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Author: Jessica Evans Merrill Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 306
Book Description
Russian formalism and Czech structuralism are understood to have initiated the study of literature as a self-sufficient discipline by applying linguistic concepts to the analysis of literary texts. This dissertation seeks to enrich our understanding of this development by examining the transition from linguistics to literary theory from an intellectual-historical perspective. My thesis is that folklore study played a crucial role in the rise of formalist and structuralist literary theory by serving as a mediating field between language and high literature. Folkloristics, which traditionally approached its subject matter through linguistic theory, understood verbal art to behave like language--as an impersonal repertoire of poetic forms which adhere to regular laws governing their usage and evolution. This body of scholarly work provided early literary theorists with a model for theorizing literature or art as a law-abiding, scientific object of study akin to language. The transfer of ideas from the field of folkloristics to literary theory was the product of scholarly training, personal intellectual exchange, and institutional affiliations. In the first chapter I focus on Victor Shklovsky's use of A.N. Veselovsky's writings to develop a universalist theory of narrative structure in his Theory of Prose . Drawing on Roman Jakobson's The Newest Russian Poetry and his work on the Cyrillo-Methodian legacy, the second chapter illustrates parallels between Jakobson's conceptions of literary value and literary evolution and the work of his teacher V.F. Miller. The last chapter argues that Jan Mukařovský's Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts drew on P.G. Bogatyrev's functional structural ethnography and compares their respective conceptions of the semiotic collective. By tracing these intersections, we can see how the emergence of theory intended to explain high literature was galvanized by moments of contact with folklore studies. Highlighting the role that folkloristics played in the work of these three pioneering literary theorists (Shklovsky, Jakobson and Mukařovský) allows us to better understand the emergence of twentieth-century literary theory as an autonomous discipline.
Author: Jessica Evans Merrill Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 306
Book Description
Russian formalism and Czech structuralism are understood to have initiated the study of literature as a self-sufficient discipline by applying linguistic concepts to the analysis of literary texts. This dissertation seeks to enrich our understanding of this development by examining the transition from linguistics to literary theory from an intellectual-historical perspective. My thesis is that folklore study played a crucial role in the rise of formalist and structuralist literary theory by serving as a mediating field between language and high literature. Folkloristics, which traditionally approached its subject matter through linguistic theory, understood verbal art to behave like language--as an impersonal repertoire of poetic forms which adhere to regular laws governing their usage and evolution. This body of scholarly work provided early literary theorists with a model for theorizing literature or art as a law-abiding, scientific object of study akin to language. The transfer of ideas from the field of folkloristics to literary theory was the product of scholarly training, personal intellectual exchange, and institutional affiliations. In the first chapter I focus on Victor Shklovsky's use of A.N. Veselovsky's writings to develop a universalist theory of narrative structure in his Theory of Prose . Drawing on Roman Jakobson's The Newest Russian Poetry and his work on the Cyrillo-Methodian legacy, the second chapter illustrates parallels between Jakobson's conceptions of literary value and literary evolution and the work of his teacher V.F. Miller. The last chapter argues that Jan Mukařovský's Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts drew on P.G. Bogatyrev's functional structural ethnography and compares their respective conceptions of the semiotic collective. By tracing these intersections, we can see how the emergence of theory intended to explain high literature was galvanized by moments of contact with folklore studies. Highlighting the role that folkloristics played in the work of these three pioneering literary theorists (Shklovsky, Jakobson and Mukařovský) allows us to better understand the emergence of twentieth-century literary theory as an autonomous discipline.
Author: Jessica Merrill Publisher: Northwestern University Press ISBN: 0810144921 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 429
Book Description
Russian Formalism is widely considered the foundation of modern literary theory. This book reevaluates the movement in light of the current commitment to rethink the concept of literary form in cultural-historical terms. Jessica Merrill provides a novel reconstruction of the intellectual historical context that enabled the emergence of Formalism in the 1910s. Formalists adopted a mode of thought Merrill calls the philological paradigm, a framework for thinking about language, literature, and folklore that lumped them together as verbal tradition. For those who thought in these terms, verbal tradition was understood to be inseparable from cultural history. Merrill situates early literary theories within this paradigm to reveal abandoned paths in the history of the discipline—ideas that were discounted by the structuralist and post-structuralist accounts that would emerge after World War II. The Origins of Russian Literary Theory reconstructs lost Formalist theories of authorship, of the psychology of narrative structure, and of the social spread of poetic innovations. According to these theories, literary form is always a product of human psychology and cultural history. By recontextualizing Russian Formalism within this philological paradigm, the book highlights the aspects of Formalism’s legacy that speak to the priorities of twenty-first-century literary studies.
Author: Boris Maslov Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1316390462 Category : History Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
Pindar and the Emergence of Literature places Pindar in the context of the evolution of Archaic Greek poetics. While presenting an in-depth introduction to diverse aspects of Pindar's art (authorial metapoetics, imagery, genre hybridization, religion, social context, and dialect), it seeks to establish a middle ground between cultural contextualism and literary history, paying attention both to poetry's historical milieu and its uncanny capacity to endure in time. With that methodological objective, the book marshals a new version of historical poetics, drawing both on theorists usually associated with this approach, such as Alexander Veselovsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Olga Freidenberg, and on T. S. Eliot, Hans Blumenberg, Fredric Jameson, and Stephen Greenblatt. The ultimate literary-historical problem posed by Pindar's poetics, which this book sets out to solve, is the transformation of pre-literary structures rooted in folk communal art into elements that still inform our notion of literature.
Author: Matthew Garrett Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108428479 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 301
Book Description
Narrative theory is essential to everything from history to lyric poetry, from novels to the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Narrative theory explores how stories work and how we make them work. This Companion is both an introduction and a contribution to the field. It presents narrative theory as an approach to understanding all kinds of cultural production: from literary texts to historiography, from film and videogames to philosophical discourse. It takes the long historical view, outlines essential concepts, and reflects on the way narrative forms connect with and rework social forms. The volume analyzes central premises, identifies narrative theory's feminist foundations, and elaborates its significance to queer theory and issues of race. The specially commissioned essays are exciting to read, uniting accessibility and rigor, traditional concerns with a renovated sense of the field as a whole, and analytical clarity with stylistic dash. Topical and substantial, The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory is an engaging resource on a key contemporary concept.
Author: Raymond Hickey Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1316839451 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 1687
Book Description
Providing a contemporary and comprehensive look at the topical area of areal linguistics, this book looks systematically at different regions of the world whilst presenting a focussed and informed overview of the theory behind research into areal linguistics and language contact. The topicality of areal linguistics is thoroughly documented by a wealth of case studies from all major regions of the world and, with chapters from scholars with a broad spectrum of language expertise, it offers insights into the mechanisms of external language change. With no book currently like this on the market, The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics will be welcomed by students and scholars working on the history of language families, documentation and classification, and will help readers to understand the key area of areal linguistics within a broader linguistic context.
Author: Ladislav Matejka Publisher: ISBN: Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 340
Book Description
Investigating the conceptualisation of structure and form within literature, the Russian Formalists affected both the creation of art during the 1920s and 1930s and the development of literary theory as a scientific discipline. Crucial to the understanding of this theoretical movement, this collection of essays by and about the Russian Formalists features work by: - Boris M. Eichenbaum ("The Theory of the Formal Method") - Viktor Shklvosky ("The Mystery Novel: Dickens's Little Dorrit") - Roman Jakobson ("On Realism in Art") - Mikhail Bakhtin ("Discourse Typology in Prose") - Osip M. Brik ("Contributions to the Study of Verse Language") A new introduction by Gerald L. Bruns provides a context for understanding why these works remain as important and influential now as when they were first written.
Author: Ilya Kliger Publisher: Fordham Univ Press ISBN: 0823264866 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 504
Book Description
Since the mid-1980s, attempts to think history and literature together have produced much exciting work in the humanities. Indeed, some form of historicism can be said to inform most of the current scholarship in literary studies, including work in poetics, yet much of this scholarship remains undertheorized. Envisioning a revitalized and more expansive historicism, this volume builds on the tradition of Historical Poetics, pioneered by Alexander Veselovsky (1838–1906) and developed in various fruitful directions by the Russian Formalists, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Olga Freidenberg. The volume includes previously untranslated texts of some of the major scholars in this critical tradition, as well as original contributions which place that tradition in dialogue with other thinkers who have approached literature in a globally comparatist and evolutionary-historical spirit. The contributors seek to challenge and complement a historicism that stresses proximate sociopolitical contexts through an engagement with the longue durée of literary forms and institutions. In particular, Historical Poetics aims to uncover deep-historical stratifications and asynchronicities, in which formal solutions may display elective affinities with other, chronologically distant solutions to analogous social and political problems. By recovering the traditional nexus of philology and history, Persistent Forms seeks to reinvigorate poetics as a theoretical discipline that would respond to such critical and intellectual developments as Marxism, New Historicism, the study of world literature, practices of distant reading, and a renewed attention to ritual, oral poetics, and genre.
Author: Dana Prescott Howell Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317551818 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 406
Book Description
Crucial to the world history of folkloristics is this key study, first published in 1992, of the development of folklore study in the Soviet Union. Nowhere else has political ideology been so heavily involved with folklore scholarship. Professor Howell has examined in depth the institutional development of folkloristics in the Soviet Union in the first half of the twentieth century, concentrating especially upon the transition from pre-revolutionary Russian to Soviet Marxist folkloristics. The study of folklore moved from narrator studies to the description of the relationship of lore to larger contexts of social groups and social classes. Showing an exceptional knowledge of Russian, political theory and folkloristics, Dana Howell provides a valuable window into the rise of folkloristics in a country undergoing almost unprecedented changes in social and political conditions.
Author: Katharina Hansen Löve Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004647899 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 184
Book Description
This book is concerned with the literary development of the narrative category of space in Russian literature from Romanticism until Modernism. It consists of two parts. The theoretical introduction renders a survey of some major 20-th century theories on literary development in the tradition of Russian Formalism and Czech Structuralism. A critical discussion is given of the cultural and stylistic typologies of the soviet scholar D. Lichacev and the semiotician I. Smirnov. Furthermore, the ideas on literary space, as they were developed by two important representatives of the Moscow-Tartu School of Semiotics, Ju.Lotman and V.Toporov, are described together with the method of literary analysis they offer. The contents of the second part of the book are analyses of the structure of space in the following narrative works: Mcyri by M.Ju. Lermontov, Nevskij prospekt by N.V. Gogol, Oblomov by I.A. Goncarov, V tolpe by F. Sologub and Kotlovan by A. Platonov. The analyses are accompanied by an interpretation of the story based on the spatial details in the text. It appears that both continuity and change characterize the development of literary space. This two-fold nature of the evolutionary proces comes to the fore through recurrence of spatial archetypes in all the periods under discussion and through ambivalence of meaning as a result of the semiotization of literary space in each literary work.
Author: Jessica Evans Merrill
Author: Jessica Evans Merrill
Author: Jessica Merrill
Author: Boris Maslov
Author: Matthew Garrett
Author: Raymond Hickey
Author: Endre Bojtár
Author: Ladislav Matejka
Author: Ilya Kliger
Author: Dana Prescott Howell
Author: Katharina Hansen Löve