Abstract

PILSHCHIKOV, Igor. "Old" and "New" Quantitative Formalism (The Moscow Linguistic Circle and the Stanford Literary Lab). Lit. teor. hist. crit. [online]. 2022, vol.24, n.1, pp.265-295.  Epub Mar 09, 2022. ISSN 0123-5931.  https://doi.org/10.15446/lthc.v24n1.98440.

This article approaches Russian Formalist theory from the perspective of the digital humanities. In 2011, Franco Moretti and his coauthors called their research method "quantitative formalism" in contrast to Russian Formalism, which, in their opinion, was "qualitative". The structural and functional analysis of the poetic text, which the Formalists themselves called "morphological" is the nucleus of the Formalist agenda, and it can indeed be considered "qualitative". However, the thesis of quantitative formalism's novelty is only partially true. To demonstrate this, the author focuses on the approaches to quantitative poetics developed by two members of the Moscow Linguistic Circle, Boris Tomashevsky and Boris Yarkho, and, in particular, on Yarkho's invention of what was later referred to as "distant reading". Apart from its historical significance, a comparison of these two versions of quantitative formalism offers new methodological insights that can be applied by researchers in contemporary digital humanities.

Keywords : Boris Tomashevsky; Boris Yarkho; Russian formalism; Franco Moretti; distant reading; quantitative methods.

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