RUSSIAN

FORMALISM
A Summary Discussion
 By the end of the nineteenth century, no single school
of criticism dominated literary studies
 Literary work was a social or political product encased Before
in a particular history.
 Texts are the personal impressions and visions of its Russian
creator, a place where the author and the reader can
imaginatively revel in the text. Formalism
 A literary work should be read biographically, seeing
the author's life and private concerns peeping
throughout the text.
 Rejected the belief that a work of literature was the
expression of the author’s worldview and their
dismissal of psychological and biographical criticism
as being irrelevant to interpretation.
 Literature, they believed, should be investigated as its
own discipline, not merely as a platform for discussing
religious, political, sociological, or philosophical ideas. Russian
 The proper study of literature, they declared, is
literature itself. To study literature is to study poetics,
which is an analysis of a work’s constituent parts - its
Formalism
linguistic and structural features - or its form.
“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.”

- Shklovsky
 Form, they asserted, included the internal
mechanics of the work itself, especially its
poetic language.
 These internal mechanics, or what the Russian
formalists called devices, comprise the
artfulness and literariness of any given text, Formalism
not a work's subject matter or content.
 The schools chief focus of literary analysis was the
examination of a text’s literariness. Unlike everyday
literary language, literary language foregrounds
itself. Russian
 Ultimately, this produced the defining feature of
literariness, defamiliarization.
Formalism
Defamiliarization
 Coined by the Russian Formalist Victor Shklovsky,
defamiliarization is the process of making strange
(ostranenie) the familiar, of putting the old in new light,
what Shklovsky called a "sphere of new perception.”
 Our ordinary experience of every day language is slowed Russian
down because we must now unpack the meaning of the
author's choice of language. Formalism
 Shklovsky analyzed narrative prose and declared
that the structure of a narrative has two aspects:
1. Fabula (story) is the raw material of the story and
can be considered somewhat akin to the writer's
working outline. This outline contains the
chronological series of events of the story.
2. Syuzhet (plot) the literary devices the writer uses to
transform a story (the fabula) into plot. By using
Russian
such techniques as digressions, surprises, and
disruptions, the writer dramatically alters the fabula, Formalism
making it a work of literature that now has the
potential to provoke defamiliarization, "to make
strange" the language of the text and render a fresh
view of language, the reader's world, or both.
TEXT for Formalists
A unified collection of various literary devices and
conventions that can be objectively analyzed. Literature is
not, they declared, the vision of an author or authorial Russian
intent.
Formalism
Although both schools use some similar terminology
and are identified as types of Formalism, no direct
relationship exists between them. New Criticism has its
own unique history and development in Great Britain Bridging the Gap
and the United States.
Interestingly, however, in the 1940s, two leading
between Russian
Russian Formalists, Roman Jakobson and Rene Wellek, Formalism and
came to the United States and actively participated in the
scholarly discussions of the New Critics. The interaction New Criticism
of these two Russian Formalists with the New Critics
does evidence itself in some of the Russian Formalism's
ideas being mirrored in New Critical principles.