This volume provides a new outlook on twentieth-century theoretical schools and movements in the humanities, both as generators of conceptual knowledge and as cultural phenomena. Offering a new perspective on unstudied or less studied groups, such as Tel Aviv School of poetics and semiotics or the research group Poetics and Hermeneutics, this book looks at what defined these schools and circles in their respective historical and institutional contexts, and traces how their dialogues and controversies resonate in the scholarly discourse in the 21st century.

Marina Grishakova is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Tartu. She is the author of The Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov's Fiction: Narrative Strategies and Cultural Frames (2nd ed. 2012) and a co-editor of Intermediality and Storytelling (with Marie-Laure Ryan, 2010). Her articles appeared in Narrative, Sign Systems Studies, Revue de littérature comparée and international volumes, such as Strange Voices in Fiction (2011), Disputable Core Concepts in Narrative Theory (2012), Literature, History and Cognition (2014), and Intersections, Interferences, Interdisciplines: Literature with Other Arts (2014).

Silvi Salupere teaches in the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu. She is a co-editor of Sign Systems Studies, Tartu Semiotics Library, Acta Semiotica Estica and (with Jan Levchenko) Conceptual Dictionary of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School (1999).

1. The Russian Formalists as a Community TomaS Glanc 2. Bakhtin and his Circle Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan and Sergeiy Sandler 3. Prague Linguistic Circle Lubomír Dolezel 4. From Circles to the School (and Back Again) The Case of Polish Structuralism Adam Kola and Danuta Ulicka 5. The Greimassian Semiotic Circle Eric Landowski 6. Tel Quel: Theory and Practice Patrick ffrench 7. Tales out of (the Yale) School Joseph Hillis Miller 8. The Chicago School: From Neo-Aristotelian Poetics to the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative James Phelan 9. The Geneva School: Form and Signification in Motion Olivier Pot 10. A School in the Woods: Tartu-Moscow Semiotics Marina Grishakova and Silvi Salupere 11. Small World: The Tel Aviv School of Poetics and Semiotics Brian McHale and Eyal Segal 12. Poetics and Hermeneutics (Poetik und Hermeneutik) Renate Lachmann 13. Annales on the Move Jacques Revel 14. Lignes: Intellectual circle, or intellectual spacing? Adrian May