From Comparative Linguistics to Comparative Literature: Meillet, Murko, Jakobson

Abstract

This article discusses the scholarly and personal relationships that have been established between key figures in modern comparative linguistics, literary theory and comparative literature, and outlines some of the commonalities that unite Meillet’s, Murko’s and Jakobson’s engagement with oral poetry and contribute to their far-reaching theorizations, especially in the field of comparative metrics, but also in the field of oral poetry theory. Antoine Meillet’s seminal book on the origins of Greek metrics established the thesis of common Indo-European verse and was the first to posit the formulaic nature of Homeric epic as a compositional principle, influencing his doctoral student Milman Parry. Matija Murko, who was invited by Meillet to lecture on South Slavic folk epics at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1928, also wrote about formulae as commonplaces linked to the metrical principle in his field reports. The following year, Jakobson, who, like Murko, was living and working in Prague at the time and developing the foundations of phonology in the Prague Linguistic Circle, which he also introduced into metrics, used the comparative method to link Meillet’s pioneering study of comparative metrics with Murko’s comparative literary-historical findings on South Slavic oral poetry, thus laying the foundations of comparative Slavic metrics. The discussion shows, among other things, that Murko’s scholarly corpus devoted to oral poetry is importantly embedded in the various currents of modern comparative literature as international discipline since not only does it make a crucial contribution to the emerging theory of orality, but also its extensive inventories and systematization of metrical and rhythmic character in the performance of South Slavic folk epics are a valuable contribution to metrics as a discipline at the crossroads of literary theory, comparative linguistics, and comparative literature.