Hello and welcome to the Discourse. Formalism in literary studies emphasizes a text's intrinsic structure, style, and techniques rather than its historical context, authorial intent, or societal implications. It treats literature as an autonomous entity, focusing on how meaning is constructed through form.
Russian scholars like Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, and Boris Eikhenbaum developed the formalist theory. They sought to establish a scientific study of literature by analyzing its linguistic and structural devices.
The Two Types of Language in Formalism:
In Formalist literary theory, language is categorized into two distinct types: poetic language and practical language. This distinction, primarily developed by Russian Formalists like Roman Jakobson and Viktor Shklovsky, serves as the foundation for understanding how literature functions as an art form.
Practical language, also called ordinary or communicative language, is utilitarian in nature. Its primary purpose is to convey information efficiently, with clarity and directness. This type of language operates on automatic perception—it is functional, transparent, and governed by conventional grammar and syntax. For example, everyday speech, news reports, and instructions rely on practical language, where the focus is on the message rather than the form. The goal is to transmit meaning without drawing attention to the language itself, making it easily digestible and immediately understandable.
In contrast, poetic language is the language of literature, characterized by its deliberate deviation from everyday speech. Unlike practical language, which prioritizes communication, poetic language emphasizes form, rhythm, and stylistic innovation to disrupt habitual perception. Techniques such as metaphor, unusual syntax, repetition, and sound patterning (e.g., alliteration, assonance) force the reader to slow down and engage with the text in a deeper, more conscious way. The Formalists argued that poetic language "defamiliarizes" (ostranenie) the familiar, making ordinary objects or experiences appear strange and new. For instance, in poetry, a simple flower might be described unexpectedly—not just as "a yellow bloom" but as "a golden host dancing in the breeze"—transforming the mundane into something vivid and extraordinary.
The Russian Schools of Formalism:
The OPOJAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language), founded in St. Petersburg in 1916, was the radical core of Russian Formalism, revolutionizing literary theory through its scientific analysis of literary devices. Led by Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynyanov, and Boris Eikhenbaum, OPOJAZ introduced groundbreaking concepts like defamiliarization (ostranenie) and the fabula/syuzhet distinction, treating literature as an autonomous system of techniques rather than a reflection of reality. Their work focused intensely on how poetic language operates differently from everyday speech, emphasizing form over content. Though suppressed by Soviet authorities in the 1930s for being "bourgeois," OPOJAZ's ideas secretly influenced later structuralist and narratological approaches.
The Moscow Linguistic Society (1915-1924), while sharing OPOJAZ's Formalist orientation, took a more linguistic and empirical approach to literary study. Centered around figures like Roman Jakobson and Grigory Vinokur, this group investigated the material properties of language - phonetics, grammar, and syntax - particularly in avant-garde poetry and futurist experiments. Their meetings became laboratories for analyzing how sound patterns and grammatical structures create poetic effects. Though short-lived due to political pressures, the Society served as a crucial bridge between literary analysis and linguistics, with Jakobson carrying its methods first to Prague and later to international structuralism.
The Prague Linguistic Circle (1926-1948) transformed Russian Formalist ideas into a sophisticated structuralist system after many scholars fled Soviet repression. Under Jakobson's leadership alongside Czech theorists like Jan Mukařovský, the Circle developed key concepts of aesthetic function, foregrounding, and the dynamic nature of literary norms. While maintaining close textual analysis, they expanded formalism's scope to examine how literature interacts with cultural systems and reader perception. The Prague School's synthesis of linguistics and poetics directly influenced French structuralism and became foundational for semiotics, narratology, and modern literary theory, ensuring formalism's survival and evolution beyond its Russian origins.
New Criticism vs Formalism:
While New Criticism and Russian Formalism both revolutionized 20th-century literary theory by focusing on close textual analysis, they developed in different contexts with distinct theoretical priorities. The Russian Formalists (1910s-1930s), including figures like Shklovsky and Jakobson, approached literature with scientific rigor, developing radical concepts like defamiliarization (ostranenie) and the fabula/syuzhet distinction to analyze how literary devices transform ordinary language into art. Their work was deeply theoretical, examining literature as an evolving system of techniques with its own autonomous laws.
In contrast, New Criticism (1930s-1960s), led by American scholars like Cleanth Brooks and W.K. Wimsatt, took a more practical, text-centered approach focused on interpreting individual works. While sharing the Formalists' rejection of biographical and historical context, New Critics emphasized organic unity, paradox, and ambiguity within self-contained works rather than literature's systemic evolution. Their famous "intentional fallacy" and "affective fallacy" doctrines reinforced textual autonomy but lacked the Formalists' revolutionary linguistic theories.
The two movements differed significantly in methodology, where Formalism sought to uncover universal literary mechanisms through technical analysis, New Criticism practiced close reading to reveal each text's unique complexity and aesthetic harmony. Both rejected extrinsic approaches, but while Formalism influenced structuralism and narratology through its scientific framework, New Criticism's legacy lies primarily in its enduring close reading techniques that still shape literary pedagogy today.
Defamiliarization and the Fabula/Syuzhet Distinction:
The concept of defamiliarization (ostranenie) stands as one of Russian Formalism's most enduring contributions to literary theory. Developed primarily by Viktor Shklovsky, this principle argues that art's essential function is to disrupt our habitual perception of the world by making familiar things seem strange. Through deliberate stylistic techniques - unusual metaphors, disrupted syntax, or unexpected perspectives - literature forces readers to experience reality anew rather than recognizing it automatically. Shklovsky famously demonstrated this using Tolstoy's works, where simple objects or actions were described as if seen for the first time, breaking through what he called the "automatization" of everyday experience. Tolstoy’s Kholstomer describes a horse’s perspective to defamiliarize human society. This theoretical lens explains why poetic language differs fundamentally from practical communication, as it actively works against our routine ways of seeing and understanding. In Wordsworth’s Daffodils, the idea of defamiliarization works wonderfully. Wordsworth offers unexpected scale, daffodils are not just flowers—they’re a "crowd," a "host" (terms usually used for people), and they "dance" (a human action given to plants). The speaker is described as a "lonely cloud"—an odd, inverted perspective (we expect clouds to be passive, not lonely). Wordsworth makes a common flower newly vivid by framing it as a living, almost supernatural spectacle.
Equally important is the Fabula and Syuzhet distinction. The fabula refers to the raw chronological events of a story - the "what happened" in its simplest form - while the syuzhet represents how those events are artistically arranged and presented to the reader. This separation allowed Formalists to analyze how narrative techniques like flashbacks, fragmented timelines, or unreliable narration transform basic story material into literary art. For instance, a crime novel's fabula might be "the detective solves the murder," but its syuzhet could withhold key information to create suspense. This analytical framework shifted focus from what stories mean to how they are constructed, influencing later structuralist narratology and providing tools still used in contemporary narrative theory.
So this is it for today. We will continue to discuss the literary theory and criticism. Please stay connected with the Discourse. Thanks and Regards!
No comments:
Post a Comment