Sociological Formalism, Or How Formalism was Made and Remade

Abstract

By “Russian Formalism”, scholars refer to the literary theory developed between the mid-1910s and the late 1920s by a group of scholars and writers, including Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, and Yury Tynianov. As the theory posited that literature cannot be reduced to the context where it is produced, it fell victim to the criticism of the growingly intolerant Sovietregime in the 1930s. The Formalists’ works and ideas started being discovered in the West in the 1950s and early 1960s before they were allowed to reappear in the mid-1960s in the Soviet Union. My dissertation, “Sociological Formalism, Or How Formalism Was Made and Remade” uses archival material collected in the United States, Italy, the Netherlands, and Russia to provide a rigorous account of the networks (publishers, patrons, scholars, translators) that made the (re)appearance of works on Formalism materially possible in the USA, France, Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union, and studies the narratives shaping the circulation of these ideas. In chapter 1, I reconstruct the publication of Victor Erlich’s Russian Formalism. History-Doctrine (1955), the first monograph on Formalism to appear in a Western country. Thanks to archival materials, I reconstruct the history of the publication and argue that the monograph develops a bipartite plot severing Formalism from the Soviet context by presenting it as a predecessor to the all-encompassing structuralist theories of Roman Jakobson, René Wellek, and Austin Warren. Chapter 2 follows the subsequent developments of this narrative, in the USA and several European countries between 1955 and 1972. Chapter 3 and 4 move away from the academic context. In the former, I show how a surprising number of translations from the Formalists appeared in Italy between 1965 and 1969 thanks to two distinct networks, one orbiting around the publisher De Donato Editore, and the other connected to the Communist journal “Rassegna Sovietica”. The final chapter moves to the Soviet context of the 1960s and investigates how the scholarly legacy of Tynianov was rehabilitated thanks to the possibilities afforded by the post-stalinist biographical genre.