Russian Formalists-WTF?

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Can anyone tell me more about these guys? Were they of the same mind as Levi-Strauss or Ferdinand De Saussure-eg language and culture=system of relational terms? Or were they more strictly formalist in the sense that Greenberg was a formalist?

― turner, Wednesday, 26 September 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

They were very strong on narratology - based around Vladimir Propp's work analysing the common elements of folk narrative, they separated the fabula (story) - which is the objective progression of narrative events - from the szujet (tale) - which is the writer's temporal manipulation of those events - using this distinctions they wrote some great stuff about the 'position' of the narrator within the text. Very good for looking at Bulgakov, Conrad, Proust and others.

Another big idea (of Mikhail Bakhtin's, I believe) was 'heteroglossia' which some believe was the by-product of the fabula/szujet distinction. As the author could not help but shape things into a story, they reasoned that this meant that all reality had to include an element of interpretation. This idea was extended to imply that reality itself was but a dizzying collection of interweaving texts, not a million miles away from Barthes' 'jouissance' idea, or as you say, the 'relativity' side of Saussure's game. This was called 'heteroglossia', and has been useful in various discussions of intertexuality, the body and joy itself! (See Bakhtin's reflections on carnival in 'Rabelais and his world'

Also, Bakhtin was put under house arrest and, so desperate for a cigarette, smoked his so-called-by-him 'greatest' manuscript away. No one knows what ideas were in it.

― Will McKenzie, Thursday, 27 September 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

You can't express many ideas on a bit of paper the size of a Rizla. Or did Bakhtin just have very small handwriting?

― MarkH, Thursday, 27 September 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Camberwell carrot, perhaps? Or maybe a Petersburg Parsnip?

― Will McKenzie, Thursday, 27 September 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

reality itself was but a dizzying collection of interweaving texts, not a million miles away from Barthes' 'jouissance' idea

Barthes would have called the interweaving text thing 'intertextuality' rather than 'jouissance', which was more to do with writers' and readers' pleasure in playing with symbols.

― Momus, Thursday, 27 September 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I was referring to the sheer dizzying-ness of it, really, from a reader's perspective. Trying to distance it from mere 'plaisir'

I shall be more precise in future. Sorry!

― Will McKenzie, Thursday, 27 September 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Bakhtin was not a formalist. In fact, Medvedev, of his circle, wrote a book against them. From what I know, they tried to reduce language to constituant elements and do super-close readings and produced works to be analyzed in this way.

― Sterling CLover, Friday, 28 September 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

seven years pass...

Fast forward seven years...how about Viktor Shklovsky? Died in '84 but has had quite a bit of his works translated post Soviet break up.

― xyzzzz__, Monday, 29 December 2008 23:03 (seventeen years ago)

as that suggests, bit of barrel-scraping there. bunch of his stuff was translated before he died (60s-70s).

dimwitted adam thirlwell called him a 'white russian' exile the other day, which is nonsense.

VS, iirc, writes pithy, short paragraphs of basic horse-sense. light on interpretation. i have no idea why you'd read it now unless you had a special interest in russian literary theory of the 1920s.

― Brohan Hari, Tuesday, 30 December 2008 00:17 (seventeen years ago)

Well you can read just to er, try something new you might not have tried before, and I suppose it might be worth seeing how these now obscure-ish theories might have been translated to novels - this looks like its worth a pop...http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/catalog/show/129

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 30 December 2008 20:00 (seventeen years ago)

two months pass...

So I got my local library to buy a copy of this...I maybe the only person who reads it for at least 20 years (I do happen to get bks out that happen to have been read once in 1978 or some such).

So far there is a terrific intro on a lot of this by the translator, so I'll see how it goes - from the little glances my impressions are that what VK says about art (its not related to what is 'out there' as I very sketchily understand this) is not really how he puts it into practice.

Anyway I shall read this and Victor Serge's Birth of Our Power back-to-back (an ed. by the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative from 1977)

― xyzzzz__, Saturday, 21 March 2009 23:19 (sixteen years ago)

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