TOWARD A STRUCTURAL AND SEMIOTIC THEORY OF LITERARY HISTORY: THE PRAGUE SCHOOL PROJECT, 1928-1944

The work of the Prague School offers a theory of literary history which vindicates structuralism against the charge that its approach, whether in linguistics, literary study or related fields, is inherently unhistorical. Born of the insight according to which a language system is complete at every moment of its existence, the structural approach is well-equipped to deal with synchronic language states but unfit to do justice to diachronic change--or so claim the critics. After a brief introduction to the problematics of literary history in Chapter 1, I try to demonstrate that the methodological rift between synchrony and diachrony, between structural and historical linguistics, is not, however, a necessary and logically unavoidable consequence of Ferdinand de Saussure's penetrating insight which, at the start of this century, inaugurated the structural study of language phenomena. Indeed, the overcoming of this methodological impasse, a resolution to the seeming incompatibility between traditional and modern linguistic inquiries, has been, as I endeavour to show in Chapter 2, the principal challenge faced by the scholars of the Prague Linguistic Circle, Roman Jakobson in particular.;As my subtitle indicates, Prague School structuralism provides us with a project for an all-encompassing theory of art and literature, not a finished version which we could accept today without criticism or modification. While Czech structuralism does strikingly foreshadow much of current structural, semiotic, even phenomenological theory, we must conclude that it does not offer sufficient practical demonstration of exactly how the complex tenets are to be applied in concrete historical investigation of literary texts. Especially in its last phase, during World War II, the structuralists' salient ideas about the universals of art, far-reaching revisions of their carlier social and historical relativism, had, under the circumstances, to remain in the form of general proposals, unsupported by specific examples. Yet despite this incompleteness, the structural and semiotic theory of the Prague School has lost little of its value and validity: contemporary literary criticism, therefore, can ignore it only to its peril. My study seeks nothing more and nothing less than to alert critics and scholars to the hidden theoretical riches of this little studied and understood school of thought.;Having reconciled structural linguistics with linguistic change, the Prague structuralists, principally Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukarovsky, sought to extend the structural and historical approach to the investigation of literary evolution. Chapter 3 focuses on Mukarovsky's exemplary attempt at an "analysis and historical classification of the poetic structure" and on the ensuing debate about the merits as well as defects of his historicizing method. Even though when working on the problems of the history of Czech versification, Mukarovsky and Jakobson did not draw on the inchoate doctrine of semiotics, they both soon found it an indispensable tool for the proper anchoring of literature and art within the larger social context. The ramifications of the semiotic break from the formalist confines of immanence are the subject of Chapter 4. The last chapter, devoted to the problems of so-called Rezeptionsgeschichte, suggests that the semiotic conception, elaborated by Mukarovsky's pupil, Felix Vodicka, defined a new and fertile area in the study of literary history. And the semiotic model of communication, finally, showed the way toward integrating the creative poetic personality into structuralist theory, thereby enabling the Prague scholars to heal the other Saussurean rift between the langue or the system and the parole or the individual utterance, and so to round off a comprehensive theory of literary art and its historical development.