Henri Mesсhonnic's Interdisciplinary Approach: Between the Swiss School and ‘Russian Theory’

The article is devoted to the identification of links between Henri Mesсhonnic's anthropological theory of rhythm and the works of the Swiss linguist F. de Saussure and the Russian formal school. The relevance of the study is due to the fact that the reception of the works of Russian formalists in French verse studies has not yet been covered and requires systematisation. Mesсhonnic's criticism of R. Barthes's position on the ‘death of the author’ has made it difficult to accept the anthropological theory of rhythm in Europe and the USA. The significant presence of Russian material in Meschonnic's works slows down its reception in Russia as well, as it creates an illusion of lack of novelty. The subject of the study is the key concepts of the anthropological theory of rhythm in comparison with the terms ‘paragram’ and ‘value’ (Saussure) and the notions of ‘historicity’, ‘deformation of semantics’, ‘sound image’ (Tynianov), ‘euphony’ (Tomashevsky). On the basis of the comparative method, a conceptual analysis of theoretical and critical texts in French (Saussure, Meschonnic, Breal) and Russian (Tynyanov, Tomashevsky) is carried out with the involvement of historical and cultural context to clarify Meschonniс's position in the confrontation with French poststructuralists. Meschonnic's scholarly discourse includes terms of politics, sociology and philosophy, which is characteristic of the 60s, 70s. Meschonnic postulates that the subject of the poem is the ‘democracy of the poem’. The term oralité (l'oralité) is defined by Meschonnic as the relation of the rhythmic and prosodic component of the mode of signification (fusis-writing) to what a given discourse says (logos-writing). The clarification of Meschonnic's attitude to Saussure's concepts (paragrams, value) combined with the analysis of the main concepts of the anthropological theory of sound (the subject of the poem, prosody, rhythm, historicity, chains of consonant-vocalic organisation) makes it possible to clearly show the originality of the French poet's approach and the fruitful interaction between Russian and European scientific thought. The situation of moving away from nation-states and national systems of versification at the stage of development of transnational communities has created preconditions for fundamental changes in the interpretation of poetic writing, one of the variants of which is Meschonnic's anthropological theory of rhythm.

Anthropological theory of rhythm, subjectivity, French poetry, Russian formalism, Meschonnic, value, anagrams, French theory, orality, voice