ABSTRACT
The counter-intuitive similarity between Formalism and Marxism with regard to the dichotomy of form and content is dramatically laid bare in the comparison of their respective conceptions of literary material. In 'The Problem of Content, Material and Form', Bakhtin had earlier taken a different view, responding to Viktor Shklovskii's rhetorical over-determination not with loud denunciation, but rather with a classic understatement, arguing that the question of the relationship between art and life and its implications for material simply 'requires more precise scientific formulation'. Bakhtin refers instead to what Pavel Medvedev later calls the second Formalist conception of material, the proposition that it is language itself which must be considered the material of literature and, crucially, to the fundamentally conflicting conclusions which may flow from this premise. Medvedev's belated acknowledgement of at least the possibility of evolution in Formalist conceptions of material is made with his by now familiar rhetorical scepticism.
