Dynamic Archeology or Distant Reading: Literary Study Between Two Formalisms.

Scholars working within computational literary studies often invoke Russian Formalism as a methodologically like-minded school of thought and a repository of useful insights, which can at last be tested with the help of recently developed digital techniques. Yet the two formalisms diverge starkly when it comes to three of their most fundamental categories of analysis: first, in their respective conceptions of literary form itself; next, in their notions of history and of what it means to tell the history of form; and finally, in the ways in which they construe the relationship between literature and society as a whole, or, in other words, in their corresponding sociologies of literary form. This paper, then, is a contribution to creating the conditions for the possibility of a genuine exchange between the two formalisms here at issue by focusing, first and foremost, on what divides them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]