Russian Formalism vs Germanic Formalism: exploring the concept of European Formalism

Abstract This comparative reading of two conceptual corpora, Russian formalism and Germano-Austrian or Germanic formalism, begins with the idea that the European formalism presents a coherent unit. The continuity of this program authorizes such a comparative reading. The comparative analysis of formalisms in Europe could be a research program aimed at an epistemological reading of the phenomenon of European formalism at the turn of the 20th century. This program deals with a rereading of two conceptual fields–Russian formalism and Germanic (Germano-Austrian) formalism. This study seeks to contextualise the formalist project within the knowledge of its time by showing its genetic links with the disciplines of this period and by introducing it as an epistemological fact. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the growth of psychologism in aesthetic theories, constitutes a reaction against the dominant scientific positivism in the “humanities” of this period. Stemming from the tensions between “aesthetics from below” and “aesthetics from above,” European formalism expresses and achieves a heterogeneous aesthetic program, halfway between “experimental science” and the “science of lived experience.”