title: Digital Humanities and Russian Formalism: Darwinism and anti-Darwinism in Literary History
metadata.name: dc.contributor.author
metadata.value: Steiner, Peter
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.date.accessioned
metadata.value: 2017-08-20T15:46:53Z
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.date.available
metadata.value: 2017-08-20T15:46:53Z
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.date.issued
metadata.value: 2017-06
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.identifier.citation
metadata.value: Steiner Peter. Digital Humanities and Russian Formalism: Darwinism and anti-Darwinism in Literary History. Vestnik SPbSU. Philosophy and Conflict Studies, 2017, vol. 33, issue 2, pp. 217–223.
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.identifier.other
metadata.value: 10.21638/11701/spbu17.2017.209
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.identifier.uri
metadata.value: http://hdl.handle.net/11701/7059
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.description.abstract
metadata.value: The first version of this paper was presented at the Stanford Humanities Centre conference “Russian
  Formalism & Digital Humanities” on April 13, 2015. It addressed Franco Moretti’s provocative
  application of the Darwinian evolutionary model based on the divergence of biological species and
  their survival through the mechanism of natural selection to literary history. This approach was juxtaposed
  against the ideas of two leading Russian Formalists, Iurii Tynianov and Roman Jakobson, whose
  explanation of linguistic/literary change was programmatically anti-Darwinian making conversion
  (conceived, though, in a very specific way) the cornerstone of their respective historiographies. In
  doing so, they were reacting to the project of historical poetics advanced by the 19th century Russian
  Positivist philologist, Aleksandr Veselovskii (1838–1906), whose stated goal was to trace the morphological
  divergences of texts across time and space. The dichotomy “conversion-diversion,” my paper
  illustrated, is not limited to criticism alone. The same frame of reference was invoked in the late 1950’s
  in a famous dispute between the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner and the father of the generativetransformational
  grammar, Noam Chomsky, about language acquisition and subsequently in their
  heated polemics about the human subject’s autonomy triggered by the publication of Skinner’s book
  Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971). Refs 15.
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.language.iso
metadata.value: en
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.publisher
metadata.value: St Petersburg State University
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.relation.ispartofseries
metadata.value: Vestnik of St Petersburg University. Philosophy and Conflict Studies;Volume 33; Issue 2
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: literary history
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: Darwinism
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: causality
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: teleology
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: digital humanities
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: Formalism
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: Chomsky
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: Jakobson
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: Moretti
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: Skinner
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: Veselovskii
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: Tynianov
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.title
metadata.value: Digital Humanities and Russian Formalism: Darwinism and anti-Darwinism in Literary History
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.type
metadata.value: Article
metadata.lang: en_GB
resources.filename: 09-Steiner.pdf
resources.url: https://dspace.spbu.ru/bitstream/11701/7059/1/09-Steiner.pdf
resources.format: Adobe PDF
resources.size: 613,01 kB