The autonomy of the aesthetic function
The autonomy of the aesthetic function

Summary/Abstract: In “What Is Poetry?”, a text from the early 1930s, Roman Jakobson takes a rather defensive stand in response to certain critics and “detractors”: “Neither Tynjanov nor Mukařovský nor Šklovskij nor I – none of us has ever proclaimed the self-sufficiency of art. [...] What we stand for is not the separatism of art but the autonomy of the aesthetic function” (Jakobson 1981a[1933–1934]: 749–750). In 1921, Jakobson (quoted in Erlich 1973: 628) had defined the “subject of literary scholarship” as “literariness” (‘literaturnost’) and not “literature in its totality”. A subject of a new literary scholarship, a new discipline had to be given its proper object, which in turn had to be defined on a previously unstudied foundation, independent of the influence of naïve psychological-historical views on literary production.

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