Between Phenomenology and Futurism: The Interwar Poetics of Roman Jakobson

The current article is based on a chapter from the author's book Russian Formalism: A Meta poetics (1984). It deals with the poetics of Roman Jakobson formulated during his stay in Prague from 1920 to 1938 and treats this subject from an epistemological perspective outlining three incompatible scholarly/artistic trends which informed it: Husserlian Phenomenology, Saussurian linguistics and Russian Futurism. From Husserl, Jakobson borrowed the concept of "expression" (Ausdruck) the sign whose self-sameness was absolute. But tie departed from the German philosopher by conceiving of this semiotic identity in terms of a Saussurein "social consciousness." And he further relativized it through the modernist notion of "de-familiarization" an incessant drive of poetic signs for an aesthetic rejuvenation. To mitigate the tension between Phenomenological stability and Futurist instability, the essay concludes, Jakobson grounded his poetics in phonology: the sound system universal to all languages that is impervious to any violations.