Le présent volume, qui regroupe les contributions de sept auteurs, est le premier ouvrage à proposer une réflexion d'ensemble sur les multiples aspects constitutifs de la pensée de Theodor Lipps (1851-1914). Figure majeure de la philosophie, de la psychologie et de l'esthétique allemandes de la fin du XIXe siècle et du début du XXe siècle, Lipps est l'auteur d'une œuvre étonnamment abondante et variée dont l'importance et la portée historiques apparaissent aujourd'hui singulièrement minorées. C'est donc non pas seulement au développement mais au renouvellement des études lippsiennes que le présent volume entend contribuer, son objectif étant ici d'offrir au lecteur une vision plus ample et plus diversifiée, plus personnelle aussi, de la pensée de Lipps, en s'intéressant à de nombreux pans de son œuvre restés jusqu'ici injustement négligés et s'efforçant de les reconsidérer à la lumière d'une grande variété de contextes.

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German–Austrian psychology is a direct source of the European formalism movement both in the German context (Germany, Austria) as well as in Russia. This interest of the formalists in the corporeal component of linguistic and literary production has resulted in a particular research stream, which could be defined as a ‘linguo-somatic orientation’. In particular, this is the case of Alois Riegl’s [1] perceptive ‘tactile–optical’ method; Adolf von Hildebrand’s [2] architectonic conception; Konrad Fiedler’s [3] ‘sensorial aesthetics’; W. Wölfflin’s [4] ‘basic concepts’ of the art history, W. Worringer’s [5] psychological arts typology as well as Oskar Walzel’s sound-corporeal poetics elaborated during 1920 [6]. Within Russian formalism, psychological notions (such as ‘representation’, ‘sensation’, ‘apperception’, ‘series’, ‘clear and dark zones of consciousness’, ‘verbal gestures’ and ‘sound gestures’) are fundamental in nearly all the formalist conceptions (Viktor Šklovskij, Evgenij Polivanov, Lev Jakubinskij, Osip Brik, Boris Eixenbaum and Jurij Tynianov). This psychological background constitutes a rather heterogeneous constellation composed of psychological aesthetics and psychological linguistics of the second half of the 19th century. Independently of its intrinsic theoretical values, the formalist way of thinking about language and literature is based on the implicit dominance of psychology, which takes its sense only with respect to the German cognitive tradition, appropriated by the Geisteswissenschaften of this time. In this respect, European formalism participates in the large movement of psychologisation of the humanities. To this extent, the case of Russian formalism is really representative: it invites the rethinking of the genealogy of European structuralism in general. This accumulation of conceptual tools borrowed from the German psychological tradition also reveals a cognitive charge of the formalist theories. The latter constitute a conceptual link between the properly psychological past of the European Geisteswissenschaften and the ‘cognitive’ future of the actual research programmes. Beyond the borrowing of conceptual tools from the psychological trend, the formal method has found in psychology its inspiration for producing new models of analysis. This intrinsically cognitivist dimension of the formalist programme explains its late success during the 1950s–1960s, the period often and abusively called the period of the cognitivist revolution. In reality, it deals with the re-emergence of the research programme of the cognitivist sciences, rather exhaustively formulated by the German psychological tradition..

This study deals with folkloric research object within Germanic and Russian Formalism, it shows why folklore and ornament have become an ideal research object of the European formalist current in Germanic and Slavic areas.

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