EDNote: I'd recommend Victor Erlich's Russian Formalism and
Peter Steiner's Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics. Both of them
discuss Andrei Bely's importance for early formalism. Formalism was
characterized, among other things, by application of scientific
terminology to the study of literature. One such term, "morphology,"
became famous in Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale
(1926), one of the foundational works of formalism. Curiously, one
might say ironically, the term "morphology" was coined by Goethe in his
own studies of nature's forms, and so far as I have been able to
discern, Andrei Bely was the very first person to apply the word to
literary or cultural forms (in English or Russian, at least; I've done
less thorough searching in German), in his essay called “Comparative
morphology of the rhythm of Russian lyrics in iambic dimeter”, from his
theoretical volume Symbolism (1909).--SB
To Jansy and Charles,
'Who is Ayn Rand?' and "What is Formalism?' are questions both too
basic and too enormous to tackle in an email message. So I think some
remedial reading is in order.
For Jansy: read The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (interesting if
unpleasant and should have been done in adolescence, but necessary if
you want to know who she is);
For Charles: Unfortunately I can't come up with a good introduction to
the subject of Formalism, but there must be such a thing. Does someone
on the List, one of our literary profs perhaps, have a suggestion?
Carolyn