This project focuses on the rethinking of human agency in the writings of Russian Formalists. Key to this rethinking was the conviction among the Formalists that the new type of literary criticism they were producing was characterised by its scientific character (nauchnost’). The aim of the project is to consider the Formalist work on human agency, subjectivity and authorship within broader cultural and historical contexts, in order to examine the scientific turn in literary studies, which is particularly pertinent in a society where romantic and religious understandings of the human subject were to give place to a new model of subjectivity. In particular, it aims to show how the Formalist remodeling of human agency can be seen as part of the project of creating “the new human” launched after the Russian revolution in the fields of education, popular psychology and biomedical sciences.

A full-length study is available here.