Distant Reading in Russian Formalism and Russian Formalism in Distant Reading

Lvoff, Basil

doi:10.1016/j.ruslit.2021.07.003

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…For a more extended comparison of the two periods, see Tynianov (1929). 19 The notion of gaiety [veselost'] was crucial to how Shklovsky, Tynianov, and Eikhenbaum understood their role as littérateurs (Lvoff 2017). Marietta Chudakova (Tynianov 1977, 462) writes in her commentary to Tynianov's works that "for Tynianov and his companions it was a matter of principle to define their scholarly and critical activity as 'merry.'"…”

Section: When History Rhymesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Russian Formalism as Journalistic Scholarship; or, When Criticism Recognized Itself as a Genre

Lvoff

2023

Linguistic Frontiers

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This article argues that Viktor Shklovsky and his allies’ theory cannot be duly appreciated and understood without accounting for their engagement in journalism. The latter was both practiced and theorized by Shklovsky’s group of the Russian Formalists, which stood out as a then rare combination of rigorous theory and extreme performativity. Accordingly, there was disagreement among the Formalists of Shklovsky’s group. On one hand, they did not want the kind of criticism that is published in periodicals and holds sway over contemporary writers to be naïve banter—the Formalists would rather criticism recognize the literariness of literature and hew to the patterns and laws they discovered. On the other hand, the Formalists applied these literary patterns to their own writing, creative or not, which is why Shklovsky wrote that he was both a fish zoologist and a fish. Hence the Formalists’ desire to make their scholarship and criticism performative. The conflict between rigor and performativity could be resolved only in a periodical, and while the Formalists, as this article explains, had a problem with issuing one fully of their own, Shklovsky’s literary magazine Petersburg was a short-lived exception. This magazine is as little studied as it is largely important—for both the history and theory of Russian Formalism, as well as journalism per se, which in 1920s Russia was recognized as a new modus vivendi of literature in the Formalists’ theory of factography (literatura fakta). The leading genre of factography was the feuilleton, and it is from this genre’s standpoint that the article analyzes Shklovsky’s Petersburg, and, in the second part, compares it with another literary magazine—the famous The Library for Reading, run by Osip Senkovsky, one of the prominent feuilletonists of the nineteenth century. The comparison of Shklovsky with Senkovsky as editors of these magazines makes it possible to appreciate both not as vivid exceptions but the very rule—a particular canon with its unique approach to culture that became relevant with the advent of fragmentation in our civilization and remains so to this day.

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Section: When History Rhymesmentioning

confidence: 99%