Russian formalism
This chapter examines the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics by the Russian formalists (with case studies focusing on Shklovsky, Petrovsky, Tomashevsky, and Propp). It demonstrates that these Russian ‘neo-Aristotelians’ adopt and adapt their key narratological priorities and principles from the Poetics, especially their theories concerning fabula and syuzhet, the primacy of plot, of form synthesizing raw story content, and the importance of the experience and affect of narrative as it is cognitively processed by an audience. Aristotle’s Poetics is made strange in each new iteration of its reading and reception by the Russian ‘neo-Aristotelians’, with each (r)evolution itself configuring a self-conscious reaction of some kind to a contemporary theorist, no less than to Aristotle himself.