Travelling Theories: Formalist Theory as Model

Abstract

If some scholars have observed that the travelling of concepts and theories from one context to another is at the same time one form of their (ie, concepts and theories) gradual disintegration and death, what we have tried to confirm here—with regards to the Formalist theory— is that this travelling has been rather endowing them, at each time, with a new life. As a matter of fact, Formalist theories can be seen as a kind of ‘travelling’ concepts, which went through a network of discourses towards numerous fields of knowledge, acquiring thus in the process a special type of existence in each of these different fields. This study has therefore tried to trace the diverse metamorphoses which this theory of Russian Formalism was undergoing. Accordingly, we have first introduced the general theoretical framework of the Formalist conceptual and terminological register. Then we have moved to the consideration of the routes and configurations taken by this theory outside Russia: thus, in France, the Formalist heritage combined with Saussurean linguistics to give birth to the methodological frame of structuralist poetics. In Germany, there was a fusion between Formalist theoretical elements and the German philosophical heritage based on Marxist philosophy, on the one hand, and the phenomenological theory, on the other hand. This fusion gave birth to critical and creative theories, consisting basically in the theory of reception and that of estrangement. Likewise, the USA witnessed the fertile marriage between Formalist theoretical data and the methodologies of New Criticism. Thus, it has become clear, from this study, that Formalist concepts are so fertile and so adaptable to the integration with the components of different theories, some of which draw upon cognitive and methodological sources that are opposed to it.