The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics

The work of the "Bakhtin school" -- Mikhail Bakhtin, Pavel Mevedev and Valentin Voloshinov -- during the 1920s has attracted *sub rosa* attention in the US since a translation of Voloshinov's *Marxism And The Philosophy Of Language* was published in 1973; and although an interest in Bakhtin later non-Marxist on "dialogism" has caused the authorship of that book and *The Formal Method In Scholarship* (to a certain extent always in question in the Soviet Union) to be a source of major interest, these books demand study as works separate from that phase of Bakhtin's intellectual development. Furthermore, although *Marxism and the Philosophy of Language* contains remarks on many topics (e.g., indirect discourse) which would be of acute interest to analytic philosophers, that actually makes this more recently translated work a solider introduction to literary study with critical intent. The intriguing remarks of Voloshinov/Bakhtin are nearly all programmatic, but this study of the earlier period of Russian formalist analysis (works from which can be found in the recently translated *Problems of Idealism*) is thoroughly *substantive*. In the hands of Bakhtin and Medvedev, "the study of ideologies" is extremely wide-ranging and *never* without its social component, like many works of early Marxist philosophy which prefigure "externalism" (Hilary Putnam remarks upon this at one point in his "Meaning of Meaning"-era papers). But it does not exhaust the field of signification, giving the methods given here as appropriate for investigating literary works formalistically a quite definite cast: this work has more in common with *The Anatomy of Criticism* than *Anti-Duehring*, although Bakhtin did not partake of Frye's high-structuralist Bicycle-deck (that is, *als ob* but never *gegenstaendlich*) attitude to signification. As a result, "post-structuralist" approaches to authorial intent may find a more comfortable ground for interfacing with structuralism without losing the flexibility necessary to do close reading here.