Russian Formalism

[mjh]

This is an area of literary (and wider) criticism that I have become increasingly interested in. I just wanted to know what other people thought of this school of thought and hopefully open up some lively discussion!

[WyattGwyon]

This is an area of literary (and wider) criticism that I have become increasingly interested in. I just wanted to know what other people thought of this school of thought and hopefully open up some lively discussion!

I am primarily a musical scholar but have found several lines of formalist thought to have intriguing implications for music-critical theory. More generally, however, the movement couldn't have had a more unfortunate name, given that accusations of formalism were deadly for the careers of numerous composers and writers under the doctrine of socialist realism. I have published on the applications of Propp's work to the relationship between form and content in the music of Beethoven and others; Jacobson's concept of the dominant, I believe, should be on the reading list of every music theorist, since those folks never begin an inquiry with questions so basic as "What is the dominant mode of organization in a work?"—they simply assume it is tonal-harmonic structure because that is the only realm in which their critical tools function effectively. Schklovsky's notion of "making strange" I have found useful at times.

Anyway, I am from a different world and will probably not have much to contribute to a discussion of formalist literary theory, but I will certainly follow any ongoing discussion. Bakhtin is my real hero among Russian theorists.

[mjh]

I am a keen musician myself and would love to read some of your work. Can you point me in the right direction?

[WyattGwyon]

I am a keen musician myself and would love to read some of your work. Can you point me in the right direction?


Here are three essays—my screen name is a pseudonym but the title will be enough to locate them. The first two use a structuralist approach after Propp:

—"Afterlife of an Archetype: Prokofiev and the Art of Subversion." Forthcoming in Musical Narrative after 1900. Ed. Michael Kline and Nick Reyland. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).

—"Structuralism and Musical Plot." Music Theory Spectrum 19 (1997), 13-34.


This one contains a Bakhtinian analysis of a movement from a Prokofiev piano sonata, arguing that the composer maintained a dialogic stance with respect to the work's "persona:"

—"Organic Methodologies and Non-Organic Values: The Andante caloroso of Prokofiev's Seventh Piano Sonata." The Journal of Musicological Research 18 (1998), 31-62.