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But 'tis my father's fault; and whenever my brains come to be dissected, you will perceive, without spectacles, that he has left a large uneven thread, as you sometimes see in an unsaleable piece of cambric, running along the whole length of the web . . .
-Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, 17621
I resurrected Laurence Sterne in Russia by knowing how to read him.
-Viktor Shklovsky, A Sentimental Journey, 19232
The renewed attention to feeling in recent literary theory has staked its urgency, in part, on the need to overcome an antisentimental prejudice inherited from the discipline's founding modernist formalisms. In one familiar story about Anglo-American New Criticism and Russian formalism, the movements consolidated and legitimized literary scholarship by redefining its proper field of study as empirical literary form purged of powerful feelings. The resulting polemic against emotional susceptibility could be traced through T. S. Eliot's insistence on the "complete adequacy" of the objective correlative to the emotional signified, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's affective fallacy, and the efforts of the Russian formalists to disentangle literariness from practical and emotional language.3 Roman Jakobson called the tendency to identify poetic and emotional language "mistaken" because it ignored "the crowning functional differences between the two linguistic systems."4 Boris Eikhenbaum decried the impulse to "regard literary 'statements' as a direct expressions of the author's actual feelings."5 And in his foundational work of narrative theory, Theory of Prose (O teorii prozy, 1925), Viktor Shklovsky stated flatly, "By its very essence, art is without emotion."6
But when it came to selecting a testing ground for his theory, Shklovsky chose a work by a novelist renowned for his extravagant feelings, a figure whose celebrity fueled and fed off the transnational sentimental culture of the late eighteenth century. In "Sterne's Tristram Shandy and the Theory of the Novel" ("Tristram Shendi Sterna i teoriia romana"), first published in 1921 and later incorporated into Theory of Prose, Shklovsky enshrines Sterne at the center of the formalist project. On one level, Tristram Shandy (1759-67) is an obvious choice for Shklovsky-a too-perfect choice, even, in the view of some critics, since the novel so transparently reflects on its own formal conditions.7 Yet at the same time there is a...