From Šklovskij's modernist aesthetics to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology

Patrick R. Flack

Université de Fribourg

in: Simone Aurora (ed), Acta Structuralica 4, 2019.

Abstract

This paper considers Šklovskij’s famous concept of “estrangement” and the modernist conception of aesthetics related to it in a philosophical perspective. Taking cue from the historical circumstances that hampered Šklovskij’s and the other Russian formalists’ work, I wish to briefly discuss its potential in connection with a structural and phenomenological theory of perception. In essence, my argument is that the Russian formalists’ apparently ad hoc and unsatisfactory intuitions as to the formal and aesthetic nature of perception can receive a much more coherent foundation with the help of the phenomenological thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Cited authors

Jakobson Roman

Merleau-Ponty Maurice

Šklovskij Viktor

Špet Gustav