Sound-Gesture

Abstract

Chapter 1 analyzes Viktor Shklovskii’s reflections on Futurist poets, who presented their experiments as an inquiry into the biodynamics of verbal expressivity. Shklovskii suggested that Aleksei Kruchenykh’s trans-rational poetry (zaum’) uncovered deeply ingrained motor programs, which shape the verbalization of various ideas and states of consciousness. Shklovskii contended that identifying these motor programs, or “sound gestures,” and putting them to play was the Futurists’ method of palpating the “inner form” of words in the Russian language. In contextualizing Shklovskii’s conception, the chapter maps the spread of psychophysiological terms in Russian literary theory and linguistic scholarship in the 1910s, with a particular emphasis on the echoes of William James’s theory of the corporeal experience of emotion and Wilhelm Wundt’s ideas on the gestural origin of language.