Saussure Ferdinand de - On Language and Poetry: Three Essays

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicationData:

Names: Yakubinsky, Lev Petrovich, 1892-1945 author. |Eskin, Michael

translator editor.

Title: On language & poetry : three essays / LevPetrovich Yakubinsky ; translated from the Russian, edited, andwith an introduction by Michael Eskin.

Other titles: On language and poetry

Description: New York : Upper West Side Philosophers,Inc., | Series: Subway line ; no. 13 | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017015857 | ISBN 9781935830511(pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Poetics. | Language andlanguages--Philosophy.

| Saussure, Ferdinand de, 1857-1913--Criticismand

interpretation.

Classification: LCC PN1042 .Y35 2017 | DDC808.1--dc23

LC record available athttps://lccn.loc.gov/2017015857

Contents

Even among the cognoscentilinguists,literary critics, and cultural theoriststhe name Yakubinsky willnot necessarily ring a bell. But it should: for his significancefor modern poetics and criticism can hardly be overestimated.Occasionally mentioned in academic literature on earlytwentieth-century Russian and Soviet literary and linguisticscholarship, he has remained virtually unknown outside a smallcircle of specialists. Eclipsed by such luminaries as ViktorShklovsky, Yury Tynyanov, Boris Eikhenbuam, Roman Jakobson, andothers who came to represent the so-called Russian formalistmovement, which he co-founded and which revolutionized the way welook at and interpret literature and culture to this day,Yakubinsky has been relegated to the footnotes of modernintellectual history. Thus, the book you are now holding in yourhands can be viewed as a recovery mission of sorts, aiming to givea powerful, unduly forgotten thinker the historical credit hedeserves by making his work widely available in English, and tobroaden and enrich our overall perspective on and understanding ofthe vagaries of modern literary and cultural theory. Together withYakubinskys book-length essay On Dialogic Speechoriginallypublished in the Soviet Union in 1923 and first published inEnglish in 2016the present volume gathers some of Yakubinskyshistorically and critically most relevant writings, giving thenon-Russian-speaking reader the opportunity to engage with thisinfluential mind first-hand.

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Born in Kiev in 1892, LevPetrovich Yakubinsky studied philology and linguistics at Kiev andPetersburg Universities from 1909 to 1915 , during a periodof change and renewal in Russian linguistics, which had up to thenbeen dominated by neogrammarian positivism and historicism.Originating in Leipzig, Germany, in the 1870s, and subsequentlymaking its way to Russia, the neogrammarian schoolrepresented,among others, by Eduard Sievers (1850-1932) and August Leskien(1840-1916) in Germany, and Fillip Fortunatov (1848-1914) inRussiapostulated the existence of a priori phonologicallaws and held that the description of the historicaltransformations of language(s) should take precedence over theinvestigation of living speech in its concrete, dynamic andgenerative, aspects. This abstract, de-humanized approach to ourmost important and ubiquitous social and cognitive medium waseagerly contested by a group of young scholars and criticsno doubtinspired and fueled by the fermenting cultural-political atmosphereleading up to and surrounding the October Revolution of 1917whowere far more interested in the functional and social diversity oflanguage as an individual and collective activity.

The word is now dead, proclaimed ViktorShklovsky, one of the groups most vociferous members, as early as1914 in his famous manifesto The Resurrection of the Word: Wehave lost our connection to the world, we no longer feel it Onlythe creation of new forms will restore our lived experience ofthe world [ oshshyushsheniye mira ],resurrect things, and kill pessimism. (Shklovsky, by the way, wasnot alone in issuing a clarion call in the name of restoring ourlived experience of the world by means of language. At roughly thesame time, another young literary formation, the so-calledAcmeistsin explicit opposition to the Symbolist doctrine of arealibus ad realiora[from the real to theideal]campaigned for exactly the same goal: our livedexperience of the world [ oshshyushsheniyemira ], as Mandelstam famously put it in his 1913poetic manifesto The Morning of Acmeism.)

What better way to make good on Shklovskysethical imperative, insofar as it is premised on breathing new lifeinto language, than to begin by investigating the mostself-conscious and self-reflexive form of linguistic activity:poetry (and literature more generally). The founding by Shklovskyand a cluster of friends and colleagues at Petersburg University ofthe Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOYAZ: Obshchestvopo Izucheniyu Poeticheskogo Yazyka) in 1916which, in dialogue withthe so-called Moscow Linguistic Circle, developed what came to beknown as Russian formalismwas designed to do just that: teach usto see and feel the world anewas if for the first time, asShklovsky wrote in his seminal essay Art as Device (1917)byteaching us to attend to language in a new way. And this new way oflooking at language, in turn, which would be different fromprevious linguistic approaches, hinged on the categoricaldistinction between poetic and practical language.More specifically: on the distinction between the two modes oflanguage not in respect to their what so much as inrespect to their how; not in respect to content andits variously conceived referential relation to the world (aquestion sufficiently dealt with by Aristotle and his followers) somuch as in respect to formin respect, that is, to thetechnical ways, the material, semiotic devices(phonological, morphological, syntactic, grammatical, rhetorical,etc.) that arguably distinguish literary from ordinary or practicallanguage (and, in turn, obviously impact content). Themethodological distinction and juxtaposition of poetic andpractical language, Boris Eikhenbaum summed up in hisretrospective 1925 essay The Theory of the