Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics, and: Historic Structures: The Prague School Project, 1928-1946, and: The Prague School: Selected Writings, 1929-1946, and: Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time (review)

168 the minnesota review in which individuals of character would choose pubUc not private interest. Tragically, for Susman, American political culture since the New Deal understood the age of abundance as dependent on the capitalist enterprise, which provided ever-rising levels of consumption demanded by the boundless self-interest of individuals. "Professional historians have increasingly felt left out," he concluded, but "some understanding of the role of history in American culture would help them to understand why. Not any kind of historical reconstruction will do. The age—like all previous ages— demands history as the myth or ideology it needs" (5). He knew that if the culture of consumption had become the establishment, it would, of course, demand history as a defense of the new order. But although Warren Susman might describe the triumph of consumer capitalism, he could not, unlike the popular historian, Ronald Reagan, bring himself to engage in an unambiguous celebration of our current dominant mythology. DAVID W. NOBLE Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics by Peter Steiner. Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1984. 280 pp. $24.95 (cloth). Historic Structures: The Prague School Project, 1928-1946 by F. W. Galan. Austin: U. of Texas Press, 1985. 268 pp. $22.50 (cloth). The Prague School: Selected Writings, 1929-1946 edited by Peter Steiner. Austin: U. of Texas Press, 1982. 231 pp. $27.50 (cloth). VerbalArt, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time by Roman Jakobson. Edited by Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1985. 232 pp. $29.50 (cloth). For most English-speaking readers of literary theory, the terms "formalism" and "structuralism " have become synonymous either with aging discussions of paradox and symmetry within the confines of a single text, or with the extravagant, if occasionally brilliant, productions of French intellectuals. Both have had their functions within the growth of the Anglo-American literary industry: the first appearing as a sort of "bourgeois revolution" in which an emerging group of skilled technicians attacked the privilege of positions built on the orthodoxy of "taste"; the second appearing as the differentiation of a later generation within an increasingly glutted pubUcation market established by the first, but which their own theories came increasingly to define. Behind these developments (or, perhaps less ethnocentrically, apart from and before them), another tradition used the same terms to describe its own trajectory of development, even though it was motivated by a different set of historical circumstances and a very different attitude toward intellectual life. This movement, which became known, first in the Soviet Union in the decade after the revolution as "Russian Formalism," and later in the 30s in Czechoslovakia as "Prague Structuralism," defined much of what was to develop later in its western counterparts, and, in some curious and important ways, developed it more completely . Yet, though one of the greatest survivors of both Slavic movements, Roman Jakobson , eventually came to settle in the United States, these movements themselves long remained relatively unknown outside of Slavic, and, occasionally, linguistics departments here. The vogue of French structuralism in the 70s, however, brought forth an increasing number of publications and translations, primarily from the university presses of Yale, Michigan, and MIT—schools with a strong commitment to either Slavic studies or linguistics. More recently, both Texas and Cornell have entered the field, the former with an aggressive array of books spanning various aspects of the Slavic theory, the latter with an impressive entry on the Formalists. Significantly, while several of these works foUow the pattern of offering primary texts in translation, two of the most recent, Peter Steiner's Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics and F.W. Galan's Historic Structures: The Prague SchoolProject, 1928-1946, offer major critical revaluations of these movements as a whole. The appearance of such works promises to make Slavic theory, as both a historical and critical phenomenon, ac- reviews 169 cessible to a widening group of readers. Steiner's book provides a critical look at the earlier stage of these developments, the Russian Formalism of the Soviet Union in the 20s. It is the first full-length study to appear in English since Victor ErUch's ground-breaking work, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine, first appeared in 1955. Though Steiner's book goes...