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

By Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev and Mikhail Bakhtin

Book Overview

Learning doesn't have to stop in the summer?or while traveling! The Summer Splash Travel Activity Book provides a variety of challenging and engaging activities that will keep children entertained when traveling! Features easy to follow, age-appropriate, educational games like crosswords, word searches, and puzzles plus ideas and instructions for travel games that can be played on the spot! Each workbook features 96 pages of colorful, eye catching illustrations that will keep children occupied and learning so everyone can enjoy the trip! Designed for easy handling in the car or on a plane, the portable size makes it easy to slip into a travel bag when on the go.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801843189
• ISBN13: 9780801843181
• Release Date: October 1991
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.9" x 9.1"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

The Greatest Lover That Kant Never Had

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.