Well, simply, the point that those ways of thinking about literature, which they exempt from their diatribe against theory. are the ways that they call "empirical," ways of thinking about literature that are based on observation-- and that, of course, would certainly, it seems to me, apply to the Russian formalists or at least to what the Russian formalists think they're doing-- ways that are empirical in the sense that they observe data, they build up a kind of database, and they generalize from what they have observed. 