ABSTRACT
The affiliations and fashions of the literary-critical world are prone to unpredictable and often merciless changes, and it is ironic that the most popular current explanation for these changes should focus on the concept of the paradigm. T.S. Kuhn, historian and philosopher of science, has argued that the ‘horizon of expectations’ or the paradigm of concepts and assumptions shared by scientists at a particular time will inevitably exhaust itself. The new paradigm will be precipitated as much by the proliferation of unanswered, perhaps unanswerable, questions as by innovative, groundbreaking discoveries. The irony for Jakobsonian poetics is that the celebrated linguistic theorist of the paradigm was to fall victim to a clear manifestation of Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shift. The 1958 Indiana University conference on literature and linguistics presented Jakobson with the opportunity to offer the Anglo-American literary-academic establishment his life’s work on ‘Linguistics and Poetics’. Prior to this the strikingly similar objectives of the New Critics and the Formalists had, with the assistance of Erlich (1955) and Wellek (1949), existed as a tantalising, but somewhat marginal, possibility. The final sentence of Jakobson’s paper was like eyes meeting across a crowded room. ‘All of us here, however, definitely realise that a linguist deaf to the poetic function of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistic problems and unconversant with linguistic methods are equally flagrant anachronisms’ (L in L, p. 94). The scientists of literary raw material (the linguists and their theoretical forebears, the Formalists) suddenly found themselves consulting the same agenda of objectives and potential techniques as the scholars and aestheticians (the American New Critics and their slightly eccentric British cousins).
