Roman Jakobson had been an active member of the Russian Formalists and the Prague School, before emigrating to America in the 1940s. He brought together Russian Formalism and American New Criticism in his "Closing Statement" at a conference on stylistics at Indiana University in 1958. Published as "Linguistics and Poetics" in 1960, Jakobson's lecture is often credited with being the first coherent formulation of stylistics, and his argument was that the study of poetic language should be a sub-branch of linguistics. The "poetic function" was one of six general functions of language he described in the lecture.