Russian Formalism

Introduction to Russian Formalism and its Influence on Literary Studies

• Russian Formalism is a literary theory that emphasizes the importance of form in literature.
• It developed a method to identify the literary characteristics in different texts, with a focus on literariness.
• Literariness refers to the capacity of a text to be considered literature, and all literary texts need to have it.
• Before Russian Formalism, scholars studied texts based on biography, history, and sociology.
• Russian Formalism dismisses extratextual approaches and focuses on the specific qualities of the literary work.
• Defamiliarization is a key concept in Russian Formalism, which creates linguistic complexity to be understood and challenges automated perception.
• The narrative concept of function, developed by Vladimir Propp, is an important aspect of Russian Formalism.
• Propp identified 31 functions and 7 types of characters in folk tales, and a function is an act of character defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action.
• Russian Formalism has influenced many literary schools, including Stylistics, New Criticism, and Structuralism.
• Literary Stylistics, a school derived from linguistic Stylistics, studies language as artistic creation and literary language as an individual creation.
• Stylistics analysis starts from linguistic detail and connects to the psyche of the creator.
• Russian Formalism is considered to be the initiator of contemporary literary theory and arose during WWI with scholars such as Shklovski, Tomashevski, Tiniánov, Eichenbaum, Propp, and Jakobson.