System and history: a critique of Russian formalism
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1980
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Oxford Literary Review
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Melbourne Authors
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Arts: Department of English with Cultural Studies
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Journal (Paginated)
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Frow, J. A. (1980). System and history: a critique of Russian formalism. Oxford Literary Review, 4(2), 56-71.
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Open Access
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Deposited with the permission of the Oxford Literary Review.
Abstract
The theoretical development of Russian Formalism, and of its structuralist successors in Prague, is the record of an exemplary attempt to fuse an immanent approach to the literary text to the literary system, which would locate significance in the structure of textual relations and not in genetic or mimetic features, with an awareness of the essential historicity of these relations. Implicit in the concept of literary evolution is a theory of the mechanism of change – that is, of the connection between literary history and history between the text and the social formation; but this theory was never adequately elaborated, both because of a refusal to postulate a direct causal connection between historical change and the apparently autonomous development of the literary system, and because of the Formalists’ almost constant separation of aesthetic from extra aesthetic functions (a separation which confirms the hiatus between the literary series and the social system in which it is inserted).