The Wisdom of Brainless Knights: Paradox, Dialectics and Literature's Conditions of Possibility

Abstract

This product of doctoral labour is a reappraisal of Russian Formalism. It establishes the convergences between the thought of key Formalists Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Yury Tynianov and German Idealist Philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel. The Formalists’ conceptualization of literary art is shown to be consistent with Kant’s programme of practical critique and Hegel’s objective dialectics, albeit without the reductive closures which Kant and Hegel programme into aesthetic theory. On this basis, the Formalists’ dialogue with the Bakhtin School is reconsidered, along with the utility of Formalist critique for how we are to understand the cultural environment of the Soviet 1920s, and the practice of theory in the present context of its own death.