10/24/2019 Russian Formalism: An Essay | Literary Theory and Criticism

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Literary Theory and Criticism

ENGL I S H L ITERATURE, LITERARY THEORY, L I N G U I S T I C S , F I L M T H E O R Y ,
MEDI A T H E ORY, UGC NET JRF EXAM PREPAR A T I O N , N O V E L A N A L Y S I S ,
RESE A R C H PAPERS NASRULLAH MAMBROL

HOME › UNCA T E G ORIZED › RUSS I A N F ORMALISM: AN ESSAY

Russian Formalism: An Essay

BY NASR U L L AH MAMBRO L on MARC H 1 7 , 2016 • ( 10 )

Russian Formalism, which emerged around 1915 and ourished in the 1920s, was
associated with the OPOJAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language) and with the
Moscow Linguistic Society (one of the leading gures of which was Roman Jakobson) and
Prague Linguistic Circle (established in 1926, with major gures as Boris Eichenbaum and
Viktor Shklovsky) The school derives its name from “form”, as these critics studied the
form of literary work rather than its content, emphasizing on the “formal devices’such as
rhythm, metre, rhyme, metaphor, syntax or narrative technique.

Formalism views literature as a special

mode of language and proposes
a  fundamental opposition between
poetic/literary language and the
practical/ordinary language. While
ordinary language serves the purpose of
communication, literary language is
self-re exive, in that it offers readers a
special experience by drawing attention
to its “formal devices”, which Roman
Jakobson calls “literariness’ — that
which makes a given work a literary work. Jan Mukarovsky described literariness as
consisting in the “maximum of foregrounding of the utterance”, and the primary aim of

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10/24/2019 Russian Formalism: An Essay | Literary Theory and Criticism

such foregrounding, as Shklovsky described in his Art as Technique, is to “estrange or

“defamiliarize”. Thus literary language is ordinary language deformed and made strange.
Literature, by forcing us into a dramatic awareness of language, refreshes our habitual
perceptions and renders objects more perceptible.

Though Formalism focused primarily on poetry, later Shklovsky, Todorov and Propp
analysed the language of ction, and the way in which it produced the effect of
defamiliarization. They looked at the structure of a narrative and explored how elements
like plot and characterization contributed to the narrative’s effect. Propp studied folk
narratives () and Shklovsky treated Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, as a novel that parodied
earlier conventions of writing.

Jakobson and Todorov were in uential in introducing Formalist concepts and methods
into French Structuralism. Formalism was strongly opposed by some Marxist critics,
proponents of Reader Response theory, Speech Act theory and New Historicism – all reject
the view that there is a sharp and de nable distinction between ordinary language and
literary language.

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10 replies

Anonymous
November 18, 2017 • 5:47 pm

goood essay

Liked by 1 person

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10/24/2019 Russian Formalism: An Essay | Literary Theory and Criticism

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