Russian Formalism

…literary formalism…represented by both American New Criticism…and Russian Formalism.

…displace “content” in literary analysis and to focus, instead, on literary “form” in a detailed manner analogous to
the methods of empirical scientific research.

…organize the generic structures of literature into a system consistent with the inner ordering of works…

…levels of generality—from the specific components of a poetic image or line through the poem’s genre to that
genre’s place in the system of literature.

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…not as constituted by its intrinsic (“natural”) meaning, as an imitation of reality, but by relational patterns that are
meaningful in a particular work and genre.

…Moscow Linguistic Circle, begun in 1915, and OPOYAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language), started in
1916.

…Prague Linguistic Circle (founded in 1926), of which Roman Jakobson…

…Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928).

…avoid all romantic notions about poetic inspiration, genius, or aesthetic organicism.

…deliberately mechanistic view of poetry and other literary art as the products of craft.

…no particular deployment of words, images, or other language effects is intrinsically literary.

…literature, like other usages of language, could have a particular function, could “work” to accomplish particular
ends…

…Kenneth Burke…more linguistic rather than “sociological”…

…language deployed as language…

…as the object of criticism. Linguistic properties then become the primary concern—instead of “inspiration”…

…identifying formal properties as effective…

…Shklovsky [Russian Formalism]… literary “device” aimed at effecting some end…

…Saussure’s “functional” definition of linguistic entities.

…concentration on images…leads one to view a poem as having actual “content”…

… “content” needs to be considered as “device”…

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…language is a medium of communication before it is used in art…

…overly familiar to the reader…

To be made new and poetically useful, such language must be “defamiliarized” and “made strange” through
linguistic displacement…

Rhyme schemes (or lack of rhyme), chiasmus (rhetorical balance and reversal), catachresis (the straining of a
word or figure beyond its usual meaning), conceits, mixed metaphors, and so on—all these devices for producing
particular effects…

…intricacy and texture of verbal structure.

…quite different from romantic criticism’s view…for transcendent (or divine) feelings or poetic (or personal)
genius.