II GENERAL THEORETICAL CONCEPTS The present essay is directed toward two general goals.
Inasmuch as literature is a form of language the basic levels of analysis that apply to language must also apply to literature.
Speech, a chain of signals unidirec- tional in the time sequence, is correlated with the language system that exists outside of time.
Meter, whose abstract pattern is recognized through scansion, creates its own system of expectation, its own inertia.
The scholar who does not understand this and who seeks the idea in isolated citations resembles a person who, having learned that a house has a plan, starts to break down the walls in search of the place where this plan is immured.
Soviet literary studies have achieved certain successes, especially in the area of the history of Russian literature.