and closed work Italian semiotician and novelist Eco, Umberto proposed this binary in his 1959 essay ‘L’opera in movimento e la coscienza dell’epoca’, translated as ‘The poetics of the open work’, to describe works of art that, on the one hand, appear incomplete inasmuch as they appear to be given to the audience to make of them what they will, and on the other hand, seem finished and somehow unassailable, as though the audience’s input was neither desired not needed. He refers to the former as open and the latter as closed and equates the first with freedom and the second with obedience and submission. Eco is aware that all texts, to a certain degree, can be regarded as co-productions between author and addressee, but he shows that what is at stake is in fact an issue of the world view of a text, or what Foucault, Michel would later term the episteme. He gives examples of medieval allegories and argues that in their own time, no reader would have thought it possible not to read them for their Christian message. It is only now, in a secular age, that such a reading is possible. Opoyaz Russian acronym created from Obschevesto po izucheniyu poeticheskogo yazyka (Society for the Study of Poetic Language), which along with the Moscow Linguistic Circle was one of the precursor groups to Russian Formalism. The group was formed in St Petersburg, Russia, in 1916, by a group of students and professors working in language studies. It was chaired by the poet Osip Brik and its membership included Shklovsky, Viktor, Boris Eichenbaum, and Jakobson, Roman. The group was interested in uncovering the working mechanisms of literary technique, or more precisely identifying the specific quality of language use that separated the literary text from the non-literary text. The group, never more than a loosely knit discussion unit and occasional cooperative publishing venture, folded in 1923 and merged with the Moscow Linguistic Circle, though by then many of its leading lights had already fled abroad. Further Reading: T. Bennett Formalism and Marxism (1979). V. Erlich Russian Formalism: History---Doctrine (1955).