ABSTRACT
Russian Formalism has acquired something of a bad name. Formalism is seen either as the specifically literary precursor of a totalizing 'method' for inquiry across the full range of the human sciences, or as the beginning of the end for the possibility of a literary 'aesthetics', the moment at which the human sciences capitulated to the logic and methodology of the natural sciences. Although the Bakhtin school's relationship to Marxism has been bitterly contested, with both Pavel Medvedev and, in particular, Valentin Voloshinov often suggestive of ostensible similarity in orientation, its relationship to Formalism has, with a few notable exceptions, been portrayed as one of undying enmity. Medvedev's book, as its subtitle suggests, is a critique of Formalism from the ostensible perspective of a developing 'sociological method', thus positioning itself firmly on the Marxist side of the argument, but thus also programming inevitable contradictions in the context of its underlying 'Bakhtinian' platform.
