academic, but often personal and subjective.”

A similar though in many ways different concept is aesthetics. The discipline is concerned with literature from a “philosophical” point of view, stressing its relation to the general concepts of art, beauty and value. It has limited relevance to practic al literary study or “criticism,” but has strong affinities with “critical theory” as both tend to take the work of art as “autonomous” and look for its specificities.

“Scholarship” is a somewhat different concept. It goes beyond the reader?s experienc e by referring to factors external to this experience, such as the genesis of the work or its textual transmission. It is often too positivistic to be “theoretical,” asking for detachment and rigor of a specialist.

Finally, “critical theory” in this bo ok is used in its broad sense, an umbrella term for various critical approaches to literature and culture in the twentieth century. Its narrower sense refers to the Frankfurt School tradition, seen generally as “responses to the specifically emancipatory i nterest that enters the order of aesthetic and social pracitces.” It is to be noted that much of Frankfurt tradition has merged with recent “literary theory” as the “generic term” when the latter becomes more and more “critical” in nature.

Some suggestions for how to read critical theory:

i. Always keep at an arm?s length from the theorists and theories. Always read with a critical eye open.

ii. Always think of theory in relation to concrete literary works of art and try to use theory in textual interpretation.

iii. Always think of theory in terms of the social reality that has produced it. Marxist perspective in this respect turns out to be helpful.

The following reference books are recommended for the course. They are anthologies where more relevant texts are to be found, and introductory works on the theories to be discussed. These books may also appear in the “Further Reading.”

Anthologies:

Adams, Hazard ed. (1971), Critical Theory Since Plato.New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. Adams, Hazard & Leroy Searle (1986). Critical Theory Since 1965, Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida,

Bate, Walter Jackson ed., Criticism: The Major Texts, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, San Diego etc., 1970

Borklund, Elmer, Contemporary Literary Critics, 2nd ed., Macmillan Publishers Limited, Hong Kong, 1982

Davis, Robert Con eds. (1998) Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies. New York: Longman

Fokkema, D.W. & Elrud Kunne-Ibsch (1977). Theories of Literature in the Twentieth Century. London: C. Hurst & Company

Handy, William J. & Westbrook, Max eds., Twentieth Century Criticism, The Major Statesments, The Free Press, New York, 1974

Kaplan, Charles ed., Criticism: The Major Statements, St. Martin?s Press, New York, 1975

Latimer, Dan ed., Contemporary Critical Theory, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, San Diego etc.

Lodge, David (1972). 20th Century Literary Criticism, London: Longman Group Ltd.

Newton, K. M. (1988). Twentieth-Century Literary Theory, A Reader, London: MacMillan Education Ltd.

---(1992) Theory into Practice, A Reader in Modern Literary Criticism. NY: St. Martin?s P.

Rivkin, Lulie & Michael Ryan eds. (1998) Literary Theory: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Inc.

Trilling, Lionel ed., Literary Criticism, An Introductory Reader, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., New York etc., 1970

Introduction:

Culler, Jonathan (1997). Literary Theory. Oxford & New York: Oxford UP

Eagleton, Terry (1985). Literary Theory, An Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.

Jefferson, Ann & David Robey eds. (1986) Modern Literary Theory---A Comparative Introduction. New Jersey: Barnes & Noble Books

Leitch, Vincent B (1988). American Literary Criticism, from the 30s to the 80s. New York: Columbia UP

Selden, Raman (1989). A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. New York & London: Harvester Wheatsheaf

Spikes, Michael P. (1997) Understanding Contemporary American Literary theory. Columbia: U of South Carolina P

Webster, Roger (1996). Studying Literary Theory, An Introduction. London & New York: Arnold I would like to express my gratitude to the MA and Ph.D. students in my class all these years for their valuable contribution to this book. My thanks go in particular to Ms Zhu Xuefeng, Miss Tang Xiaomen and Miss Shen Xiaoni for their support in the preparation of the manuscript.

Z. G.

School of Foreign Studies

Nanjing University

Jan. 2001

Contents Page

Introduction i Unit 1 Russian Formalism 1

1. V. Shklovsky, Art as Technique 3

2. J. Mukarovsky, Standard Language and Poetic Language 9

3. B. Eik enbaum, The Theory of the “Formal Method” 13

4. L. Trotsky, The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism 17 Unit 2 Anglo-American New Criticism 23

1. T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent 25

2. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and M.C. Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy 29

3. The Affective Fallacy 32

4. C. Brooks, Irony as a Principle of Structure 34

5. A. Tate, Tension in Poetry 38 Unit 3 Marxist Criticism 43

1. T. Eagleton, Literature and History 45

2. G. Lukács, Critical Realism and Socialist Realism 54

3. R. Williams: Determination 57

4. F. Jameson, Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act 61

5. The Prison-House of Language 65 Unit 4 Psychoanalytical Criticism 69

1. S. Freud, The Structures of the Mind 71

2. The Oedipus Complex 78

3. The Interpretation of Dreams 82

4. Creative Writers and Daydreaming 84

5. L. Trilling, Freud and Literature 88

6. J. Lacan, The Mirror Stage 91 Unit 5 Myth and Archetypal Criticism 96

1. C. G. Jung, The Principal Archetypes 98

2. The Concept of the Collective Unconscious 102

3. N. Frye, The Archetypes of Literature 106

Unit 6 Structuralism 112

1. F. de Saussure, Nature of the Linguistic Sign 114

2. C. Lévi-Strauss, The Structural Study of Myth 117

3. R. Barthes, The Structuralist Activity 121

4. T. Todorov, Definition of Poetics 125 Unit 7 Reader Criticism 129

1. W. Iser, The Act of Reading 131

2. H.R. Jauss, Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory 135

3. S. Fish, Why No One?s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser 138

4. N.N. Holland, Reading and Identity 141

5. D. Bleich, The Subjective Character of Critical Interpretation 145 Unit 8 Deconstruction 150

1. J. Derrida, Structure, Sign, and Play 152

2. Différance 155

3. J. Hillis Miller, The Critic as Host 158

4. A. P. Debicki, New Criticism and Deconstruction 163

5. M. H. Abrams, The Deconstructive Angel 166 Unit 9 Feminist Criticism 170

1. T. Moi, Sexual/ Textual Politics 172

2. E. Showalter, A Literature of Their Own 176

3. Representing Ophelia 180

4. J. Kristeva, About Chinese Women 185 Unit 10 New Historicism 192

1. M. Foucault, The Structures of Punishment 194

2. S. Greenblatt, The Improvisation of Power 197

3. J. Tompkins, Sentimental Power 201

4. N. Armstrong and L. Tennenhouse, Representing Violence 206 Unit 11 Post-Colonial Studies 212

1. A. Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks 214

2. F. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks 217

3. E. Said, Orientalism 220

4. G. Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest 224 Unit 12 Gender Studies 230

1. V. L. Bullough, Homosexuality, A History 232

2. A. Jagose, Queer Theory, An Introduction 236

3. M. Wittig, One Is Not Born a Woman 239

4. E. K. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet 243

5. J. Butler, Gender Trouble 246

Unit 13 Cultural Studies 252

1. R. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy 254

2. S. Hall, Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms 257

3. R. Williams, The Future of Cultural Studies 261

4. M. Gottdiener, Disneyland: A Utopian Urban Space 265

5. D. Wright, Racism in School Textbooks 271

Unit 1 Russian Formalism

In the heyday of high modernism emerged a group of college students and young faculty in Moscow and Petersburg, Russia, whose interest was claimed to be literature per se. They were few in number, but their unmistakable insistence on the ideal status of literary study and stubborn pursuit for its realization has marked the beginning of a new era, and produced profound influence on the subsequent development of contemporary Western critical theory.

It is generally believed that Formalism started in 1914 when Viktor Shklovsky publis hed “The Resurrection of the Word,” and ended with his essay “A Monument to Scientific Error” in 1930. Organizationally the formalists centered around two different though interrelated groups. One was “The Society for the Study of Poetic Language” (Opojaz), founded in 1916 by Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Yury Tynyanov and others, whose interest was the general principles governing literature and distinguishing it from other forms of verbal expression. The other group was the Moscow Linguistic Circle, founded in 1915 by linguists like Roman Jakobson, which based literary study on linguistics by insisting on the differentiation between poetic and practical language.

In spite of the apparent differences in their theoretical assumptions and critical practice, the two groups share one thing in common, namely, to “place the study of literature on a scientific footing by defining its object and establishing its own methods and procedures.” In other words, they were united in an effort to find the internal laws and principles that make a piece of literature literary, or the FORM of literature (hence the label of “formalism”, though Eikhenbaum for political reasons would rather prefer the word “specificity”) (Bennett 1979: 10).

“Form” is a negative word, met hodologically, if not ideologically. That is, the formalists argued at the beginning for a strict separation of form and content and made repeated efforts to discredit the latter as a proper object of literary study by concentrating exclusively on the former. This radical separation posed difficult problems, theoretical as well as ideological, for the later formalists, and forced them to make compromises. The former “extra-aesthetic” materials (historical, biographical, sociological, or psychological) were treated as quasi-formal and put back again into the category of “form” in terms of foreground/ background. Here content was called upon only as a means of foregrounding form, and therefore had lost the value of its own ontological existence.

For Shkl ovsky, there must be a quality which made form “formal” or literature “literary.” Here he and other formalists faced a difficult task of defining the peculiarity of literature. This peculiarity had been talked about ever since Aristotle in vague terms like “poetry” or “work of art,” simply because it seemed to defy any concrete explication. But for the formalist a concrete and unmistakable concept had to be found, so that the object of discussion (literature) might be put in a more clearly defined

theoretical framework. Shklovsky made a wise breakthrough by turning to language, as literature is basically a verbal art. He argued that literature differs from non literature for a quality called “literariness,” (though other formalists such as the Muscovites wou ld express it in different terms) manifested in its peculiar use of language, as “the language of poetry is ... a difficult, roughened, impeded language.” It is to be noted that this does not mean “poetic” language is necessarily a difficult language. The emphasis here, Shklovsky argued, is on the process of experience rather than on its final product, “the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”

A.S. Pushkin and Maxim Gorky reversed the traditional literary/ ordinary language and therefore “roughened” their language by intentionally making it easier (Lemon & Reis 1965: 22, 12). Similar cases are numerous in different literatures. The Chinese poets in Tang Dynasty such as Li Po pushed for a plain and terse poetic language as a reaction to the dominant ornate poetic style. Similarly, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the English Romanticism used “common language of the common people” for the “spontaneous overflow” of feelings as against the mannerism of the proceeding century.

What follows then is the means by which this “literariness” is to be achieved. The formalists started with verbal art, but for a general theory of “specificity” applicable to all forms of art (painting, dancing, photography, architecture, etc.), they had to come to terms with a more universal principle for the “artfulness” of art. Hence the concept of “defamiliarization” (It is said that Shklovsky originally used “OCTPAHHEИE,” or “estrangement” in Russian. But the typesetter mistakenly turned the word into “OCTPAHEИE,” meaning “sharpening,” a beautiful mistake as it now comes to mean “to defamiliarize so as to sharpen”).Shklovsky may not be the first to raise the idea of defamiliarization, P.B. Shelley for instance says in “A Defence of Poetry” that poetry “makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” But it is the Formalists who first made it, by a systemati c account, a poetic principle.

If the Opojaz critics looked for “literariness” in the process of reading experience with individual texts, the Moscow linguists turned to more concrete rhetorical devices in structure, rhyme and rhythm for “poeticity.” Roman Jakobson, for instance, in “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles” believes that linguistic signs may be clustered around the poles of metaphor and metonymy. Realism in its emphasis on reflection is more metonymic while the avant guard literature is more metaphorical, or poetical.

There is one important difference, however, between the Opojaz critics and their linguistic counterparts. While Shklovsky took “laying bare devices” at the expense of all the other literary constituents, Jakobson and Muk arovsky tried to be more inclusive in their idea of “foreground/ background”: a work of art is constituted not by the sheer number of devices, but by devices arranged in a hierarchy. In order to “foreground” a temporarily stable “dominant device,” all the other components of the work have to be present and work together. While Shklovsky finds it hard to account for change in literary form since this form is mechanical and static, and an increased number of devices would eventually lead to the disappearance of any noticeable device, the dynamic network of literary work proposed by the Russian linguists generates a theory of literary historiography: any change in literature is explained by the rearrangement of literary device, with the obsolete device retreating into the background to be foregrounded again, in a different form perhaps, in the future.

Later Opojaz critics tried to redress the error they had made. Shklovsky, for instance, talks about literary history in terms of the relation of literary forms: the hegemonic form takes on the traces of the previously dominant form, which may expect to win back the dominance again. Here Shklovsky to a certain extent solves the problem of defamiliarization eventually turned into automatization. Tynyanov also t alks about the change in literary form in terms of “breaks”: literary forms replace one another more by struggle and breakthroughs than by direct inheritance. The idea is interesting because it in a way anticipates Thomas S. Kuhn?s idea of paradigm shifts and Michel Foucault?s idea of history. The idea of breakthrough may also account for the particular period when Russian Formalism flourished, a period in which Russian literature tried to break away from the European literary tradition, and Russian criticism to deviate from symbolism, realism, and naturalism.

The most severe criticism of Formalism came from Marxism. Trotsky?s remark that “the form of art is, to a certain and very large degree, independent, but the artist who creates this form, and the spectator who is enjoying it, are not empty machines” is a valid and forceful criticism. Bakhtin was also keen to point out that “if, when we isolate the ideological object, we lose sight of the social connections which penetrate it (of which it is the most subtle manifestation), if we detach it from the system of social interaction, then nothing of the ideological object will remain” (Bakhtin & Medvedev 1985: 77). The formalist idolization of an autonomous text was later described by Fredric Jameson as f alling into the “prison house of language.” In the same light, the British Marxist Terry Eagleton deconstructs the idea of an ordinary language shared by the whole community, since “[any] actual language consists of a highly complex range of discourses, differentiated according to class, region, gender, status and so on” (Eagleton 1985: 5). Even formalists themselves realized that isolation of literariness might create more problems than they claimed to have solved. Tynyanov, for instance, observed in 1924 that it was almost impossible to make an absolute definition of literature; Eikhenbaum also admitted in 1929 that the relation between and the function of the constituents of literature were changing all the time (Todorov 1988: 86).

Erroneous as it was and notorious as it has now become, the heritage of Formalism is too large to be overlooked. The post-structuralist Stanley Fish redefines formalism in terms of “beliefs,” and the sixteen formalistic beliefs he has listed cover almost every aspect of our life (Fish 1989: 6). Fokkema also observes that almost every literary theory in Europe is inspired by Formalism in one way or another (Fokkema & Kunne-Ibsch 1977:11). After the most dismantling attack on formalism in the seventieth and eightieth, more and more critics realize today that “we find in the activity of the Opojaz group the challenge in their trying to make out of literary studies a homogeneous domain... As we observe, they succeeded to a very large extent. For this reason alone, it is important to accept the most enriching part of their heritage and to continue it, rather than to grasp its weak points and to criticize them. The latter is always the easiest task” (Matejka & Pomorska, 1978: 279)

There are many ways to account for the rise of Russian formalism. The turbulent years under Tsarism had turned some literary scholars away from any political commitment, for instance; the European influences such as aestheticism, intuitionism and Saussurean linguistics had found ready followers in Russia to the ivory tower of language; and the early twentieth century scientism had a special appeal to the Formalists. Yet one is not to forget the Russian critical heritage which had “foregrounded” Formalism. “Formalism was, it is true, the first critical m ovement in Russia which attacked in systematic fashion the problems of rhythm and meter, of style and composition. But the interest in literary craft was not in itself a novel phenomenon in Russian critical thought...a rich indigenous tradition of form-con sciousness [goes] back as far as the Middle Ages” (Erlich 1965: 20). Russian Formalism formally ended in early 1930s, but Jakobson and his colleagues went on with their research, first in Prague and then in the US. In spite of the apparent similarities between Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism, there is little evidence of mutual influence. However, RenéWellek, a major New Critic, collaborated with Jakobson in the Prague group in the 1930s. Formalism did not attract any critical attention from the Western academia until Erlich?s publication of Russian Formalism, History - Doctrine in 1955 and Todorov?s publication in 1965 of an anthology of Russian formalists, Theory of Literature, which enhanced the awareness of language and linguistic model for the French structuralists. Formalism had strong impact on the structuralism in the Soviet Union in the 1960s, especially the Tartu-Moscow group. Similar impact was also found in Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Art as Technique(Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky, 1893-1984)

Shklovsky is the leading Russian formalist theoretician and novelist. Graduate from St.

Petersburg U and teacher at the Institute of Art History, he organized Opojaz and

became its charter member, having “touched most of the fundamentals of Formalist

theory” and being “often the first to define a problem, and frequently [pointing] to its

solution.” Within a decade he proposed some of the most enduring concepts of

Formalism, such as defamiliarization (ostranenie), literariness, story/ plot (fabula/

siuzhet), material/ device and laying bare of device. He is best remembered for his

analysis of plot composition in terms of repetition, tautology, parallelism, double-

plotting, opposition and false ending. From 1930s, he made more conventional

sociological studies on Tolstoy, and re-emerged in the 1960s with the reprints of his

earlier works and memoirs of Opojaz. “Art as Technique” (1917), a primary document

of the early Formalists, is often regarded as its manifesto. It “announces a break with

th e only other …aesthetic? approach available at that time and in that place,” and “offers

a theory of both the methodology of criticism and the purpose of art” by highlighting

some concepts central to the theoretical stance of the school in general, such as

defamiliarization and the distinction between poetic and ordinary language.

“Art is thinking in images.” This maxim, which even high school students parrot, is nevertheless the starting point for the erudite philologist who is beginning to put together some kind of systematic literary theory. The idea, originated in part by Potebnya, has spread. “Without imagery there is no art, and in particular no poetry,” Potebnya writes. And elsewhere, “poetry, as well as prose, is first and foremost a special way of thinking and knowing.”

Poetry is a special way of thinking; it is precisely, a way of thinking in images, a way which permits what is generally called “economy of mental effort,” a way which makes for “a sensation of the relative ease of the process.” Aesthetic feeling is the reaction to this economy. This is how the academician Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, who undoubtedly read the works of Potebnya attentively, almost certainly understood and faithfully summarized the ideas of his teacher. Potebnya and his numerous disciples consider poetry a special kind of thinking--- thinking by means of images; they feel that the purpose of imagery is to help channel various objects and activities into groups and to clarify the unknown by means of the known.

Nevertheless, the definition “Art is thinking in images,” which means (I omit the usual middle terms of the argument) that art is the making of symbols, has survived the downfall of the theory which supported it. It survives chiefly in the wake of Symbolism, especially among the theorists of the Symbolist movement.

Many still believe, then, that thinking in images---thinking, in specific scenes of “roads and landscape” and “furrows and boundaries”1--- is the chief characteristic of 1An illusion to Vyacheslav Ivanov?s Furrows and Boundaries (Moscow, 1916), a major statement of Symbolist theory.

poetry. Consequent ly, they should have expected the history of “imagistic art,” as they call it, to consist of a history of changes in imagery. But we find that images change little; from century to century, from nation to nation, from poet to poet, they flow on without cha nging. Images belong to no one: they are “the Lord?s.” The more you understand an age, the more convinced you become that the images a given poet used and which you thought his own were taken almost unchanged from another poet. The works of poets are classified or grouped according to the new techniques that poets discover and share, and according to their arrangement and development of the resources of language; poets are much more concerned with arranging images than with creating them. Images are given to poets; the ability to remember them is far more important than the ability to create them.

Imagistic thought does not, in any case, include all the aspects of art nor even all the aspects of verbal art. A change in imagery is not essential to the development of poetry. We know that frequently an expression is thought to be poetic, to be created for aesthetic pleasure, although actually it was created without such intent---e.g., Annensky?s opinion that the Slavic languages are especially poetic and An drey Bely?s ecstasy over the technique of placing adjectives after nouns, a technique used by eighteenth-century Russian poets. Bely joyfully accepts the technique as something artistic, or more exactly, as intended, if we consider intention as art. Actually, this reversal of the usual adjective-noun order is a peculiarity of the language (which had been influenced by Church Slavonic). Thus a work may be (1) intended as prosaic and accepted as poetic, or (2) intended as poetic and accepted as prosaic. This suggests that the artistry attributed to a given work results from the way we perceive it. By “works of art,” in the narrow sense, we mean words created by special techniques designed to make the works as obviously artistic as possible.

Potebnya?s conclusion, which can be formulated “poetry equals imagery,” gave rise to the whole theory that “imagery equals symbolism,” that the image may serve as the invariable predicate of various subjects. (This conclusion, because it expressed ideas similar to the theories of the Symbolists, intrigued some of their leading representatives---Andrey Bely, Merezhkovsky and his “eternal companions” and , in fact, formed the basis of the theory of Symbolism.) The conclusion stems partly from the fact that Potebnya did not distinguish between the language of poetry and the language of prose. Consequently, he ignored the fact that there are two aspects of imagery: imagery as a practical means of thinking, as a means of placing objects within categories; and imagery as poetic, as a means of reinforcing an impression. I shall clarify with an example. I want to attract the attention of a young child who is eating bread and butter and getting the butter on her fingers. I call, “Hey, butterfingers!” This is a figure of speech, a clearly prosaic trope. Now a different example. The child is playing with my glasses and drops them. I call, “Hey butterfingers!”2 This figure of speech is a poetic trope. (In the first example, butter finger is metonymic; in the second, metaphoric---but this is not what I want to stress.)

Poetic imagery is a means of creating the strongest possible impression. As a method it is, depending upon its purpose, neither more nor less effective than other poetic techniques; it is neither more nor less effective than ordinary or negative parallelism, comparison, repetition, balanced structure, hyperbole, the commonly accepted rhetorical 2 A word play for “hat,” colloquial for “clod,” “duffer,” etc.

figures, and all those methods which emphasize the emotional effect of an expression (including words or even articulated sounds.) But poetic imagery only externally resembles either the stock imagery of fables and ballads or thinking in images---e.g., the example in Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky?s Language and Art in which a little girl calls a ball a little watermelon. Poetic imagery is but one of the devices of poetic language. Prose imagery is a means of abstraction: a little watermelon instead of a lampshade, or a little watermelon instead of a head, is only the abstraction of one of the object?s characteristics, that of roundness. It is no different from saying that the head and the melon are both round. This is what is meant, but it has nothing to do with poetry.

These ideas about the economy of energy, as well as about the law and aim of creativity, are perhaps true in their application to “practical” language; they were, however, extended to poetic language. Hence they do not distinguish properly between the laws of practical language and the laws of poetic language. The fact that Japanese poetry has sounds not found in conversational Japanese was hardly the first factual indication of the differences between poetic and everyday language. Leo Jakubinsky has observed that the law of the dissimilation of liquid sounds does not apply to poetic language. This suggested to him that poetic language tolerated the admission of hard-to-pronounce conglomerations of similar sounds. In his article, one of the first examples of scientific criticism, he indicates inductively, the contrast (I shall say more about this point later) between the laws of poetic language and the laws of practical language.

We must, then, speak about the laws of expenditure and economy in poetic language not on the basis of an analogy with prose, but on the basis of the laws of poetic language.

If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us. Such habituation explains the principles by which, in ordinary speech, we leave phrases unfinished and words half expressed. In this process, ideally realized in algebra, things are replaced by symbols. Complete words are not expressed in rapid speech; their initial sounds are barely perceived. Alexander Pogodin offers the example of a boy considering the sentence “The Swiss mountains are beautiful” in the form of a series of letters: T. S. m. a. b.

This characteristic of thought not only suggests the method of algebra, but even prompts the choice of symbols (letters, especially initial letters). By this “algebraic” method of thought we apprehend objects only as shapes with imprecise extensions; we do not see them in their entirety but rather recognize them by their main characteristics. We see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack. We know what it is by its configuration, but we see only its silhouette. The object, perceived thus in the manner of prose perception, fades and does not leave even a first impression; ultimately even the essence of what it was is forgotten. Such perception explains why we fail to hear the prose word in its entirety (see Les Jakubinsky?s article) and, hence, why (along with other slips of the tongue) we fail to pronounce it. The process of “algebrization,” the over-

automatization of an object, permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort. Either objects are assigned only one proper feature---a number, for example---or else they function as though by formula and do not even appear in cognition:

I was cleaning a room and, meandering about, approached the divan and couldn?t

remember whether or not I had dusted it. Since these movements are habitual and

unconscious, I could not remember and felt that it was impossible to remember---so that

if I had dusted it and forgot--- that is, had acted unconsciously, then it was the same as

if I had not. If some conscious person had been watching, then the fact could be

established. If, however, no one was looking, or looking on unconsciously, if the whole

complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had

never been.3

And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one?s wife, and the fear of war. “If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously,

then such lives are as if t hey had never been.” And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as

they are known. The techniq ue of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a

way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.

The range of poetic (artistic) work extends from the sensory to the cognitive, from poetry to prose, from the concrete to the abstract; from Cervantes?s Don Quixote---scholastic and poor nobleman, half consciously bearing his humiliation in the court of the duke---to the broad but empty Don Quixote of Turgenev; from Charlemagne to the name “king” [in Russian “Charles” and “king” obviously derive from the same root, korol]. The meaning of a work broadens to the extent that artfulness and artistry diminish; thus a fable symbolizes more than a poem, and a proverb more than a fable. Consequently, the least self-contradictory part of Potebnya?s theory is his treatment of the fable, which, from his point of view, he investigated thoroughly. But since his theory did not provide for “expressive” works of art, he could not finish his book. As we know, Notes on the Theory of Literature was published in 1905, thirteen years after Potebnya?s death. Potebnya himself completed only the section on the fable.

After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it---hence we cannot say anything significant about it. Art removes objects from the automatism of perception in several ways. Here I want to illustrate a way used repeatedly by Leo Tolstoy, that writer who, for Merezhkovsky at least, seems to present things as if he himself saw them, saw them in their entirety, and did not alter them.

Tolstoy makes the familiar seem strange by not naming the familiar object. He describes an object as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were happening for the first time. In describing something he avoids the accepted names of its part s and instead names corresponding parts of other objects. For example, in “Shame” Tolstoy “defamiliarizes” the idea of flogging in this way: “to strip people who have 3Leo Tolstoy?s Diary entry dated March 1, 1897.

broken the law, to hurl them to the floor, and to rap on their bottoms with switches,” an d, after a few lines, “to lash about on the naked buttocks.” Then he remarks:

Just why precisely this stupid, savage means of causing pain and not any other---why

not prick the shoulders or any part of the body with needles, squeeze the hands or the

feet in a vise, or anything like that?

I apologize for this harsh example, but it is typical of Tolstoy?s way of pricking the conscience. The familiar act of flogging is made unfamiliar both by the description and by the proposal to change its form without changing its nature. Tolstoy uses this technique of “defamiliarization” constantly. The narrator of “Kholstomer,” for example, is a horse, and it is the horse?s point of view (rather than a person?s) that makes the content of the story seem unfamiliar. Here is how the horse regards the institution of private property:

I understood well what they said about whipping and Christianity. But then I was

absolutely in the dark. What?s the meaning of “his own,” “his colt”? From these phrases

I saw that people thought there was some sort of connection between me and the stable.

At the time I simply could not understand the connection. Only much later, when they

separated me from the other horses, did I begin to understand. But even then I simply

could not see what it meant when they called me “man?s property.” The words “my

horse” referred to me, a living horse, and seemed as strange to me as the words “my

land,” “my air,” “my water.”

But the words make a strong impression on me. I thought about them constantly, and

only after the most diverse experiences with people did I understand, finally, what they

meant. They meant this: in life people are guided by words, not by deeds. It?s not so

much that they love the possibility of doing or not doing something as it is the

possibility of speaking with words, agreed on among themselves, about various topics.

Such are the words “my” and “mine,” which they apply to different things, creatures,

objects, and even to land, people, and horses. They agree that only one may sa y “mine”

about this, that, or the other thing. And the one who says “mine” about the greatest

number of things is, according to the game which they?ve agreed to among themselves,

the one they consider the most happy. I don?t know the point of all this, but it?s true. For

a long time I tried to explain it to myself in terms of some kind of real gain, but I had to

reject that explanation because it was wrong. Many of those, for instance, who called

me their own never rode on me--- although others did. And so with those who fed me.

Then again, the coachman, the veterinarians, and the outsiders in general treated me

kindly, yet those who called me their own did not. In due time, having widened the

scope of my observations, I satisfied myself that the notion “my,” not only in relation to

us horses, has no other basis than a narrow human instinct which is called a sense of or

right to private property. A man says “this house is mine” and never lives in it; he only

worries about its construction and upkeep. A mercha nt says “my shop,” “my dry goods

shop,” for instance, and does not even wear clothes made from the better cloth he keeps

in his own shop.

There are people who call a tract of land their own, but they never set eyes on it and

never take a stroll on it. There are people who call others their own, yet never see them.

And the whole relationship between them is that the so-called “owners” treat the others

unjustly.

There are people who call women their own, or their “wives,” but their women live with other men. And people strive not for the good in life, but for goods they can call

their own.

I am now convinced that this is the essential difference between people and

ourselves. And therefore, not even considering the other ways in which we are superior,

but considering just this one virtue, we can bravely claim to stand higher than men on

the ladder of living creatures. The actions of men, at least those with whom I have had

dealings, are guided by words---ours, by deeds.

The horse is killed before the end of the story, but the manner of the narrative, its technique, does not change:

Much later they put Serpukhovsky?s body, which had experienced the world, which had

eaten and drunk, into the ground. They could profitably send neither his hide, nor his

flesh, nor his bones anywhere.

But since his dead body, which had gone about in the world for twenty years, was a

great burden to everyone, its burial was only a superfluous embarrassment for the

people. For a long time no one had needed him; for a long time he had been a burden on

all. But nevertheless, the dead who buried the dead found it necessary to dress this

bloated body, which immediately began to rot, in a good uniform and good boots; to lay

it in a good new coffin with new tassels at the four corners, then to place this new coffin

in another of lead and ship it to Moscow; there to exhume ancient bones and at just that

spot, to hide this putrefying body, swarming with maggots, in its new uniform and clean

boots, and to cover it over completely with dirt.

Thus we see that at the end of the story Tolstoy continues to use the technique even though the motivation for it [the reason for its use] is gone.

Study Questions:

1.What does “form” stand for in this essay, and what d oes it stand against?

2.What is the relation between form and content as viewed by the early Formalists?

3.Do you agree that art exists only to “make the stone stony?”

Standard Language and Poetic Language(Jan Mukarovsky, 1891-1975)

A member of the academy and professor of Czech literature at Charles IV University

(once nominated its rector) in Prague, Mukarovsky was one of the most active members

of the Prague Linguistic Circle founded in 1926. His early works are heavily tinged by

theo ries of the Russian Formalists, due in part to Jakobson?s move to Prague in 1920,

but his is not an extension of Formalism. “He replaces the concepts of causality by

reciprocity and form by structure,” having influenced by Edmund Husserl?s

phenomenology. In order to rid aesthetics of positivism and of psychologizing

speculation over …beauty? as absolute idea, Mukarovsky emphasizes the

“phenomenological (functional) organization of empirical reality,” as may be found in

the following excerpt first published in 1932. What is important here is the explication

of the formalist dichotomy (poetic/ordinary language) in terms of “foregrounding” or

“dominant”. This is also the point where he turned away from the strictly formalist

position.

The problem of the relationship between standard language and poetic language can be considered from two standpoints. The theorist of poetic language poses it somewhat as follows: is the poet bound by the norms of the standard? Or perhaps: how does this norm assert itself in poetry? The theorist of the standard language, on the other hand, wants to know above all to what extent a work of poetry can be used as data for ascertaining the norm of the standard. In other words, the theory of poetic language is primarily interested in the differences between the standard and poetic language, whereas the theory of the standard language is mainly interested in the similarities between them. It is clear that with a good procedure no conflict can arise between the two directions of research; there is only a difference in the point of view and in the illumination of the problem. Our study approaches the problem of the relationship between poetic language and the standard from the vantage point of poetic language. Our procedure will be to subdivide the general problem into a number of special problems.

The first problem, by way of introduction, concerns the following: what is the relationship between the extension of poetic language and that of the standard, between the places of each in the total system of the whole of language? Is poetic language a special brand of the standard, or is it an independent formation?--- Poetic language cannot be called a brand of the standard, if for no other reason that poetic language has at its disposal, from the standpoint of lexicon, syntax, etc., all the forms of the given language---often of different developmental phases thereof. There are works in which the lexical material is taken over completely from another form of language than the standard (thus, Villon?s or Rictus? slang poetry in French literature). Different forms of the language may exist side by side in a work of poetry (for instance, in the dialogues of a novel dialect of slang, in the narrative passages the standard). Poetic language finally also has some of its own lexicon and phraseology as well as some grammatical forms, the so-called poetisms such as zor [gaze], or [steed], pláti [be aflame], 3rd p. sg. muz [can; cf. English -th] …. Only some schools of poetry, of course, have a positive attitude towards poetisms (among them the Lumír Group including Svatopluk Cech), others reject them.

Poetic language is thus not a brand of the standard. This is not to deny the close connection between the two, which consists in the fact that, for poetry, the standard language is the background against which is reflected the esthetically intentional distortion of the linguistic components of the work, in other words, the intentional violation of the norm of the standard. Let us, for instance, visualize a work in which this distortion is carried out by the interpenetration of dialect speech with the standard; it is clear, then, that it is not the standard which is perceived as a distortion of the dialect, but the dialect as a distortion of the standard, even when the dialect is quantitatively preponderant. The violation of the norm of the standard, its systematic violation, is what makes possible the poetic utilization of language; without this possibility there would be no poetry. The more the norm of the standard is stabilized in a given language, the more

varied can be its violation, and therefore the more possibilities for poetry in that language. And on the other hand, the weaker the awareness of this norm, the fewer possibilities of violation, and hence the fewer possibilities for poetry. Thus, in the beginnings of Modern Czech poetry, when the awareness of the norm of the standard was weak, poetic neologisms with the purpose of violating the norm of the standard were little different from neologisms designed to gain general acceptance and become a part of the norm of the standard, so that they could be confused with them.

The second special question which we shall attempt to answer concerns the different function of the two forms of language. This is the core of the problem. The function of poetic language consists in the maximum of foregrounding of the utterance. Foregrounding is the opposite of automatization, that is, the deautomatization of an act; the more an act is automatized, the less it is consciously executed; the more it is foregrounded, the more completely conscious does it become. Objectively speaking: automatization schematizes an event; foregrounding means the violation of the scheme. The standard language in its purest form, as the language of science with formation as its objective, avoids foregrounding [aktualisace]: thus, a new expression, foregrounded because of its newness, is immediately automatized in a scientific treatise by an exact definition of its meaning. Foregrounding is , of course, common in the standard language, for instance, in journalistic style, even more in essays. But here it is always subordinate to communication: its purpose is to attract the reader?s (listener?s) attention more closely to the subject matter expressed by the foregrounded means of expression. All that has been said here about foregrounding and automatization in the standard language has been treated in detail in Havránek?s paper in this cycle; we are here concerned with poetic language. In poetic language foregrounding achieves maximum intensity to the extent of pushing communication into the background as the objective of expression and of being used for its own sake; it is not used in the services of communication, but in order to place in the foreground the act of expression, the act of speech itself. The question is then one of how this maximum of foregrounding is achieved in poetic language. The idea might arise that this is a quantitative effect, a matter of the foregrounding of the largest number of components, perhaps of all of them together. This would be a mistake, although only a theoretical one, since in practice such a complete foregrounding of all the components is impossible. The foregrounding of any one of the components is necessarily accompanied by the automatization of one or more of the other components; thus, for instance, the foregrounded intonation in [Jaroslav] Vrchlicky [1853-1912, a poet of the Lumír Group, see above] and [Svatopluk] Cech has necessarily pushed to the lowest level of automatization the meaning of the word as a unit, because the foregrounding of its meaning would give the word phonetic independence as well and lead to a disturbance of the uninterrupted flow of the intonational (melodic) line; an example of the degree to which the semantic independence of the word in context also manifests itself as intonational independence can be found in [Karel] Toman?s [1877-1946, a modern poet] verse. The foregrounding of intonation as an uninterrupted melodic line is thus linked to the semantic “emptiness” for which the Lumír Group has been criticized by the younger generation as being “verbalistic.”--- In addition to the practical impossibility of the foregrounding of all components, it can also be pointed out that the simultaneous

foregrounding of all the components of a work of poetry is unthinkable. This is because the foregrounding of a component implies precisely its being placed in the foreground; the unit in the foreground, however, occupies this position by comparison with another unit or units that remain in the background. A simultaneous general foregrounding would thus bring all the components into the same plane and so become a new automatization. The devices by which poetic language achieves its maximum of foregrounding must therefore be sought elsewhere than in the quantity of foregrounded components. They consist in the consistency and systematic character of foregrounding. The consistency manifests itself in the fact that the reshaping of the foregrounded component within a given work occurs in a stable direction; thus, the deautomatization of meanings in a certain work is consistently carried out by lexical selection (the mutual interlarding of contrasting areas of the lexicon), in another equally consistently by the uncommon semantic relationship of words close together in the context. Both procedures result in a foregrounding of meaning, but differently for each. The systematic foregrounding of components in a work of poetry consists in the gradation of the interrelationships of these components, that is, in their mutual subordination and superordination. The component highest in the hierarchy becomes the dominant. All other components, foregrounded or not, as well as their interrelationships, are evaluated from the standpoint of the dominant. The dominant is that component of the work which sets in motion, and gives direction to, the relationships of all other components. The material of a work of poetry is intertwined with the interrelationships of the components even if it is in a completely unforegrounded state. Thus, there is always present, in communicative speech as well, the potential relationship between intonation and meaning, syntax, word order, or the relationship of the word as a meaningful unit to the phonetic structure of the text, to the lexical selection found in the text, to other words as units of meaning in the context of the same sentence. It can be said that each linguistic component is linked directly or indirectly, by means of these multiple interrelationships, in some way to every other component. In communicative speech these relationships are for the most part merely potential, because attention is not called to their presence and to their mutual relationship. It is, however, enough to disturb the equilibrium of this system at some point and the entire network of relationships is slanted in a certain direction and follows it in its internal organization: tension arises in one portion of this network (by consistent unidirectional foregrounding), while the remaining portions of the network are relaxed (by automatization perceived as an intentionally arranged background). This internal organization of relationships will be different in terms of the point affected, that is, in terms of the dominant. More concretely: sometimes intonation will be governed by meaning (by various procedures), sometimes, on the other hand, the meaning structure will be determined by intonation; sometimes again, the relationship of a word to the lexicon may be foregrounded, then again its relationship to the phonetic structure of the text. Which of the possible relationships will be foregrounded, which will remain automatized, and what will be the direction of foregrounding--- whether from component A to component B or vice versa, all this depends on the dominant.

The dominant thus creates the unity of the work of poetry. It is, of course, a unity of its own kind, the nature of which in esthetics is usually designated as “unity in variety,” a dynamic unity in which we at the same time perceive harmony and disharmony,

convergence and divergence. The convergence is given by the trend towards the dominant, the divergence by the resistance of the unmoving background of unforegrounded components against this trend. Components may appear unforegrounded from the standpoint of the standard language, or from the standpoint of the poetic canon, that is, the set of firm and stable corms into which the structure of a preceding school of poetry has dissolved by automatization, when it is no longer perceived as an indivisible and undissociable whole. In other words, it is possible in some cases for a component which is foregrounded in terms of the norms of the standard, not to be foregrounded in a certain work because it is in accord with the automatized poetic canon. Every work of poetry is perceived against the background of a certain tradition, that is, of some automatized canon with regard to which it constitutes a distortion. The outward manifestation of this automatization is the ease with which creation is possible in terms of this canon, the proliferation of epigones, the liking for obsolescent poetry in circles not close to literature. Proof of the intensity with which a new trend in poetry is perceived as a distortion of the traditional canon is the negative attitude of conservative criticism which considers deliberate deviations from the canon errors against the very essence of poetry.

The background which we perceive behind the work of poetry as consisting of the unforegrounded components resisting foregrounding is thus dual: the norm of the standard language and the traditional esthetic canon. Both backgrounds are always potentially present, though one of them will predominate in the concrete case. In periods of powerful foregrounding of linguistic elements, the background of the norm of the standard predominates, while in periods of moderate foregrounding, that of the traditional canon. If the latter has strongly distorted the norm of the standard, then its moderate distortion may, in turn, constitute a renewal of the norm of the standard, and this precisely because of its moderation. The mutual relationships of the components of the work of poetry, both foregrounded and unforegrounded, constitute its structure, a dynamic structure including both convergence and divergence and one that constitutes an undissociable artistic whole, since each of its components has its value precisely in terms of its relation to the totality.

Study Questions:

1. What is the distinction between poetic/standard language, according to Mukarovsky?

2. How does Mukarovsky differ from the Formalists in his analysis of the “backgrounded?”

The Theory of the “Formal Method”(Boris Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum, 1886-1959)

After studying at the Military Medical Academy, Eikhenbaum switched to the Faculty

of Philology of St. Petersburg U and graduated in 1912. From 1918 to 1949 he was

professor at Leningrad U, and starting in 1956 he taught in the Institute of Russian

Literature. In the 1920s Eikhenbaum was actively involved in Opojaz and became its

spokesman at all important debates. Later on he worked in the area of literary history

and published over 300 works on major Russian writers. As a literary historian,

Eikhenbaum developed a keen interest in the interaction of literature and milieu, trying

to fight both the narrow formalism that excluded life from literature and vulgar

sociology that discussed literature in terms of socio-economic factors. The following

essay w as first published in Ukrainian in 1926, two years after Trotsky?s major attack

and a few years before Formalism?s total disappearance. Now often regarded as a

Formalist classic, it is both an apology for Formalist position and a summary of its main

arguments.

The so-called formal method grew out of a struggle for a science of literature that would be both independent and factual; it is not the outgrowth of a particular methodology. The notion of a method has been so exaggerated that it now suggests too much. In principle the question for the Formalist is not how to study literature, but what the subject matter of literary study actually is. We neither discuss methodology nor quarrel about it. We speak and may speak only about theoretical principles suggested to us not by this or that ready-made methodology, but by the examination of specific material in its specific context. The Formalists? works in literary theory and literary history show this clearly enough, but during the past ten years so many new questions and old misunderstandings have accumulated that I feel it advisable to try to summarize some of our work--- not as a dogmatic system but as a historical summation. I wish to show how the work of the Formalists began, how it evolved, and what it involved into.

The evolutionary character of the development of the formal method is important to an understanding of its history; our opponents and many of our followers overlook it. We are surrounded by eclectics and latecomers who would turn the formal method into some kind of inflexible formalistic system in order to provide themselves with a working vocabulary, a program, and a name. A program is a very handy thing for critics, but not at all characteristic of our method. Our scientific approach has had no such prefabricated program or doctrine, and has none. In our studies we value a theory only as a working hypothesis to help us discover and interpret facts; that is, we determine the validity of the facts and use them as the material of our research. We are not concerned with definitions, for which the latecomers thirst; nor do we build general theories, which so delight eclectics. We posit specific principles and adhere to them insofar as the material justifies them. If the material demands their refinements or change, we change or refine them. In this sense we are quite free from our own theories---as science must be free to the extent that theory and conviction are distinct. There is no ready-made science; science lives not by settling on truth, but by overcoming error.

This essay is not intended to argue our position. The initial period of scientific struggle and journalistic polemics is past. Such attacks as that in The Press and the Revolution (with which I was honored) can be answered only by new scientific works. My chief purpose here is to show how the formal method, by gradually evolving and broadening its field of research, spread beyond the usual “methodological” limits and became a special science of literature, a specific ordering of facts. Within the limits of this science, the