Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader

In the storyteller the chronicler is preserved in changed form, secularized, as it were. Leskov is among those whose work displays this with particular clarity. Both the chronicler with his eschatological orientation and the storyteller with his profane outlook are so represented in his works that in a number of his stories it can hardly be decided whether the web in which they appear is the golden fabric of a religious view of the course of things, or the multicolored fabric of a worldly view.

(Walter Benjamin, "A Storyteller")

Two ideas in Jakobson's contribution to modern literary theory deserve special mention. One was his identfication of the rhetorical figures, metaphor and metonymy, as models for two fundamental ways of organizing discourse that can be traced in every kind of cultural production. ...

The other was his attempt to understand 'literariness'-to define in linguistic terms what makes a verbal message a work of art. This was a preoccupation of the Russian formalists from the inception of the movement, but in "'Linguistics and Poetics'", reprinted below, we find a lucid exposition of Jakobson's mature thought on the subject, enlivened and illuminated by a staggering range of illustration.