Russian Formalism Summary

• Russian Formalism was a literary criticism and interpretation movement in Russia from the 1910s to 1930.
• It emphasized literature's autonomous nature.
• Formalists believed literature should not be studied as a reflection of the author's life, or as a product of the historical or cultural environment in which it was created.
• Formalists tried to define poetic language's properties and study how aesthetic devices determined an object's literariness.
• The movement had two groups: The Moscow Linguistic Circle, which was founded in 1915 by Roman Jakobson, and the Petersburg OPOJAZ, which was established a year later.
• The term "formalist" was initially used negatively towards the Moscow Linguistic Circle and OPOJAZ.
• Despite disagreements, Formalists aimed to move beyond the psychologism and biographism in 19th-century Russian literary scholarship.
• The Symbolists had partially succeeded in redressing the imbalance of content over form, but they "could not rid themselves of the notorious theory of the 'harmony of form and content' even though it clearly contradicted their bent for formal experimentation and discredited it by making it seem mere 'aestheticism.'"
• Aleksandr Veselovskii and Aleksander Potebnia were two leading 19th-century literary and linguistic theoreticians whom the Formalists remained indebted to.
• The Formalists were attracted to Veselovskii's work in comparative literature and folklore studies, as well as in the theory of literary evolution.
• Potebnia made a distinction between practical and poetic language like the Formalists.
• Shklovsky rejected Potebnia's idea that "art is thinking in images".
• Shklovsky argued the techniques poets use to arrange images were more important given the same image appears across various works.
• Shklovsky noted images are common in both everyday and poetic language, so images are not unique or essential to verbal art.
• Formalists pursued "literariness," instead of image or referent, in poetry and prose studies.
• Literariness was an essential function in the relationship/system of poetic works called literature.
• Volumes of essays came from the cooperation of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and OPOJAZ (Sborniki po teorii poeticheskogo iazyka).
• Given that many of the Formalists had been students of the Polish linguist Jan Baudoin de Courtenay and were well apprised of the latest developments made in linguistics by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, it is not surprising that most of the essays in these volumes reflect a predominant interest in linguistics.
• Members of the Moscow Linguistic Circle considered poetics as part of linguistics, while OPOJAZ Formalists insisted they be distinct.
• Shklovsky was concerned with literary theory instead of linguistics, while Eikhenbaum and Tynianov are known as literary historians.
• Tomashevskii and Jakobson used statistics to approach meter and rhythm in verse and attempted to isolate metrical laws.
• Formalists viewed poetic language as synchronic and autonomous.
• Formalists stressed the poetic work's internal mechanics over extraliterary systems like politics, ideology, economics, and psychology.
• Roman Jakobson's 1921 analysis of futurist poet Velemir Khlebnikov and the concept of "self-made word" illustrate that poetry is an utterance directed toward "expression".
• The futurist exploration of zaum parallels the Formalist focus on sound in poetic language at the phonemic level.
• Eikhenbaum's "How Gogol's 'Overcoat' Is Made" (1919) examines narrative devices and acoustic wordplay in the text and emphasizes verbal art's self-referential nature without sociocultural conclusions.
• Skaz (from Russian verb "to tell") is comparable to "free indirect discourse," marked by third-person narration's grammar and the tone/syntax of direct speech from the character.
• Zhirmunskii was interested in the thematic level, while Tynianov considered understanding byt (everyday language/experience) essential for poetic analysis.
• Formalists tended to downplay the issue of form versus content.
• Eikhenbaum wanted to "destroy these traditional correlatives [form and content] and so to enrich the idea of form with new significance".
• Eikhenbaum said "technique" is "much more significant in the long-range evolution of formalism than is the notion of 'form'".
• Shklovsky explained "a new form appears not in order to express a new content, but in order to replace an old form, which has already lost its artistic value".
• Rejecting subjectivism in 19th-century literary scholarship, Formalists wanted a scientific, objective methodology for studying literature.

Scientific Study of Poetic Language

• May be traced to the 19th-century West European trend toward classification, genealogy, and evolution in human sciences.
• Propp used rhetoric/methodology from Goethe and Cuvier to isolate recurring folktale features in Morphology of the Folktale (1928).
• Viewed as a direct challenge to the subjectivism/mysticism in the Symbolist movement.
• Sought to create a professional discipline independent of 19th-century university scholarship.
• Response to social, economic, and political transformations caused by industry and new technology in Russia during the early 20th-century.
• Shklovsky used the machine metaphor and rhetoric of technology to account for poetic devices and formal laws like automatization and defamiliarization.
• Objectives of scientificity in Formalist literary study were held up as an ideal, but only insofar as the Formalists believed scientificity would shield their theory from external influences, since everything outside the poetic system could only corrupt and obfuscate data extrapolated from the text.

Defamiliarization

• Shklovsky believed "literariness" is a function of it.
• It involves "estranging," "slowing down," or "prolonging" perception.
• Impedes the reader's habitual, automatic relation to objects, situations, and poetic form.
• The difficulty of the process is an aesthetic end because it provides a heightened sensation of life.
• "Laying bare" the poetic device is a primary sign of artistic self-consciousness.
• New literary production involves deliberate deviations from poetic norms of the preceding genre or literary movement.

Poetic Text

• Tynianov's and Jakobson's notion of the "dominant" approximates Shklovsky's emphasis on defamiliarization, albeit as a feature of the diachronic system.
• Other devices are "transformed" or pushed to the background for "foregrounding" of the dominant device.
• The function of the dominant in the service of literary evolution included the replacement of canonical forms and genres by new forms.
• The function of the dominant in the service of literary evolution included the replacement of canonical forms and genres by new forms, which in turn would become canonized and, likewise, replaced by still newer forms.
• The synchronic nature of poetic devices was gradually mediated by considering literature and language within diachronic contexts.
• Tynianov's works shifted toward systemic relations between the internal and external organization of the poetic work.

Criticism

• Newly emerging literary groups such as the Bakhtin Linguistic Circle and Prague School of Structuralism found the Formalists' attempts to incorporate a diachronic view of the literary work insufficient.
• The Formalists were attacked for refusing to address social and ideological concerns in poetic language.
• The Soviet state criticized them for neglecting social and ideological discourses impacting the poetic work's structure and function.
• Medvedev dismissed the Formalists for failing to provide sociological and philosophical justification in The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928).
• Russian Formalism remained committed to "literariness" as the focus of literary scholarship vs. the referent.
• Debates over what constitutes Formalism arise from its "dialogic" nature.
• The Formalists based their theories of literary evolution largely upon Hegel's dialectical method.
• Eikhenbaum concluded the formal method would end if there was a ready-made theory explaining all past and future events.
• Shklovsky's 1930 denunciation signaled the end of the Formalist movement as political pressures worsened.
• The Moscow Linguistic Circle and OPOJAZ dissolved in the early 1920s.
• After the banning of all artistic organizations and the introduction of "socialist realism" in 1932, the Russian Formalist movement officially closed.
• The Formalist approach influenced European and American literary scholarship.
• The Prague Linguistic Circle and the Bakhtin Linguistic Circle were immediate heirs to the Formalist legacy.

Legacy

• The Prague Linguistic Circle influenced French structuralism.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology echoes Propp's work.
• The Bakhtin Linguistic Circle extended Formalist concerns dealing with narrative theory/discourse in the novel.
• Structural-semiotic research and the emergence of the Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School extended the aims/interests of both formalism and structuralism.
• Semiotic research renews the Formalist emphasis on how language devices generate meaning as sign systems.
• New Criticism in the United States, emphasized the literary text as a discrete entity.
• Poststructuralism (and Deconstruction) in the 1970s and 1980s extended certain Formalist assumptions.
• Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Juia Kristeva, and Fredric Jameson are indebted to Russian Formalism's aims/strategies.

Summary of Russian Formalism, covering its history, key figures, and concepts like defamiliarization. It highlights important works and misconceptions about the movement's focus and internal consistency, and external influences.