"Criticism is Surprised, Science understands”: Deadlocks of Literary Criticism in Russian Formalism

Abstract

The present paper aims at discussing the birth of modern literary theory, taking the Formal School as the starting point of the constitution of literary studies as an autonomous discipline. Russian formalists sought early on to elaborate an original conceptual body to understand the literary phenomena as emancipated from categories borrowed from sociology, philosophy or psychology. Such effort produced ground-breaking results, but also gave rise to deadlocks that are on the base of the crisis in literary theory in the 1970s and 1980s, when post-theories emerged bringing extra-literary elements (such as gender, politics, decolonial perspective) back to the spotlight. This paper argues these deadlocks have become evident in the early stages of the Formal School, when its theoretical construction was confronted with the practice of literary criticism. While theory and criticism fed each other back, the interrelations between them made their own shortcomings and limits explicit.

Keywords

• crítica literária, teoria literária, formalismo russo, pós-teoria.