Anna Förster: Translation and the Becoming of Theory. Todorov, Bakos, and Russian Formalism

Presentation in the panel “Traces of Displacement: An Approach to Cultural, Political, and Language Operations in East Central Europe: Imagined, Dissolved, and Appropriated Territories” at the 54th Annual Convention of the American Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), 10–13 Nov 2022, Chicago, IL

The international circulation of Russian Formalism. Inititally, the works of Šklovskij, Tynjanov, Eikhenbaum, et al. were of interest primarily to those “who really cared about Russian literature” (V. Erlich). After being muted in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, however, they were recreated as foundational texts for a distinctly transphilological and translinguistic theory of literature. This process is quite literally manifest in three identically named publications: the anthologies Teória literatúry (ed. by M. Bakoš, Bratislava 1941) and Théorie de la littérature (ed. by t. Todorov, Paris 1965) which comprise of translations of Russian Formalist writings, as well as, to a lesser degree, by their treatment in R. Wellek’s and A. Warren’s eponymous Theory of Literature (New York, 1949).

Anna Förster is a literary scholar and ZfL research fellow with the project Theory in Translation. French Theory in East Central Europe since 1945.