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Translator’s Introduction to Boris Tomashevskii’s “The New School of Literary History in Russia”
Boris Tomashevskii
The New School of Literary History in Russia
William J. Vande Kopple
M. A. K. Halliday’s Continuum of Prose
Styles and the Stylistic Analysis of Scientific Texts
Monika Fludernik
Scene Shift, Metalepsis, and the Metaleptic Mode
LuMing Mao
Reflective Encounters: Illustrating Comparative Rhetoric
Suresh Raval
Jakobson, Method, and Metaphor: A Wittgensteinian
Critique
The author was a leading figure in the short-lived Formalist school of literary criticism, and the article here translated was only one item he published during a decade of intensive work in prosody and literary history. The latter interest is especially evident in Tomashevskii’s survey, and remains significant today.
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Boris Tomashevskii, The New School of Literary
History in Russia / 355
A contemporary overview of the Russian Formalist movement by one of
its leading practitioners. Begins by outlining the emergence of the movement
in the 1910s (section 1) and ends by discussing its prospects as of 1927
(section 7). In between, discusses three major theoretical problems that
concerned the Formalists: the need for an authentically literary history
(section 2), the nature of literary language (section 3), and the distinction
between literary form and content (section 4). The Formalists’ solution
to the first of these problems, their theory of literary evolution, is
discussed at some length (section 5) and, more briefly, later developments
generalizing on this model, particularly the use of the notions of system
and function (section 6).
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William J. Vande Kopple, M. A. K.
Halliday’s Continuum of Prose Styles and the Stylistic Analysis of Scientific
Texts / 367
This article begins by describing the continuum that M.A.K. Halliday
often uses to analyze prose styles. This continuum has what Halliday calls
the synoptic style on one pole and the dynamic style on the other. After
this description, the article reviews a study showing how the discourse
of experimental work in spectroscopy shifted from the dynamic style to
the synoptic style over the course of much of the twentieth century. The
essay also attempts to explain why this shift occurred. The article concludes
by describing seven areas of stylistic work that research based on Halliday’s
tools of analysis can open up.
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Monika Fludernik, Scene Shift, Metalepsis, and
the Metaleptic Mode / 382
Starting out with Gérard Genette’s classic passages about
metalepsis, the article distinguishes between five different types of metalepsis
in Genette’s Narrative Discourse. Section 2 then concentrates on one particular
type of metalepsis which Marie-Laure Ryan has recently dubbed “rhetorical”
metalepsis. The paper therefore does not treat the most commonly known
type of metalepsis, ontological metalepsis. By focusing on one particular
context in which rhetorical metalepses occur with some regularity, section
2 discusses the historical development of this figure between the
late Middle English prose romance and the nineteenth century novel. In
section 3 metaphoric uses of the term metalepsis are enumerated and analyzed.
It is argued by way of conclusion that the concept of metalepsis inevitably
depends on a mimetic understanding of narrative and on a neat distinction
between story and discourse.
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LuMing Mao. Reflective Encounters: Illustrating
Comparative Rhetoric / 401
The essay offers a brief history of comparative rhetoric. Tracing the
development of comparative rhetoric to the influence of contrastive rhetoric,
the essay discusses a number of representative works in the field: it identifies
the progress so far made and spells out the ideological and methodological
challenges facing the discipline. The essay proposes an “etic/emic” approach
to better meet these challenges. This approach, the essay argues, promotes
a dynamic, self-reflective process in the study of comparative rhetoric,
and it yields what may be called “reflective encounters”—where the logic
of Orientalism loses its attractiv eness, and where rhetorical traditions
from East and West can begin to co-exist and dialogue with each other in
some most productive manner.
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Suresh Raval, Jakobson, Method, and Metaphor:
A Wittgensteinian Critique / 426
In his well-known essay on aphasia and language, Roman Jakobson claims
that metaphoric and metonymic processes are fundamentally constitutive
of all verbal activity and indeed of human behavior in general. Characterizing
metaphor and metonymy as the defining poles of language, Jakobson argues
that all linguistic expression lies between these polar extremes. He substantiates
this claim by an analysis of aphasia and its relation to literature. My
essay attempts a Wittgensteinian critique of Jakobson’s assumption about
the nature of language, and argues, among other things, that in analyzing
aphasia Jakobson reaches conclusions about the structure of language that
are already at work in his analysis.
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