Peter Steiner

The paper covers the last phase of Jan Mukařovský’s career between 1945 and 1964 during which his scholarly outlook underwent several steep flections. It treats his conversion from structuralism to Marxism as a story with a distinctive composition, generic characteristics, and buildup. It articulates it into three stages and argues that each accommodates the relationship between these two scholarly paradigms in a different manner. If the initial one strove toward a harmonious merge of structuralism with Marxism, the second one triggered a sharp renunciation of the former and the total acceptance of the latter, while the last one brought about a rather diffident return to some initial premises of structuralism.