Russian Formalism PDF

Russian Formalism Russian Formalism is a literary school that originated in Russia, particularly in Moscow and St Petersburg, in the second decade of the 20th century. Moscow St. Petersburg  It moved to Prague in the late 1920s whe...

Russian Formalism Russian Formalism is a literary school that originated in Russia, particularly in Moscow and St Petersburg, in the second decade of the 20th century. Moscow St. Petersburg  It moved to Prague in the late 1920s when the movement suffered from the then repressive Russian regime. Following the Second World War, the school moved to France where it evolved into what is known as Structuralism. It was also in France where the counter movement known as Post Structuralism began to emerge.  Early Formalism: Like The New Criticism, its Anglo-Saxon counterpart which appeared about two decades later, Russian Formalism started out by focusing on form or the formal elements of literature, particularly poetry, hence the name Formalism. For the Russian Formalists, the purpose of art or literature is to enable us see the world in a new light and have a fresh view of all that has become familiar, through a process of defamiliarization. In this early phase, the Formalists focused on the aesthetic dimension while ignoring the moral and the social function of literature.  The Russian Formalists were mainly focused on the literariness of literary works, that is, the aspects that make a literary text different from a piece of journalism or a treatise on economics, for example. They were looking for the common factor shared by literary works, even while working on individual texts. Looking upon the study of literature as a science, the Formalists wanted to discover the general laws that govern this discipline, basically how defamiliarization is achieved. Defamiliarization (estrangement or ostranenie in Russian), a maxim promoted by Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) is the process of making that which has become familiar from over-exposure and / or overuse strange once again.  The Formalists decided that the literariness of poetry is due to defamiliarization. In other words, the literary language of poetry is different from everyday speech because of the defamiliarizing effects used, which in turn affects the reader’s perception. This literariness which distinguishes the language of poetry can be found in poetry’s technical devices. Some of those devices may be present in other linguistic forms, but in poetic language they are characterized by frequency and ambiguity. In poetry, those technical devices draw attention to themselves; they signal their difference, their artifice.  Roman Jakobson coined the term literariness in 1921 to show that what distinguishes poetry is how language deviates from everyday speech, emphasizing its own difference.  Poetry may employ devices used in ordinary language, such as metaphors, similes or symbolism; however, the language of poetry achieves its difference through ambiguity; i.e., the association of meaning. Remember that: The main focus for the Russian Formalists is language, how it departs from everyday language and draws attention to itself. For the Formalists, it is not what is said that matters; it is how it is said. The Formalists looked upon Literature as a science and as an autonomous discipline. Their goal was to discover the rules or laws that govern this literary science.  With the absence of some of poetry’s defamiliarizing devices in fiction such as rhyme and meter, for instance, the Formalists wanted to override those technical aspects that are peculiar to poetry and were quite difficult to apply on prose. Boris Tomashevski (1890-1957), in 1925, came up with a solution by arguing that the distinguishing factor in fiction lay in the presentation not in language. To make his point, he put forward the two concepts of fabula (a term initially introduced by Viktor Shklovsky) and syuzhet.  Fabula is the story as it is supposed to have actually happened, following a chronological order. Syuzhet is the plot, that is, how the story is told, how the events are narrated and rearranged or restructured, using such techniques as flashback, points of view and elements of suspense. It is the syuzhet that establishes the defamiliarizing effect in fiction. It draws attention to itself and it interferes with and manipulates the story’s chronology. There can be one fabula, from which springs many syuzhets, some more interesting than others.  Fabula is the raw Syuzhet is how the materials of the story story is organized The insight that one fabula can create many syuzhets inspired Vladimir Propp (1895-1970) to write his famous book Morphology of the Folktale (1928), whose approach clearly anticipates Structuralism.  Though not a Formalist, Propp builds his premise on arguing that a single fabula can produce a hundred syuzhets, or, put differently, that a hundred syuzhets can have one underlying story. So he set out to demonstrate that the hundred Russian tales he had selected were just presentations of the same basic fabula or story. This Propp proves by dividing the tales in terms of actors and functions. The Actors are characters that move the story forward. Characters may be various but still serve the same function such as acting as helpers, or as heroes or villains, etc. The individual character traits are of no importance.  What counts is their acts which derive from their functions. The functions are the acts or the events that the characters play put in the story, such as seeking help, the punishment of the villain, the happy ending, and so on. This actor / function approach enabled Propp to reduce the one hundred fairytales to a single fabula. The interrelatedness between the different characters and their clearly defined functions that recur in Propp’s selected tales clearly indicate an underlying structure. The tales are seen as systems in which the functions play an important role in the tales’ underlying structure. Russian Formalism Revisited: One basic rule in Russian Formalism is that, as Bertens states, “literariness is created by a defamiliarizing set of devices”. But, as the Formalists soon discovered that this rule can only work in certain contexts, they decided that defamiliarization can only be established through difference or contrast. The Formalists decided to examine familiarization and defamiliarization in both the literary text and within literature itself.  The Formalists then came up with an important principle: defamiliarization is not inherent in certain literary devices or techniques. It is how the device or technique functions in the literary work, how it stands out and differs from the rest of the elements that really matters. This means literary devices can be a familiarizing or defamiliarizing factor, depending on how they are used. For example, in a poem consisting of heroic couplets, having two unrhyming lines will have a defamiliarizing effect. In another poem of unrhyming lines, the presence of a heroic couplet will establish defamiliarization.  This view led to seeing the literary work as a system that creates its own defamiliarizing devices. Such a system works by difference or opposition. Extending this view to literature, the Formalists argued that defamiliarization is the driving force for the development and innovation in literary genres. Such innovations in technique in the field of literature can never be isolated from social changes – a point that the Formalists began to reconsider.  The Prague School: the Beginnings of Structuralism Prague: the capital of the present Czech Republic  In the 1920s, the Prague or Czech Formalists, led by Roman Jakobson, began to develop some of the earlier ideas of Formalism: They argued that the literary text is a structure in which all the elements are interrelated and interdependent and that all the work’s elements had a role to play in the text, not just the defamiliarizing devices. The Prague Group also developed the notion of function. For them, the text as a whole has a function; the text’s function is determined by its orientation. They saw that literary texts are oriented towards themselves.  In other words, the literary text is self-oriented, i.e., it focuses on its own form and its own literary code. They acknowledged that literature refers to itself (its form) as well as the outside world. However, they saw that this referential element, i.e., the outside world, has to be subservient to the poetic function. For the Prague Formalists, a text would not be a literary text if its orientation shifted from the text – specifically its form – to the outside world. The Prague School also replaced the concept of defamiliarization with the term foregrounding.  Foregrounding, with its structuralist orientation, sees the text as a structure of interrelated elements. Some of those elements are emphasized and foregrounded and the rest gets relegated to the background. However, the relationship among all the elements is one of dynamism, unlike the one of static difference that characterized defamiliarization. Source: Bertens, Hans. Literary Theory: The Basics. Second Edition. London: Taylor & Francis, 2008. Prepared by: Dr. Hala Zakariya Fall Term 2024 / 25