A Re-Enactment of the 1920s Debates presented by the Retro-Formalism Group in cooperation with Marxism in Culture (University of London) and the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture (University of Westminster) June 4.-5th 2015 Organised by David Cunningham, Anke Hennig, Anthony Iles more

The So-Called Formalist Method (1923) more

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In our second workshop we would like to differentiate between formalist theory on the one hand and the artists of the Russian avant-garde on the other. To this end we chose to focus on the fate of formalist theory during the Stalinist 1930s when it became nearly impossible to draw the line between Formalism and avant-garde art дальше weiterlesen more

As scholars and as writers, the founding fathers of Russian Formalism were not afraid to err in the conventional sense, but what definitely was amongst their fears were epigonism and imitation as an academic and literary secondary activity. However, the repetition or automation of some characteristic features was obvious in the texts of Shklovsky and in the early prose of Tynianov during the 1920s. more

Shklovsky begins his seminal text, "Art as Device", with critiques of diverse formulations of the ‘laws’ of economy governing creative effort and perception in poetic and prose language. more