Alexander A. Potebnja's Psycholinguistic Theory of Literature. A Metacritical Inquiry

Cover Type: Hardcover
Book Condition: As New
Jacket Condition: As New
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publisher Place: Cambridge, Mass
Publisher Year:
Edition:

Description: 164 pages. Book and Jacket appear to have hardly been read and are both in As new condition throughout.

Publishers Description: The work of Alexander A. Potebnja, a leading Ukrainian linguist of the nineteenth century, has significantly influenced modern literary criticism, particularly Russian formalism and structuralism. Potebnjas theory, known as potebnjanstvo (Potebnjanism), flourished in the Russian Empire and in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. It attracted scores of adherents and gave rise to an influential literary journal and a formal critical school at Kharkiv. Yet despite his remarkable achievements in linguistics and literary theory, Potebnjas work was officially renounced in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and in the West he remains virtually unknown. In his study, John Fizer carefully reconstructs Potebnjas theory of literature from the psycholinguistic formulations found in his works on language, mythology, and folklore. Elaborating Potebnjas concept of internal form, energeia, polysemy, and the semiosis of poetic discourse, Fizer develops the central tenets of Potebnjas theory with regard to their philosophical, psychological, and linguistic bases. Largely influenced by Kant and by Humboldts philosophy of language, Potebnja conceived of language and the verbal arts as coterminous phenomena. He identified the internal form with the etymon of the word, which he considered the preeminent locus in the structure of poetic art. He insisted on the dynamic role of the Self in poetic creation and perception but, unlike many of his contemporaries, he believed that the diachronic depth of the signifiers was ethnic and had measureable limits. According to Potebnja, this depth (or internal form) reveals itself as a semantically multivalent image that induces self-knowledge and transforms the primary data of consciousness into syntagmatic wholes. A great deal of Potebnjas theory shares similarities with the work of Benedetto Croce, Leo Spitzer, and Charles S. Pierce. It anticipated modern literary criticism, and, as the author convincingly argues, retains existential and epistemological cogency even today. Fizers volume offers the first thorough study of Potebnjas literary theory, and his insightful analysis restores Potebnja to his rightful place in the history of literary criticism.

ISBN: 0916458164