Jakobson, Roman and Juri Tynjanov 1980[1928]. Problems in the Study of Language and Literature. Translated by H. Eagle. Poetics Today 2(1a): 29-31.
1. The immediate problems facing Russian literary and linguistic science demand a precise theoretical platform. They require a firm dissociation from the increasing mechanistic tendency to paste together mechanically the new methodology and old obsolete methods; they necessitate a determined refusal of the contraband offer of naive psychologism and other methodological hand-me-downs in the guise of new terminology. Furthermore, academic eclecticism and pedantic "formalism" - which replaces analysis by terminology and the classification of phenomena - and the repeated attempts to shift literary and linguistic studies from a systematic science to episodic and anecdotal genres should be rejected. (Jakobson & Tynjanov 1980[1928]: 29)
2. The history of literature (art), being simultaneous with other historical series, is characterized, as is each of these series, by an involved complex of specific structural laws. Without an elucidation of these laws, it is impossible to establish in a scientific manner the correlation between the literary series and other historical series. (Jakobson & Tynjanov 1980[1928]: 29)
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3. The evolution of literature cannot be understood until the evolutionary problem ceases to be obscured by questions about episodic, nonsystemic genesis, whether literary (for example, so-called "literary influences") or extraliterary. The literary and the extraliterary material used in literature may be introduced into the orbit of scientific investigation only when it is considered from a functional point of view. (Jakobson & Tynjanov 1980[1928]: 29)
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4.The sharp opposition of synchronic (static) and diachronic cross sections has recentry become a fruitful working hypothesis, both for linguistics and for history of literature, inasmuch as it has demonstrated that language, as well as literature, has a systemic character at each individual moment of its existence. At the present time, the achievements of the synchronic concept force us to reconsider the principles of diachrony as well. The idea of a mechanical agglomeration of material, having been replaced by the concept of a system or structure in the realm of sychronic study, underwent a corresponding replacement in the realm of diachronic study as well. The history of a system is in turn a system. Pure synchronism now proves to be an illusion: every synchronic system has its past and its future as inseparable structural elevents of the system: (a) archaism as a fact of style; the linguistic and literary background recognized as the rejected old-fashioned style; (b) the tendency toward innovation in language and literature recognized as a renewal of the system. The opposition between synchrony and diachrony was an opposition between the concept of system and the concept of evolution; thus it loses its importance in principle as soon as we recognize that every system necessarily exists as an evolution, whereas, on the other hand, evolution is inescapably of a systemic nature. (Jakobson & Tynjanov 1980[1928]: 29-30)
5. The concept of synchronic literary system does not coincide with the naively envisaged concept of a chronological epoch, since the former embraces not only works of art which are close to each other in time but also works which are drawn into the orbit of the system from foreign literatures or previous epochs. An indifferent cataloguing of coexisting phenomena is not sufficient; what is important is their hierarchical significance for the given epoch. (Jakobson & Tynjanov 1980[1928]: 30)
6. The assertion of two different concepts - la langue and la parole - and the analysis of the relationship between them (the Geneva school) has been exceedingly fruitful for linguistic science. The principles involved in relating these two categories (i.e., the existing norm and the individual utterance) as applied to literature must be elaborated. In this latter case, the individual utterance cannot be considered without reference to the existing complex of norms. (The investigator, in isolating the former from the latter, inescapably deforms the system of artistic values under consideration, thus losing the possibility of establishing its immanent laws.) (Jakobson & Tynjanov 1980[1928]: 30)
7. An analysis of the structural laws of language and literature and their evolution inevitably leads to the establishment of a limited series of actually existing structural types (and, correspondingly, of types of structural evolution). (Jakobson & Tynjanov 1980[1928]: 30)
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8. A disclosure of the immanent laws of the history of literature (and language) allows us to determine the character of each specific change in literary (and linguistic) systems. However, these laws do not allow us to explain the tempo of evolution or the chosen path of evolution when several, theoretically possible, evolutionary paths are given. This is owing to the fact that the immanent laws of literary (and, corresponding, linguistic) evolution form an indeterminate equation; although they admit only a limited number of possible solutions, they do not necessarily specify a unique solution. The question of a specific choice of path, or at least of the dominant, can be solved only through an analysis of the correlation between the literary series and other historical series. This correlation (a system of systems) has its own structural laws, which must be submitted to investigation. It would be methodologically fatal to consider the correlation of systems without taking into account the immanent laws of each system. (Jakobson & Tynjanov 1980[1928]: 30-31)
Real understanding of any scientific subject must include some knowledge of its historical growth; we cannot comprehend and accept modern concepts and theories without knowing something of their origins - of how we have got where we are. Neglect of this maxim can lead to that unfortunate state of mind which regard the science of the day as finality. (Cherry 1977: 32)We should temper reading by writing, and reciprocally, so that the written composition gives body (corpus) to what has been obtained by reading. Reading collects orationes logoi (discourses, elements of discourse); we must make a corpus of them. (Foucault 2005: 359)The existence of the inner book, along with unreading or forgetting, is what
makes the way we discuss books so discontinuous and heterogeneous. What we take to be the books we have read is in fact an anomalous accumulation of fragments of texts, reworked by our imagination and unrelated to the books of others, even if these books are materially identical to ones we have held in our hands. (Bayard 2007: 85-86)The post-Cubist function of quotations in collages emerges with particular clarity in the early notes of Eisenstein, who wrote in 1928 that "an entire treatise can be made by composition of quotations." In his later works, in which compositions of quotations are often used, he himself explains them (in the spirit of the "linear style" of quotations) by a desire for "minimal distortion." (Ivanov 1976b: 323)A person may be interested in scientific statements for their own sake (interested in collecting them as a person may be interested in collecting butterflies); a person may have knowledge and the increase of knowledge as his goal. (Morris 1949: 128)In non-literate society, of course, there are usually some individuals whose interests lead them to collect, analyse and interpret the cultural tradition in a personal way [but] it is still evident that the literate individual has in practice so large a field of personal selection from the total cultural repertoire that the odds are strongly against his experiencing the cultural tradition as any sort of patterned whole. (Goody & Watt 1963: 335)A different language is too often taken for stammering, a nonconformist virtuosity is misinterpreted as formlessness, exquisite variability is confused with cruelty, intentional enigmatic indefiniteness is deplored as the disappointing obscurity or fragmentariness of a mere neglected sketch, and in the stupendous interplay of symmetry and disequilibrium onesided critics are prone to overlook the harmony and to observe nothing but chaos. (Jakobson 1981[1967b]: 498)I am convinced that there must still be a number of other concepts or models of potentially systemic generality scattered in some (un)fairly unknown works of disappeared or living researchers. We should dive for them in the deeps of literature. (François 1999: 217)The selections included are of such a nature that readers who feel that the study of the history of systematic social theory is a waste of time will have occasion to ponder how thoroughly our predecessors have plagiarized many of our best ideas. (Meyer 1956: 166)This, we may conceive, would be no small Advantage to the Knowledge of a thinking Man, if all his past Thoughts and Reasonings could be always present to him. (Locke 1741a: 115)
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