Niraula 1

Ujwal Niraula

Professor Dr. Tara Prasad Adhikari

Literary Theory and Cultural Studies 425.25

23 Feb 2022

Formalists’ attempt to redefine art and its implications in Literary Studies

Formalism, in a nutshell, is the theory of giving marked attention to style, arrangement or

form in art and literature which generally corresponds with de-emphasizing of the content. In

simple words, the basic essence of formalists’ idea is that the form of a literature is what

provides literariness rather than the content.

In contrast to the existing contemporary notions of perceiving art and literature,

formalism ever since its advent in the mid-nineteenth century, polemicized against symbolism

and provided a new base of viewing and perceiving literature and art which opened the door for

superiority of the construction, of the plot over the material itself. The formalistic methodology

provided a way of perceiving and analyzing artworks which intentionally avoided illusionistic

realism and modern art which are so much more than mere mimesis. Symbolism and iconology

failed to facilitate the interpretation of art which is void of any religious, mythological or cultural

symbolism and so came formalism which made the analysis and interpretation of abstract and

modern art possible. Formal methodology also challenged the traditional theories used to

perceive literary works and advocated analysis of literature based on their form as opposed to the

content or the image they portrayed.

The mid-nineteenth century experienced rapid change and rapid industrialization with

significant advancement in technology. This was a period defined by gradual movement away

from old systems and old ways of thinking. Inventions such as camera and photography was
 Niraula 2

changing the way people viewed the world around them and challenging the purpose of art such

as paintings; the visual accuracy of photographs challenged the notion that painting is supposed

to create an illusion of reality. Artists responded to these changes as many artists explored how

vision is coloured by feelings and emotions and in turn, how formal elements of artwork can

generate a feeling whether or not a visual is figurative in itself. Artists were gradually moving

towards abstraction. There was a need to interpret these new artworks and new images in new

ways. Out of this, new kind of visual thinking emerged which we now refer to as formalism.

Emile Zola, a French writer of the late nineteenth century, is considered as one of the

early formalists because of the way he critiqued artworks. Analyzing the paintings of Edouard

Manet, an impressionist artist of the late nineteenth century, and a very good friend of Zola

himself, Zola writes:

What first strikes me in these pictures, is how true is the relationship of tone values…

Some fruit is placed on a table and stands out against a grey background…The artist,

confronted with some subject or other allows himself to be guided by his eyes which

receive this subject in terms of broad colours which control each other. Thus a great

simplicity is achieved- hardly any details, a combination of accurate and delicate patches

of colour, which from a few paces away, give the picture an impressive sense of relief. I

stress this characteristic of Manet’s works, because it is their dominating feature and

makes them what they are. The whole of the artist’s personality consists in the way his

eye functions: he sees things in terms of light colour and masses.

Therefore, according to Zola, art should be analyzed in its empirical features, external observable

facts and individual perception of reality and not mere mimesis. The so-called meaning of an

artwork is now in the eye of artist and the viewer. Meaning of an art, therefore becomes relative
 Niraula 3

and is dependent upon the explicitly observable features of the art such as lines, colours and

shape rather than any underlying image or symbol it is attempting to portray.

Defamiliarization of art is one of the concepts propagated by formalists which provided

readers with a different tool, in lieu of existing ones, to perceive art. To put it simply,

defamiliarization of art refers to the technique of making art alien to the observer so that the

moment of recognition of meaning of the art becomes more rewarding. Viktor Shklovsky,

perhaps the most extreme of the formalists, first suggest this idea in his famous essay Art as

Technique (1917) and has been propagated by many writers following him. Rivkin in her famous

book writes:

Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to

make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are

perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar”

to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the

process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of

experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important…

Shklovsky challenged the ways of critiquing poetry before him, and asked readers to perceive

poetry in a different way. In his journal article Daniel P. Gunn writes:

The source of this position is Shklovsky’s critique of the theory of Alexander Potebnya, a

nineteenth century philologist, who had argued (under the slogan, “art is thinking in

images”) that the artist uses the image-something familiar and concrete-to present the

unknowable phenomenal world to the reader. According to this view, poetry is valuable,

relative to other kinds of discourse, because of its economy; it delivers a relatively large

quantity of experience in a relatively direct way. Shklovsky turn this formulation on its
 Niraula 4

head, arguing that, ordinarily, our perception of the world is habitual, economical,

automatic-too familiar, in fact. Habitualization casts a desensitizing pall over the world,

depriving us of actual experience. Art, according to Shklovsky, restores experience to us

by distorting and slowing down perception by making the world strange once again.

Mere suggestions of analysis of literature and art on the basis of their form was not going to be

enough to establish formalism as a literary theory facilitating as a different lens to critique any

literature or art. There was a need to understand and explain the basic nuances of linguistics and

literature. Jonathan Culler, a French Structuralist, recognized progress would be possible only if

one isolated a suitable object for study, distinguished between speech acts and the system of a

language. Distinction between phonetics and phonology was emphasized by formalists because

phonology showed the systematic nature of the most familiar phenomena, distinguished between

the system and its realization and concentrated not on the substantive characteristics of

individual phenomena but on abstract differential features which could be defined in relational

terms.

Roman Jakobson, a Russian-American linguist, a pioneer of structural linguistics, who is

considered to be greatly influenced by Ferdinand De Saussure, stands as a link between

Formalism and Structuralism. Jakobson’s essay Two Aspects of Language (1956) talks about

two aspects of language and two types of Aphasic disturbances. The essay is considered as the

seminal and groundbreaking text in structural analysis which served as an inspiration for

linguists, literary theorists and semioticians. Adhering to Jakobson’s idea of literary analysis,

Rivkin in her book writes:

Since poetry is focused upon sign and pragmatical prose primarily upon referent, tropes

and figures were studied mainly as poetical devices. The principle of similarity underlies
 Niraula 5

poetry; the metrical parallelism of lines or the phonic equivalence of rhyming words

prompts the question of semantic similarity and contrast; there exist, for instance,

grammatical and anti-grammatical but never agrammatical rhymes. Prose, on the

contrary, is forwarded essentially by contiguity. Thus, for poetry, metaphor, and for

prose, metonymy is the line of least resistance and consequently, the study of poetical

tropes is directed chiefly toward metaphor.

This discourse explained concept used as tools for formal analysis of literary studies of poetry

and prose.

To conclude, formalists attempted to redefine art and literature on merit of their form

rather than the symbolic image, and they formulated and propagated formalism. Formalism has

provided different lens to perceive and critique literature and art with regards to the pre-exting

ones, and is till date one of the most practiced forms of literary analysis in academic forums all

over the world.

 Niraula 6

Zola, Emile. Looking at Manet. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2018.

RIVKIN, Julie. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004, pp. 34-99.

Gunn, Daniel P. “Making Art Strange: A Commentary on Defamiliarization.” The Georgia

Review, vol. 38, no. 1, Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia by and on Behalf
of the University of Georgia and the Georgia Review, 1984, pp. 25–33,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41398624.