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On Tuesday, we began class by taking a look at “Hillary’s Inner Tracy Flick,” a mash-up of two genres that ironically portrays Reese Witherspoon as Hillary Clinton in an angry tirade against a less-qualified but more popular opponent (Obama). This exemplifies how scripts of real-life campaigns (and what we do in our own lives) copy scripts that have already been written.

In three groups, we looked at three Russian Formalist genre theorists’ work and how it relates to Moby-Dick and other theorists we’ve read. First, we had Yury Tynyanov’s “The Literary Fact,” which emphasizes change. He says that there cannot be set definitions within literature because all literature is constantly in flux. One interesting idea he puts forth is to think about genre in terms of how much energy goes into making a certain genre. Like Rosmarin, he emphasizes randomness, but talks more about “chance” than “mistakes.”

The structuralist of the group is Vladimir Propp, who wrote “Fairy Tale Transformations.” He looks for invariance, instead of change, to define a specific genre, the fairy tale. Propp came up with 31 functions that define a fairy tale, and he talks about how these functions are either basic (based on old religions) or derived (based on reality). He uses evolutionary terms to describe which plot elements or functions precede others; for example, a “heroic treatment” is older than a “humorous treatment.”

We also looked at Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Epic and Novel” and “The Problem of Speech Genres.” The latter argued that spoken languages compose genres just as literature does, and in fact language genres are primary while literary genres are secondary. There are infinite possibilities of genres. Bakhtin talks about “utterances” as the basic form of communication that has a meaning: a book, a chapter, or a word can be talked about as an “utterance.” In “Epic and Novel,” Bakhtin praises the novel as the only living genre: epics and lyrics are complete, but the novel is ever growing and constantly using other genres. We argued that other genres are still alive (e.g. “The Penelopean,” a new epic poem). We thought that Moby-Dick is an exemplar of his kind of novel because it is very much in contact with reality and does new things with the novel form.

The Russian Formalists were persecuted for their literary convictions (strange as that seems to us now). They believed that all the meaning to be gleaned from a text is inherent in the text, so there is no need to examine the historical/biographical background to interpret it. They wanted to create a science of literature that relied on linguistics. This was controversial because they said that art was defined by form, and that tradition and subject didn’t matter; Trotsky, on the other hand, said that formal analysis neglects the social world, that men are not empty machines and that psychology is the result of society. We decided that this overview of Formalist criticism is distinctly non-formalist.

We mapped out the first sentence of Moby-Dick according to a Formalist perspective: The implied “You” lends ambiguity to the sentence. Formalists wouldn’t talk about Ishmael’s psychology or the history of his name.

When we thought about what Melville would say to the Formalists, we decided he would parody them. Specifically, he would argue that “a book is but a draft” and there is no such thing as a complete, closed system. The Cetology chapter can be seen as a response to the theory of invariance and Propp’s 31 functions. Melville would say that you can’t understand the world from your armchair, and you can’t understand a book without digging into its context.