How to Murder a Work of Art

Philology, Historical Poetics, and the Morphological Method

Bibliographic Data

ID4746388
AuthorsBoris Maslov (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Saint Petersburg, and University of Chicago), Борис Маслов (National Research University Higher School of Economics, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume38
Issue3
Pages485-518
Publication date2017-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePoetics Today (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0333-5372 • E-ISSN: 1527-5507
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/03335372-4166671
OpenAlexW2755540456
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited13

Historical Poetics, while in many ways an ally of Russian Formalism, finds itself in an uneasy relationship with the empiricist mode of formalist enquiry inasmuch as the latter is seen as generally inimical to historical contextualization. On the other hand, representatives of both Historical Poetics and the morphological method have at different points been accused of favoring atomizing analysis over aesthetic appreciation. This putative inability to grasp the work of art as a totality is a taint that literary theory inherited from nineteenth-century philology, whose mission was precisely to combine historicization with minute attention to details of verbal texture. By emphasizing their shared philological patrimony, the article argues for a reconciliation between the morphological method and Historical Poetics. The approach to literary forms it puts forward, which detects historical vitality in distinct elements revealed by morphological analysis, takes its inspiration from Alexander Veselovsky's theory of motif and Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of architectonics and the chronotope

Art · Empiricism · Epistemology · Literature · Philology · Poetics · Poetry · Sociology · History · Medieval Literature and History · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies

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