ABSTRACT
IN his essay ‘On Realism in Art’, Jakobson summarized the Formalists’ perception of the intellectual flabbiness of the traditional schools of literary criticism they sought to displace:
Until recently, the history of art, particularly that of literature, has had more in common with causerie than with scholarship. It obeyed all the laws of causerie, skipping blithely from topic to topic, from lyrical effusions on the elegance of forms to anecdotes from the artist’s life, from psychological truisms to questions concerning philosophical significance and social environment…. The history of art has been equally slipshod with respect to scholarly terminology. It has employed the current vocabulary without screening the words critically, without defining them precisely, and without considering the multiplicity of their meanings.1
