Formalism, Dialogism, Structuralism

Abstract

Though Russian Formalism has a strong claim to be the earliest analytic and theoretical approach to literature to emerge in the twentieth century, having its origins shortly before the Russian Revolution, it was little known in the English-speaking world until the emergence of structuralism in France aroused interest in earlier critical schools which had influenced structuralist critics. But whereas structuralism as a method came to prominence first — especially through the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss — in the field of social anthropology and then was applied to other areas, Russian Formalism was almost entirely concerned with literature. Indeed, one of its primary concerns was to make literary criticism a separate and coherent discipline. As one of its exponents, Boris Eikhenbaum, remarks in his essay, ‘The Theory of the Formal Method’, published as long ago as 1926, Russian Formalism’s method was ‘derived from efforts to secure autonomy and concreteness for the discipline of literary studies’. It endeavoured to establish the study of literature on a scientific basis and rejected the impressionistic or intuitive approaches of previous critics because they lacked rigour or method. Indeed, Eikhenbaum stresses Formalism’s connections with positivism when he writes of the need to break with ‘subjective-aesthetic principles’ in favour of ‘an objective-scientific attitude toward facts’ which is ‘the source of the new spirit of scientific positivism that characterizes the Formalists’.¹