Review Bakhtin:Medvedevev

8/12/2019 Review Bakhtin:Medvedevev

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University of Oregon

The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics byP. N. Medvedev; M. M. Bakhtin; Albert J. WehrleReview by: Lionel GossmanComparative Literature, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Autumn, 1979), pp. 403-412Published by: Duke University Presson behalf of the University of OregonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1770299.

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THE FORMAL METHOD IN LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP: A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION TOSOCIOLOGICALOETICS. By P. N. Medvedev/M. M. Bakhtin. Translated by Al-bert J. Wehrle. The Goucher College Series. Baltimore and London: The JohnsHopkins University Press, 1978. xxvi, 191 p.Mikhail Bakhtin was brought to the attention of English-speaking scholarsby the translation of his important studies of Rabelais (Cambridge, Mass.:M.I.T. Press, 1968) and Dostoievskii (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,1973).1 The present work, first published in the Soviet Union in 1928, antedatesboth these studies and appears to have been part of an ambitious cooperative effortby Bakhtin and his circle, during the experimental period of the New Economic

Policy, "to rethink the study of culture" (p. ix). In addition to The Formal Meth-od, the group produced studies of Freudian psychology, linguistics, and contem-porary philosophy, several of which have now begun to appear in English or Ger-man translation. The present translation thus contributes to the rediscovery of aninteresting intellectual movement, which seems to have been a victim of internalSoviet politics. The translator's Notes and Introduction provide valuable informa-tion about the movement as a whole and about the texts through which it can befurther studied. In addition, the Introduction throws light on the unusual condi-tions in which The Formal Method was published, on the problem of its author-ship, and on the subsequent career of both the work and its authors. As The FormalMethod in Literary Scholarship seems to me to be an important and challengingwork of literary theory, I propose to outline its arguments in some detail.The most effective way for a young discipline to define itself and to "clarify itspoint of view and methods," according to one of Bakhtin's associates, "is by intelli-gently criticizing and combating other trends" (quoted on p. xiii). The critique ofliterary formalism in The Formal Method was intended to contribute to the defini-tion of a new sociological poetics, which would form part of a general Marxisttheory of culture. Bakhtin and his group considered Russian formalism methodo-logically weak, in large measure because it had never had to define itself against awell-developed, disciplined, and entrenched intellectual opposition, such as positi-vism had been in the West. They also recognized that by 1928 it had passed itszenith as an active and creative school: with Viktor Zhirmunskii it was devolvinginto a mild and eclectic academicism, with Boris Eikhenbaum it had begun to makepeace with psychologism and with the traditional ethical and social concerns ofRussian criticism, and with Tomashevskii and Iakubinskii it was seeking an accom-modation with sociology (pp. 65-70). Nevertheless, it remained influential. "Thenumber of its adherents has perhaps even increased, and in the hands of epigonesit has become even more systematic, undeviating, and precise" (p. 75). It was

1 Problems of Dostoievskii's Poetics appeared in a first version in the U.S.S.R.in 1929. A revised version was published in 1963. A French translation, by GuyVerret, appeared in 1970 (Lausanne, Switzerland: Editions L'Age d'Homme).The Work of FrancoisRabelais and the Popular Cultureof the MiddleAges andthe Renaissance appeared in the U.S.S.R. in 1965. Bakhtin had first presented it asa doctoral thesis ("Rabelais in the History of Realism") in 1940.403


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necessary, therefore, for the author or authors of The Formal Method to presentthe essential principles of formalism as clearly and coherently as possible, to iden-tify it as "not only a unified system of views but also a special way of thinking"(p. 75), in order to define effectively, in contrast, their own principles and methods.Part I (Chs. i and ii) lays the groundwork for the critique of formalism that oc-cupies the remainder of the book. The authors begin by pointing to "specification"as the basic problem of the study of ideologies. While recognizing the ideologicalcharacter of all forms of cultural production, the Marxist scholar must at the sametime, they claim, respect the specificity of each, be it painting, literature, science,philosophy, or religion. In most existing criticism, either the specificity of the phe-nomenon is dissolved by sociocultural analyses or "immanent" readings are pro-posed which completely ignore the social character of the phenomenon. Some well-meaning critics advocate a policy of partition and peaceful coexistence. P. N. Saku-lin, for instance, "contrasts an 'immanent essence' of literature, which is inaccessibleto the sociological method, and its immanent and likewise extrasociological 'natur-al' evolution, to the effect of extrinsic social factors on literature. He limits the so-ciological method to the study of the causal effect of extraliterary factors on litera-ture" (p. 32). The authors do not accept such a dualism, and their book is in largemeasure an attempt to resolve it and to sketch the outlines of a science of ideologythat will be both comprehensive and attentive to the specificity of different formsof cultural production. There are many excellent pages on the specific characterof literature and on the inadequacy of the simple "reflective" view of literary textsheld by most sociologically oriented critics. The authors point out-rightly, as Ithink it will seem to most readers-that (a) literature is singularly diminished bybeing considered only as a reflection, a "servant and transmitter of other ideolo-gies" (p. 18) ; (b) what is reflected in the content of literature is not life itself but"the ideological horizon, which itself is only the refracted reflection of real exis-tence" (p. 18) ; (c) the essential content of literature reflects not "prepared orconfirmed theses"-these "inevitably show up as alien bodies in the work"-but"generating ideologies . . . the living process of the generation of the ideologicalhorizon" (p. 19) ; and (d) "the artist only asserts himself in the process of the ar-tistic selection and shaping of the ideological material" (p. 20) but "the artisticstructure of the novel and the artistic function of each of its elements are in them-selves no less ideological and sociological than the esthetic, philosophical, or politi-cal ideologemes present in it" (p. 23).At times, it must be admitted, these pages are hard going. Theses are thunderedout one after another like the pronunciamentos of some literary dictator. Even awell-disposed reader might be put off by the manner, if not by the content, of apassage such as the following:"There is no meaning outside the social communication of inderstanding, i.e.,outside the united and mutually coordinated reactions of people to a given sign.Social intercourse is the medium in which the ideological phenomenon first acquiresits specific existence, its ideological meaning, its semiotic nature. All ideologicalthings are objects of social intercourse, not objects of individual use, contemplation,emotional experience, or hedonistic pleasure. For this reason subjective psychologycannot approach the meaning of the ideological object." (pp. 8-9)The syllogism here seems to run as follows: all cultural products are ideologicalthings; all ideological things exist in the medium of social intercourse; culturalproducts are consequently not objects of individual use or contemplation and can-not be properly understood as such. I tend to agree, but I know that many of myfriends and colleagues would not accept the first term of the syllogism. Moreover,since I am certain that literature does sometimes-rightly or wrongly-serve as an404


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object of individualuse, contemplation,emotionalexperience,or hedonisticplea-sure,I amleft wonderingwhatto make of this "abuse." s it the resultof intellectualerror or of moral vice-a stupidityto be silenced,a disease to be cured, perhapseven a punishableoffense? The authorsof The Formal Methodhave a convenientway of dealingwith positionsthat differ fundamentallyrom their own. If the so-cial aspects of cultural production ("the forms and types of ideological inter-course") have not beenmuch studied to date, they say, there are "pernicious eas-ons"for this-among them the traditionalWestern way of conceiving interpreta-tion andunderstanding s the outcome of an encounterbetweenan individualcon-sciousness and the signs in which anotherindividualconsciousnesshas expresseditself. This tradition-presently muchunderattack-is dealt with summarilyhereas "incorrecthabitsof thinkingfosteredby idealism,with its stubborn endencytoconceiveof ideologicallife as a single consciousness uxtaposed to meaning" (p.13). At times,the polemical anguageof TheFormalMethodhas the effectiveraci-ness of Marx's own language, as when Russian formalismis describedas "thevaudeville radicalismof some declasse innovator"(p. 44), but terms like "perni-cious,""incorrect," nd "stubborn" ave a terroristring that other readersbesidesmyself will probably indoffensive.I hopethey will not lose patience,however,forthe dogmatic, hectoring tone of these first pages is hardly heard again once theauthorsstoptheorizingabstractly(monologically?) andbeginto definetheirposi-tion in relationto that of formalism.Chapteriii presentsa brief review of what the authorscall Western Europeanformalism, houghthey seem most familiar with Germanwriters. In opposition othe positivist tendencyto breakworks of art down into their componentpartsandto deal separatelywith these, German ormalismemphasized he unityof the workof art and the articulationof its parts within a closed totality. Neo-Kantian ininspiration, t also laid stress on the constructiveratherthan the mimeticaspectofliterarycreation.But it never overlooked he semanticmeaningof the work of artor of the elementsin its construction."European ormalismnot only did not denycontent, did not make content a conditionaland detachableelement of the work,but, on the contrary,strove to attributedeepideologicalmeaningto form itself. Itcontrastedthis conceptionof form to the simplisticrealist view of it as some sortof embellishmentof the content, a decorativeaccessory lacking any ideologicalmeaningof its own" (p. 49). Similarly, the problemof perceptionwas treated inWestern formalism-in keeping with its neo-Kantian orientation and in opposi-tion, once more, to positivist reductionof sense perception o a mere physicalorpsychological process of registering abstract quantities-as the problemof "thesensual perceptionof meaning" (p. 49).For Western formalism,"man'sbasic relation to the world thus defines his'artisticvolition'and, consequently, he constructiveprincipleof the work-object"(p. 51). Different artistic styles (geometric, realist, naturalist,etc.) express andconstruct differenttypes of relationto the world.In general, this presentationof Western European formalism,and of Germanwriting on aesthetics in particular,seems just. The themesbroughtout-the em-phasis on totality, on the constructiverather than the mimetic character of thework of art, andon form itself as meaning-can be tracedfar backinto the tradi-tion of GermanRomanticwriting on aesthetics,from Kant and Schiller throughMoritz to Novalis. For Novalis, for instance,the work of art is definedby the factthat it does not use languagereferentiallyas in everydaycommunication.Yet it ispreciselyby sheddingmeaning, n the ordinarysense, that the work of art comesto signify, for Nova is, in the mannerproperto it. Whereas referential anguageonly reflectsthe externalappearances f the universe,poeticlanguage-the explo-

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ration of language itself in the work of art-is a discovery of its inner structure,languagebeing,for Novalis, like mathematics,a partof nature.It is characteristicof the positiontaken by the authorsof The Formal Methodthat they consider Russian formalism a far poorer affair than its Western Euro-peancounterpart.Having to combata highly disciplinedandprofessionalpositivistschool,Western formalism, hey claim,hadthoroughlythoughtout its philosophi-cal position and its method. Its close relation to contemporary neo-Kantian philos-ophy also ensured a high degree of methodological self-consciousness, since in theKantian tradition the method is not adapted to the real existence of the object, buton the contrary, the object is itself defined by the method. While the authors ofThe Formal Method, as Marxists, naturally reject neo-Kantian idealism and ap-prove in principle the more pragmatic attitude of the Russian formalists, in actualpractice they considerthat the Russianswere so inattentive o questionsof method,so cavalier and "journalistic" that they naively and uncritically took over manylinguistic and literary categories as if they were given objects, without adequatelyreflecting how they had been or should be defined. They thus turned out to be muchcloser in several important respects to the positivism that Western formalism hadset out to criticize.2 Though always careful to signal their rejection of neo-Kantianidealism, the authors of The Formal Method do not disguise their affinity withcertain features of neo-Kantian aesthetics. Hermann Cohen, for instance-theleading figure in a reevaluationof Kant at Marburgat the end of the nineteenthcentury-is praised for the inclusiveness of his aesthetic theory, for conceiving theaesthetic as "a kind of superstructure over other ideologies," and for recognizingthat reality enters art "already cognized and ethically evaluated," even if he mustbe criticized for seeing in the ideological horizon, "deprived of concreteness andmateriality," the ultimate reality-even if, in short, Cohen, as an idealist, knows ofno real existence or material base which determines cognition (p. 24). Similarly,the theory of genre outlined in The Formal Method-"one might say that humanconsciousness possesses a series of inner genres for seeing and conceptualizing re-ality" (p. 134)-appears strikingly neo-Kantian. As the authors, while dutifullyacknowledging the material basis of ideological superstructures, have little to sayabout the relation between basis and superstructure-a question on which Marxand Engels themselves were notoriously concise-it is possible to see how theycould come to be accused,in a later, less experimentalperiodof Soviet history, ofthe dreadful heresy of neo-Kantianism (p. xvi).

Having begun to define Russian formalism indirectly, in relation to WesternEuropean formalism, the authors approach their topic directly in Chapter iv. For-malism in its Russian version is now located historically. Its polemical, adversarystance,andits close associationwith variousliterarytrends andmovements,nota-bly futurism, of which it is presented as having been in many respects the criticalarm, are seen by the authors as a handicap from the point of view of the elabora-tion of a theoretically sound poetics. The struggle against idealism, transcenden-talism, symbolism, everything high-flown and pretentious, in the name of thoseelements of literary language "which seemed vulgar, second-class, and almost ar-tistically indifferent to the symbolists, namely, its phonetic, morphological, andsyntactic structures taken independently of meaning" (p. 59), was a healthy one,they acknowledge, but it was ultimately nihilistic. The primary aim of the formal-ists, according to the authors, was the "subtraction of meaning" (p. 60). Thus therelated devices of deautomatization of the word and defamiliarization were forthem, above all, means of abstracting words or objects from semantic context. One

2 See, for instance,pp.98-103on sound n poetry.406


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consequence of the close association of formalism with contemporary literary andartistic trends was, in short, the limited scope of formalist poetics and the exces-sively journalistic character of the formalists' activity as critics. They played therole of enfants terribles of the scholarly world with verve and wit, but they failedto develop an independent poetics which could have acted not only negatively onestablished literary doctrines and practices but critically and constructively on thenew ones.At the beginning of Chapter v the authors outline what they see as the six es-sential principles of formalism, and Chapters v through ix of the book (confusinglydivided between Chapters vii and viii into Parts III and IV) deal with each of themin turn, though the last receives only very brief treatment at the very end of Chap-ter ix. The six points are as follows: "(1) poetic language (and poetic phonetics)as the object of poetics; (2) material and device as the two components of thepoetic construction; (3) genre and composition, theme, story, and plot as the de-tailing of the constructive functions of material and device; (4) the concept of thework as a datum external to consciousness; (5) the problem of literary history;(6) the problem of artistic perception and criticism" (p. 79). I shall attempt tosummarize each of the five chapters.

Chapter v presents a critique of the formalist notion of poetic language. Thereis no way of differentiating between ordinary language and poetic language on thebasis of linguistic features alone, the authors point out,3 and in the work of theformalists poetic language comes to be simply the "converse and parasite of prac-tical language" (p. 88). The opposition of the useful and the beautiful, they mighthave noted, goes back to the late eighteenth century at least, to Mendelssohn andKant, and it was taken up enthusiastically by virtually all the German Romantics.But whereas poetic language, for the Romantics, had a deeper meaning than prac-tical language, its essence for the Russian formalists, according to the authors ofThe Formal Method, is simply to negate meaning. Once again, in short, theauthors bring out what in their view is the characteristically negative thrust offormalism. "If the only difference between poetic and practical language is thatthe construction of the former is perceptible owing to the negative devices enumer-ated above," they observe, "then poetic language is absolutely unproductive anduncreative . . . poetic language is only able to 'make strange' and deautomatizethat which has been created in other language systems. It does not create newconstructions itself. Poetic language only forces the perception of the already cre-ated" (p. 89). But it is not only the formalists' conception of poetic language thatis found to be inadequate; their conception of "practical language" is also unsatis-factory. Practical language, the authors insist, is not frozen, stereotyped, or auto-mated, as the formalists claim it is, except in a few special cases of interchange("narrowly technical, industrial, and business" types of exchange, where the wordis easily "replaced by a signal or symbol of another type"). Normally, "practicalintercourse is constantly generating, although slowly and in a narrow sphere" (p.95).4 The formalist conception of language makes it impossible to account for thecreative enrichment of language: "A language which transmits prepared com-munications within the bounds of fixed, generated intercourse cannot . . . be cre-

3 The point was restated recently by Roger Fowler, "Linguistic Theory and theStudy of Literature," in Essays on Style and Language, ed. R. Fowler (London,1966), pp. 1-28.4 An attempt to explain such change at the level of folk or oral literature wasmade by Jakobson in an important article written with Piotr Bogatyriev and pub-lished in 1929: "Die Folklore als eine besondere Form des Schaffens," in DonumNatalicium Schrijnen (Nijmegen and Utrecht, 1929), pp. 900-13.407


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in the plane of the work" (p. 136). The work of art is seen as defined by its "final-ization"-a category that is crucial to the authors' conception of literature as dis-tinct from other forms of ideological creation and that seems closely related to thecategory of totality in Romantic aesthetics."Outside of art, all finalization, every end, is conditional, superficial, and is mostoften defined by external factors rather than factors intrinsic to the object itself.The end of a scientific work is an illustration of such a conditional finalization. Inessence, a scientific work never ends: one work takes up where the other leaves off.Science is an endless unity. It cannot be broken down into a series of finished andself-sufficient works . . . To put it another way: compositional finalization is pos-sible in all spheres of ideological creation, but real thematic finalization is impossi-ble. Only a few philosophical systems, such as that of Hegel, pretend to thematicfinalization in epistemology . . . But the essence of literature is in substantial, ob-jective, thematic finalization, as opposed to the superficial finalization of the utter-ance in speech. Compositional finalization, confined to the literary periphery, canat times even be absent . . . But this external vagueness sets off the inner thematicfinalization more strongly." (pp. 129-30)The various genres correspond to different types of finalization. "Every genrerepresents a special way of constructing and finalizing a whole, finalizing it essen-tially and thematically (we repeat), and not just conditionally or compositionally"(p. 130). It is perhaps worth remarking that the authors' very strong sense of theorganizing structure and the teleological articulation of the literary work leavesFreud out of account. Organizing structure seems to be located not in the uncon-scious, but in the collective consciousness. One wishes the translator had foundroom in his introduction to tell us more than he does about the Bakhtin circle'swork on Freud.In Chapter viii the formalist view of literary works and of literary history asautonomous with respect to general ideology is analyzed and rejected. To the de-gree that the formalists' dissociation of the work from the psyche of creator andperceiver marks an attempt to liberate literary study from psychologism and bi-ologism, the authors of The Formalist Miethod welcome it. As in so many otherinstances, however, the formalist negation of a specific meaning turns out to be anegation of all meaning, a pure nihilism. "While liberating the work from thesubjective consciousness and psyche, the formalists at the same time estrange itfrom the whole ideological environment and from objective social intercourse" (p.145). Moreover, in severing literature from the ideological world, the formaliststurn it into a "stimulus for relative and subjective psychophysical states and per-ceptions . . . For their basic theories-deautomatization, the perceptibility of theconstruction, and the others-presuppose a perceiving, subjective consciousness"(p. 149). The work of literature becomes "an apparatus for the stimulation of thisperceptibility" (p. 149). Perception itself thus becomes completely subjective, andexpresses only the subjective condition of consciousness, not the "objective datumof the work" (p. 149). At the same time the readers are in their turn reduced tomere "psychophysiological apparatuses for perception" (p. 158).The last chapter of The Formal Method concerns literary history. The authorsrecall that the formalists consider the series of literary history, "the series of ar-tistic works and their constructive elements" (p. 159), to be completely indepen-dent of other historical series, and notably of other ideological series. (The formal-ist position on this score was restated programmatically, in the same year The For-mal Method was published, in eight theses by Jakobson and Tynyanov.) The courseof literary development is autonomous and has its own inner necessity. Extralit-erary reality may affect the tempo of change, but it will not affect the logic, which

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is defined by literature itself. Literary history unfolds, in short, in a remarkablysimilar way to that discovered by Propp for the folktale, and like the folktale,though it permits of variations and allows for many options, its inner logic is in-eluctable. As Jakobson and Tynyanov declared in a text that may well have beenintended to be conciliatory with respect to sociological criticism:"Demonstration of the immanent laws of the history of literature (or language). does not explain the tempo of evolution, nor the direction which it takes whenit is confronted with several theoretically possible paths of development. The im-manent laws of literary (or linguistic) evolution only give us an indeterminateequation, which allows of several solutions-limited in number, no doubt, but notimposing any single answer. The concrete problem of the direction or at least thedominanta chosen, cannot be resolved without an analysis of the correlation be-tween the literary series and the other social series."'5To the authors of The Formal Method the development envisaged by the for-malists is not a genuine development; more precisely, it is not an evolution, not ahistory, but a succession, whose only content turns out to be difference."All that the formalist system needs is the existence of two mutually contrast-ing artistic trends, let us say the Derzhavin and the Pushkin traditions. Let us findthem in the required situation of mutual contrast. The Pushkin tradition succeedsthe Derzhavin tradition, and the latter tradition becomes the junior line. After acertain time the Derzhavin tradition succeeds the Pushkin tradition, which nowtakes the position of the junior line. This process can continue to infinity . .. Ifnew forms appear, they do so for reasons completely incidental to literary develop-ment." (p. 163)The final page of the book raises the question of the relation between criticismand literature. In opposition to the formalist view that criticism should be the or-gan of the writer, and should campaign actively in the service of contemporary lit-erary movements, the authors argue for the traditional position of criticism as amediator between the public and the artist. The function of the critic, as they hadalready outlined it earlier, toward the end of Chapter ii, is to "give the artist his'social assignment' in his own language, as a poetic assignment" (p. 35). In therare societies in which culture is relatively homogeneous and undivided, social de-mands and needs will "naturally and easily translate . . . into the immanent lan-guage of poetic craftsmanship"(p. 35). In most cases, however, a "translatingmedium" is required, and this, for the authors of The Formal Method, is the func-tion of criticism. Criticism as a discipline, therefore, has a duty to maintain a rela-tive independence of contemporary literary trends, and to preserve a long, histori-cal view of poetics. Only by so doing can it contribute effectively and construc-tively to the ongoing culture. To Medvedev/Bakhtin the absence of mediation be-tween writer and public and the rejection by criticism of its mediating functionare themselves symptoms of "sharp and deep social disintegration" (p. 36).I have tried to present the argument of this book as clearly as possible, at therisk of sometimes going over ground made familiar by Victor Erlich in his com-prehensive and readable Russian Formalism (2nd ed., rev., The Hague: Mouton,1965), and worse still, of failing to meet my obligation, as a reviewer, to be brief.I did so because, half a century after its publication in Russia, The Formal Methodremains, in my opinion, an important and challenging work. Even if it does not leadto a mass abandonment of positions that have come to be assumed, almost natur-ally, throughout the academic community, it will at the very least make us aware

5 Quoted from R. Jakobson and J. Tynyanov, "Theses on Formalism," New LeftReview (London), 37 (May-June 1966), p. 61.410


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of the choices we have made, and may prompt some serious soul-searching.It does us good to be reminded, from time to time, of the history of our disci-pline. Though it would be possible, I think, to show that Russian formalism andWestern European formalism have important common roots in Romantic aesthet-ics, the comparison drawn between the two in these pages is extremely interesting.It sheds a striking-and disquieting-light on the recent and still current vogue ofRussian formalism in academic circles in this country and in the West generally.6Above all, it prompts one to ask what it tells us about ourselves that of the twoformalisms it is the Russian one that we have appropriated, and what it means (ifthe question may be asked) that the Russian formalists' impoverished version ofliterary history is the one now current in many "advanced" critical circles. Afterreading The Formal Method it is difficult not to identify the rejection of history asthe essential characteristic of much recent literary theory and literary criticism. Ifthe "pseudodialectic" (p. 92) of the formalists acquires a content, it is at best oneborrowed from Freud. Thus a contemporary philosopher, who is close to literaryscholarship, could simply assume in a recent article, as if it were the accepted doc-trine, that development in literature is a matter of struggling with and outdoingpredecessors.7 To the degree that history survives at all in avant-garde intellec-tual circles, it is probably in a form close to that of the formalists, that is, as puredifference. What survives, in other words, is not history but the ghost of history,history tamed and deprived of its density and social significance. If history is an-other name for God the Father, we certainly seem to have done our work of cas-tration well.The struggle against history and the struggle against meaning are one and thesame. The authors of The Formal Method return several times to what they de-scribe pointedly as the formalists' "fear of meaning" (pp. 105, 118). And this fearof meaning is diagnosed-most interestingly in view of certain recent speculations-not as the abandonment of an ideal of presence, but as a desire for presence, anavidity of appropriation, a fear of otherness. "Meaning . . . with its 'not here' and'not now' is able to destroy the material nature of the work and the fullness of itspresence in the here and now" (p. 105).It is a pity that Professor Wehrle, who appears to be familiar with the work ofDerrida (quoted in the Introduction, pp. xi, xxi), was not encouraged to exploresome of the intersections between Medvedev/Bakhtin and the contemporary crit-ics and philosophers he refers to in passing in his Introduction. Instead of isolatedand rather gratuitous references to Paul de Man or Levi-Strauss-which seem tofunction here, like tics or speech traits, to establish membership of a particularcoterie--one would have liked a fuller discussion of the relations between TheFormal Method and the work of present-day scholars in the so-called human sci-ences. In general, though informative on matters of historical background andauthorship, the Introduction seemed unusually turgid and occasionally preten-tious. But why cavil? Most literary scholars will be as grateful as I am to Pro-fessor Wehrle for following the suggestion, made to him by Renate Horlemann

6 Thus the editors of the New Left Review, quoted above, urge their backwardEnglish readers to keep up to date by paying attention to formalism: "Today For-malism is once more beginning to receive the recognition it deserves: Tynyanov'smemoirs are being serialized in Novy Mir; a collection of Formalist writings hasappeared in France and a study has been written and recently republished in theNetherlands by Victor Erlich. It is time this growing interest spread to Britaintoo."7 Richard Rorty, "Derrida on Language, Being, and Abnormal Philosophy,"JP, 74 (1977), 673-81.411


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during her regrettably brief association with The Johns Hopkins HumanitiesCenter, that he translate The FornmalMethod. Likewise, The Johns Hopkins Uni-versity Press deserves praise for once again undertaking to place a significant buthitherto inaccessible work of literary scholarship and theory before the academiccommunity.8 Finally, if I may be permitted a personal comment, it is a particularpleasure for me that the publication of this important book is due to the collabora-tion of two institutions with which I was happily associated for many years.

LIONELGOSSMANPrinceton University8

I must, however, register a protest at the state in which this book was allowedto go to press. There are misspellings: "canvass"-as in "to canvass votes"-forthe artist's "canvas" (p. xxiii), "taylor" for "tailor" (p. 110), "calander" for "cal-endar" (three times, pp. 169-70); there are misprints: "sweckbeurissten" for"Zweckbewussten" (p. 10), "totaly" (p. 26), "usualy" (p. 35), "Leben und Werkeder Troubadour" for "Leben und Verke der Troubadours" (p. 81), "melieu" (p.94). There are some apparent mistranslations (e.g., "meanwhile" for "however"on page 11) or inappropriate translations ("the big bourgeoisie" on p. 17). Andsurely Pushkin's play must be printed either as Mozart and Salieri or-though lessprobably-as Motsart i Sal'eri, but not as Mozart and Sal'eri. Or does Mr. Wehrlewant us to take Salieri for a Russian ? Perhaps it is impossible to do anything aboutsolecisms such as "different than" followed by a noun instead of a clause, or theubiquitous "cannot help but." But has academic prose already capitulated to thepopular use of "like" as a conjunction, as in "like Shklovskii does" (p. 115) ? Ingeneral, the writing in this text is often quite careless. The following sentencesare, unfortunately, not sufficiently exceptional to be forgiven: " . . . a certain gap,a shifting and hazy area through which the scholar picks his way at his own risk,or often simply skips over . . . " (p. 3) ; " . . . Gottfried Semper, whose follow-ing definition is characteristic . . . " (p. 9) ; "Life, the aggregate of defined ac-tions, events, or experiences, only become plot . . . " (p. 17). It is regrettablethat we professors of the humanities do not write better than we do. Until we im-prove, publishers cannot afford to dispense with the services of expert editors.

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Review Bakhtin:Medvedevev