scholarly journals Between phenomenology and futurism: Roman Jakobson’s poetics before the WW 2

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 86-106
Author(s):  
Peter Steiner
Keyword(s):  
Husserlian Phenomenology ◽  
Universal System ◽  
Russian Formalism ◽  
Epistemological Perspective ◽  
Russian Futurism ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
Roman Jakobson

The article is based on a chapter from the author’s book Russian Formalism: A Metapo­etics (1984). It deals with the poetics of Roman Jakobson formulated during his stay in Prague from 1920 to 1938 and treats this subject from an epistemological perspective outlining three incompatible scholarly/artistic trends which informed it: Husserlian Phenomenology, Saus­surian linguistics and Russian Futurism. From Husserl, Jakobson borrowed the concept of “expression” (Ausdruck) — the sign whose self-sameness was absolute. But he departed from the German philosopher by conceiving of this semiotic identity in terms of a Saussurean “so­cial consciousness.” And he further relativized it through the modernist notion of “de-familiarization” — an incessant drive of poetic signs for an aesthetic rejuvenation. To miti­gate the tension between Phenomenological stability and Futurist instability, the essay con­cludes, Jakobson grounded his poetics in phonology: the universal system of distinctive fea­tures common to all languages that is impervious to any violations.

“Formalism” in Polish Literary Scholarship

Slavic Review ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 574-582
Author(s):  
Zbigniew Folejewski
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Russian Formalism ◽  
Literary Research ◽  
Roman Jakobson ◽  
The One ◽  
The University ◽  
The Impact

In discussing the contribution of the Polish “Formal” or “Integral” School to the development of literary research, one of the difficulties is whether to view it mainly as an echo of Russian Formalism or as a scholarly movement in its own right. There is no doubt that the often strikingly suggestive theoretical slogans and undeniable practical achievements of the Russian Formalists—such as Shklovsky's insights on the theory of the novel, V. I. Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, M. A. Petrovsky's Morphology of the Short Story, and the research of Boris Tomashevsky, Viktor Zhirmunsky, and Roman Jakobson in the field of poetry—all greatly attracted those Polish scholars who were looking for a coherent, strictly literary set of criteria, discouraged as they were by the inflation of biographism and psychologism in literary research. Yet the impact of Russian Formalism was limited in scope and in many respects rather indirect. On the one hand, the reaction against the one-sidedness of the psychological school came in Poland independently, and in some ways even earlier than in Russia. For this the Polish scholars did not need to go to Russia—they had both ancient (Aristotle) and more modern sources (German, Italian, French, and others). On the other hand, many of the Polish scholars did not even know the Russian language, though they knew some Western languages very well. (The scholar who was to become the foremost promoter of Formalism, Manfred Kridl, knew very little Russian when he came to teach at the University of Wilno. It was under the influence and with the help of a group of students that he became familiar with the writings of the Formalists.)

scholarly journals Diálogos a partir de Walter Benjamim: a figura de Maiakovski como elo de ligação entre o cubofuturismo e o formalismo russo

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 51
Author(s):  
Carolina Izabela Dutra de Miranda
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Vladimir Mayakovsky ◽  
Russian Formalism ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
The Social ◽  
Russian Futurism ◽  
Critical Movement

Resumo: O presente trabalho aborda as especificidades do futurismo russo, nomeado cubofuturismo, a partir das colocações de Walter Benjamim, presentes nos textos “A nova literatura Russa” (1927) e “O agrupamento político dos escritores na União Soviética” (1927). Embasando-se na discussão desses textos, pretende-se esclarecer a relação deles com o formalismo russo, importante movimento crítico que ocorreu contemporaneamente ao cubofuturismo. Para tanto, pretende-se explicitar como a figura de Vladimir Maiakovski estabeleceu um elo de ligação entre esses dois movimentos – o crítico e o literário – e de que forma o poeta tornou-se importante marco para ocubofuturismo russo e para engajamento político social do movimento literário. Este trabalho pretende expandir as informações e as visões apresentadas por Benjamim em seus textos, sobretudo em relação à atualização acerca do progresso destes movimentos literários e à importância deles, que dificilmente poderiam ser antevistos pelo teórico alemão no momento de produção de seus escritos.Palavras-chave: Cubofuturismo; Futurismo; Formalismo russo; Maiakovski.Abstract: This study aims to deal with the singularities of Russian futurism, named Cubo-Futurism, based on the writings of Walter Benjamin, exposed in the texts “New Russian Literature” (1927) and “The Political Groupings of Russian Writers” (1927). Based on the discussion of these texts, it is intended to clarify their relationship with Russian formalism, an important critical movement which happened contemporaneously with Cubo-Futurism. For this purpose, it aims to explain how the figure of Vladimir Mayakovsky established a connecting link between these two movements – the critic and the literary – and how the poet became an important symbol for Russian Cubo-Futurism and also for the social and political engagement of the literary movement. This study intends to expand the information and the aspects exposed by Benjamin in his texts, especially in relation to the update on the progress of these literary movements and the importance of them, which could hardly be foreseen by the German theorist at the time of his writings.Keywords: Cubo-Futurism; Futurism; Russian formalism; Mayakovsky.

scholarly journals Surprise, Event and the Metonymic Subject

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 97-122
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Russian Formalism ◽  
New Horizons ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Roman Jakobson ◽  
The Subject ◽  
May 1968 ◽  
Traditional Poetry

A well-worn platitude holds that surprise (admiration for the Greeks, but closer to astonishment for their successors) is the starting point of philosophy (while carefully distinguishing philosophical surprise from the routine kind). Surprise also functions as an important concept in aesthetics. Russian formalism elucidates it through the concepts of ostranenie and defamiliarization. Roman Jakobson in 1919 began a heuristically rich analysis that reveals the role of metonymy in prose and new poetry — in contrast to the centrality of metaphor in traditional poetry. This reassessment of the role of contiguity (as well as of randomness and arbitrariness) as opposed to similarity (or, stated another way, syntax vs. paradigmatics) has found some resonance in (mainly, but not exclusively, French) thinking about the concept of event. After its introduction in Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense (1969), the real apotheosis of the event unfolds among different thinkers (Derrida, Badiou, neo-phenomenologists) who glorify the unexpectedness, unforeseeableness, ineffability and causelessness of the event. The article shows that this kind of event theorizing (with its inherent optimism and joyous enthusiasm for new horizons and possibilities) is bound to the type of event within which that thinking took shape, the “revolution” (as it conceived itself) of May 1968. This “theory” cannot fully account for either certain previous events (the Holocaust) nor subsequent ones (such as 9/11 or the pandemic). Parallel with the thinking about the May 1968 event came reflections on subjectivity, or rather on the rapid alteration in its historical types during the 20th century accompanied by efforts to grasp what has taken the place once occupied by the subject. This new and elusive entity (referred to as advenant or “coming about” by Claude Romano) corresponds to the metonymic, contingent nature of current social and/or semantic reality itself.

ODBRANA POEZIJE: RUSKI FORMALIZAM I NOVA KRITIKA

Lipar ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol XXI (73) ◽  
pp. 89-100
Author(s):  
Jovana Pavićević ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States Of America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Specific Method ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Russian Formalism ◽  
Critical Methodology ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Poetic Imagination ◽  
Poetic Expression ◽  
Roman Jakobson

The paper aims to present the key concepts that two formalist schools of thought developed in order to defend poetry as a miracle of communication. Russian Formalism takes Shklovsky’s defamiliarization (остранение) as its key concept and the trans-sense language (zaum) of Russian Futurist poets as a basis for analysing what constitutes differentia specifica of poetry. The ideas of the Russian formalist school, through Roman Jakobson, spread first to Eastern Europe, and then to the United States of America, where they influenced a group of critics, who were already inspired by T. S. Eliot’s and I. A. Richards’ ideas on poetic language and communication, to develop a new critical methodology. The name “New Criticism” was supposed to indicate that this school of thought was about different approaches and new tendencies in criticism. As the paper demonstrates, the key representatives of New Criticism are particularly interested in exploring the function of poetry and of criticism as well as the nature of poetic imagination and language. In order to examine what the poem says as a poem, they developed the practice of close reading and focused on metaphor, paradox, and specific method by which a poet transforms his experience into a poem as autonomous features of poetic expression. The special terminology introduced by Russian Formalism and New Criticism, and the complex, ironic and intellectual language they used not only managed to throw light on what specific problems of the science of literature were, but also enabled a defence through poetry – a kind of resuscitation and refinement of non-literary reality.

Envisioning World Literature in 1863: From the Reports on a Mission Abroad

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (2) ◽  
pp. 439-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. N. Veselovsky ◽  
Jennifer Flaherty ◽  
Boris Maslov
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Common Denominator ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Russian Formalism ◽  
Russian Literary ◽  
Roman Jakobson ◽  
Rudimentary Form ◽  
Viktor Shklovsky

Veselovsky has assigned a task to scholarship which can hardly ever be solved. The Russian formalists, however, have taken up his challenge.—René Wellek (279)The task, which many feel is beyond their abilities, lies within the power of scholarship.—A. N. VeselovskyALEXANDER NIKOLAEVICH VESELOVSKY (1838-1906) IS WIDELY REGARDED AS RUSSIA'S MOST DISTINGUISHED AND INFLUENTIAL Literary theorist before the formation of Opoyaz (“Society for the Study of Poetic Language”), whose members—Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Yury Tynianov, Roman Jakobson, and others—developed the approach generally known as Russian formalism. Readers of Shklovsky may note the prominence accorded to Veselovsky in Theory of Prose (1925). Some will also recall the use of the term historical poetics—in reference to the method put forward by Veselovsky—in the 1963 edition of Mikhail Bakhtin's book on Dostoevsky and in his “The Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel: Notes towards a Historical Poetics” (1937-38, pub. in 1975). Another eloquent testimony to Veselovsky's spectral ubiquity in Russian literary theory is the concluding paragraph of Vladimir Propp's pathbreaking Morphology of the Folktale, where Propp humbly asserts that his “propositions, although they appear to be new, were intuitively foreseen by none other than Veselovsky” and ends his study with an extensive quotation from Veselovsky's Poetics of Plot (115-16). It is rarely recognized, however, that Veselovsky's method, in its rudimentary form, constitutes a common denominator of Shklovsky's, Bakhtin's, and Propp's widely divergent approaches.

Friedrich Nietzsche

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Lemm
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Georges Bataille ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
Point Of Reference

Readers of Giorgio Agamben would agree that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is not one of his primary interlocutors. As such, Agamben’s engagement with Nietzsche is different from the French reception of Nietzsche’s philosophy in Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Georges Bataille, as well as in his contemporary Italian colleague Roberto Esposito, for whom Nietzsche’s philosophy is a key point of reference in their thinking of politics beyond sovereignty. Agamben’s stance towards the thought of Nietzsche may seem ambiguous to some readers, in particular with regard to his shifting position on Nietzsche’s much-debated vision of the eternal recurrence of the same.

Le premier moment de l’art dans À la recherche du temps perdu de Marcel Proust – une « leçon d’idéalisme » ?

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-40
Author(s):  
Larisa Botnari
Keyword(s):  
Essential Role ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
The Self ◽  
Philosophy Of Art ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Philosophical Interpretation ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
Lost Time ◽  
Aesthetic Thinking

Although very famous, some key moments of the novel In Search of Lost Time, such as those of the madeleine or the uneven pavement, often remain enigmatic for the reader. Our article attempts to formulate a possible philosophical interpretation of the narrator's experiences during these scenes, through a confrontation of the Proustian text with the ideas found in the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) of the German philosopher F. W. J. Schelling. We thus try to highlight the essential role of the self in Marcel Proust's aesthetic thinking, by showing that the mysterious happiness felt by the narrator, and from which the project of creating a work of art is ultimately born, is similar to the experiences of pure self-consciousness evoked and analyzed by Schellingian philosophy of art.

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