UC Berkeley

This dissertation investigates how writers across the Russian and Anglo-American language traditions formulate the aesthetic and intellectual problem of method between 1900-1922. As scientific methods become the definitive model of epistemological certainty and practical utility, writers feel compelled to demarcate literature’s own intellectual rationale—its “method.” Claiming a method for literature in this period involves much more than a rhetorical label to bolster the broader legitimacy of a particular aesthetic model. It increasingly requires spelling out one’s position in relation to the philosophical, scientific, and ideological ramifications of the concept of method itself. Analyzing the period through the vantage point of method revises the assumptions about modernist literature emulating or appropriating scientific concepts in a derivative way. The theories of method formulated by prominent modernist and avant-garde figures in dialogue with the sciences, such as Andrei Bely, T.S. Eliot and Velimir Khlebnikov, explicitly refuse to reduce literary form, and the knowledge literature makes possible, to the constraints of the scientific method. Problematizing the very possibility of method in the arts, these early twentieth-century debates reveal a heterogeneity at the heart of the concept of method itself.

Channeling yet expanding the resources of scientific thought, Bely, Eliot and Khlebnikov each conceive method as a universalizing form of rational practice. Andrei Bely recasts literary method from a problem of technique to a problem of epistemology. To counterbalance the empirical reduction imposed by scientific positivism, Bely puts forth “symbolism, as a method” in the Kantian sense. Symbolism offers an a priori epistemological grounding for aesthetics as a whole. Artistic cognition “expands” conceptual and rational thought: by tapping into the intuitive knowledge of geometry, a new form of idealism is made possible. This alliance between symbolism and geometry explains the prominence of recurrent geometric motifs in Bely’s work, which I trace from his earliest essays to his novel Petersburg. Returning to T.S. Eliot’s conceptualization of method in his early career helps revise his position as a “scientific critic” understood in terms of “impersonality” and the “mythical method.” I show that these Eliotic concepts stem from his reading of Bertrand Russell. Eliot amends this Russellian rhetoric of method to affirm not the identity but only the analogy between science and literature. Following Aristotelian analogy, literature thus defines its own approach to its materials, even as it channels the authority of science as a discipline. Eliot formulates method as an emergent quality of a writer’s oeuvre in its entirety. Velimir Khlebnikov’s Futurist concept of zaum [transrational language] parallels Bely’s and Eliot’s sense of a rational structure made visible through literary language but whose implications extend beyond it. Whereas zaum has traditionally connoted a departure outside rationality and into nonsensical poetic expression, I argue that Khlebnikov’s approach rejects this dichotomous model. Retracing the neologistic origin of zaum, I draw attention to the variety of poetic coinages featuring the root -um [mind] in Khlebnikov’s oeuvre. This -um paradigm offers the vision of a utopian, neurodiverse language open to “many kinds of mind.” Zaum becomes a method for isolating and recombining elemental “units” of language—to reveal the rational, communicable, and infinitely generative patterns inherent in our speech.