One of the most successful transnational European projects in the 20th century was Formalism and its heirs — Structuralism and, as some would argue, literary theory as such. Formalism profoundly affected intellectual trends in the Humanities and Social Sciences, well beyond literary analysis and linguistics. This conference will explore how the various local political, social and cultural contexts influenced the development of formalist thought, and how Eastern and Central Europe contributed to its, ultimately, universal career.
The
conference marks the centenary of Russian Formalism, commemorating the
publication of Victor Shklovsky’s “The Resurrection of the Word” (Voskreshenie slova, 1914), which was not
only a milestone in the emergence of Formalism, but arguably also the beginning
of the whole project of literary theory. However, in contrast to some other similar
endeavors, this interdisciplinary conference focuses on the multinational and
multicultural nature of Russian Formalism, and its interactions with/transformations into/influences upon the Prague Linguistic School, Polish
Formalism, the Czech and Slovak forms of structuralism, as well as its
subsequent Hungarian reconsiderations.
In this
context, the interrelationship between constructions of national and
intercultural identities, between expert knowledge in one subject and
transmutations of this knowledge into an interdisciplinary enterprise are not
just abstract categories, but specific aspects of cultural practices. Shared, contested, disputed and
migrating intellectual movements of this kind form an integral part of Eastern
and Central European cultural memory — no history of the region, no modern
history of ideas can be complete without it.
Topics for discussion will include the emergence of Russian
Formalism with reference to the general intellectual context of the time; the
migration of the theory beyond the borders of Russia and its integration and involvement into the dialogue with, local intellectual circles of
Eastern and Central Europe; subsequent transformations of Russian Formalism
into what later became the basis for structuralist theory in the humanities and social sciences, and for literary theory in general.
PROGRAM
15
May, Friday
09:30 – Introduction by Penelope Simons (Head of School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Sheffield, UK) and Evgeny Dobrenko
(University of Sheffield, UK)
10:00 – 11:45 PANEL 1: BETWEEN DISCIPLINES
Chair: Evgeny Dobrenko
Jan Levchenko (National
Research University – Higher School of Economics, Russia)
The Blind Theory: Russian Film Studies between
Petersburg Formalism, Prague Structuralism, and Its Moscow-Tartu Successors
Zoran Milutinovic (University
College London, UK)
Russian Formalist Dramatic Theory
Katerina Clark (Yale
University, USA)
Viktor Shklovskii, Nikolai Trubetskoi and Nomadism
Patrick Sériot (University
of Lausanne, Switzerland)
Roman Jakobson and the Linguists' Poetry
Coffee
12:00-13:45 PANEL 2: BETWEEN VISIONS
Chair: Natalia Skradol
Ilya Kalinin (Smolny
College, Saint Petersburg State University, Russia)
A War of Languages: Shklovsky vs. Jakobson
Petr A. Bílek (Charles
University, Prague, Czech Republic)
Roman Jakobson Between the Poles of ”Gehobenes
Kulturgut“ vs. ”Gesunkenes Kultrugut“ in 1930s Czechoslovakia
Tomáš Glanc
(University of Zürich, Switzerland)
Prague Structuralism against Russian Formalism:
Figures of Denial of Intellectual Heritage
Evgeny Ponomarev (Saint-Petersburg
State University of Culture and Arts, Russia)
Marxist Versions of Formalism: Grigory Gukovskiy and
György Lukács
Lunch
14:30-16:00 PANEL 3: BETWEEN HISTORIES
Chair: Katerina Clark
Sergei Zenkin (Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow)
Russian Formalism and the Idea of History
Tomáš Hoskovec (Masaryk
University, Brno, Czech Republic)
Atlas du structuralisme européen classique: Methodological
Reflections on Grasping a Scientific Past
Bohumil Fořt (Institute
for Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague)
Literary History Between Russian Formalism and the Prague
School
Coffee
16:15-17:45 – KEYNOTE
Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary, University of London, UK)
The
Memory of Theory: Russian Formalism and Its Legacy
16
May, Saturday
09:00 – 10:45 PANEL 4: BETWEEN CULTURES (1)
Chair: Marci Shore
Hans Günther (University
of Bielefeld, Germany)
How Russian Formalism Came to Germany (the 1960s and
1970s)
Josip Užarević (University
of Zagreb, Croatia)
Russian Formalism and the Zagreb Stylistic School
Robert Gáfrik (Institute
of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava)
The Formal Method in Slovak Literary Studies
Tamás Scheibner (Eötvös
Loránd University of Budapest, Hungary)
Hungarian Structuralism in the Making: Challenging
Realist Aesthetics in the 1960s
Coffee
11:00 – 12:45 PANEL 5: BETWEEN CULTURES (2)
Chair: Tamás Scheibner
Mihhail Lotman (University of Tartu,
Estonia)
Formalist Traditions in Tartu Semiotics
Loreta Mačianskaitė and Dalia Satkauskytė (Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, Vilnius University)
Episodes of Russian Formalism in Lithuanian Culture
Alexander Dmitriev
(National Research University – Higher School of Economics, Russia)
Ukrainian Formalism: Theme and Variations
Andrzej Karcz (Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw)
Polish Literary Studies from Formalism to
Structuralism
Lunch
13:45 – 15:30 PANEL 6: BETWEEN PHILOSOPHIES
Chair: Petr A. Bílek
Dušan Radunović (University
of Durham, UK)
The Return of the (Aesthetic) Object: Towards a
Reevaluation of Russian Formalism on the Principles of Systematic Aesthetics
Marci Shore (Yale
University, USA)
To Break the Spell of Automatization: Ostranenie,
Obnazhenie, and the Phenomenological Epoché
Ondřej Sládek (Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences, Brno)
From Formalism to Structuralism: The Epistemological
Basis of Jan Mukařovský´s and Roman Jakobson´s Poetics
Peter Steiner (University
of Pennsylvania, USA)
Formalists and Bakhtin: Interactive Intellectual
Matrix and Game Theory
Coffee
15:45 – 17:00 PANEL 7: BETWEEN THE MODERN
AND THE (POST-)
Chair: Peter Steiner
Aage Hansen-Löve (University
of Munich, Germany)
From Roman Jakobson's Linguistic Turn to Postverbal
Mediality
Tomáš Kubíček (Palacký
University, Olomouc, Czech Republic)
With Roman Jakobson from Formalism to the 21st Century
Igor Pilshchikov (Moscow
State University, Russia / Tallin University, Estonia)
A Web Resource on Moscow Linguistic Circle: New Primary
Data and Research Tools
Concluding remarks
