Russian Formalism

 

*Russian formalism was a school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s.

*It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Boris Tomashevsky, Grigory Gukovsky .

*These people revolutionised literary criticism between 1914 and the 1930s by establishing the specificity and autonomy of poetic language and literature.

*It developed in the structuralist and post-structuralist periods. Under Stalin it became a pejorative term for elitist art.

*Russian formalism was a diverse movement, producing no unified doctrine, and no consensus amongst its proponents on a central aim to their endeavours.

*"Russian Formalism" describes two distinct movements: the OPOJAZ (Obshchestvo Izucheniia Poeticheskogo Yazyka, Society for the Study of Poetic Language) in St. Petersburg and the Moscow Linguistic Circle. Therefore, it is more precise to refer to the "Russian Formalists", rather than to use the more encompassing and abstract term of "Formalism".

*The term "formalism" was first used by the adversaries of the movement, and as such it conveys a meaning explicitly rejected by the Formalists themselves. 

*one of the foremost Formalists, Boris Eichenbaum ,said that : "It is difficult to recall who coined this name, but it was not a very felicitous coinage". 

*Russian Formalism is the name now given to a mode of criticism which emerged from two different groups, The Moscow Linguistic Circle (1915) and the Opojaz group (1916). 

*Although Russian Formalism is often linked to American New Criticism because of their similar emphasis on close reading, the Russian Formalists regarded themselves as a developers of a science of criticism and are more interested in a discovery of systematic method for the analysis of poetic text.

*Russian formalism is distinctive for its emphasis on the functional role of literary devices and its original conception of literary history. Russian Formalists advocated a "scientific" method for studying poetic language, to the exclusion of traditional psychological and cultural-historical approaches.

*Two general principles underlie the Formalist study of literature: first, literature itself, or rather, those of its features that distinguish it from other human activities, must constitute the object of inquiry of literary theory; second, "literary facts" have to be prioritized over the metaphysical commitments of literary criticism,

*The formalists agreed on the autonomous nature of poetic language and its specificity as an object of study for literary criticism. 

*The OPOJAZ, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language group, headed by Viktor Shklovsky was primarily concerned with the Formal method and focused on technique and device. 

* "Literary works, according to this model, resemble machines: they are the result of an intentional human activity in which a specific skill transforms raw material into a complex mechanism suitable for a particular purpose"

*one of Viktor Shklovsky's early texts, "Art as Device" (Iskússtvo kak priyóm, 1916): art is a sum of literary and artistic devices that the artist manipulates to craft his work.

*Broadly speaking, literature was considered, on the one hand, to be a social or political product, whereby it was then interpreted in the tradition of the great critic Belinsky as an integral part of social and political history. On the other hand, literature was considered to be the personal expression of an author's world vision, expressed by means of images and symbols. 

*The aim of Shklovsky is therefore to isolate and define something specific to literature or "poetic language": these, as we saw, are the "devices" which make up the "artfulness" of literature.

*Shklovsky, however, insisted that not all artistic texts de-familiarize language, and that some of them achieve defamiliarization (ostranenie) by manipulating composition and narrative.

*The Formalist movement attempted to discriminate systematically between art and non-art.

*One of the most famous dichotomies introduced by the mechanistic Formalists is a distinction between story and plot, or fabula and "sjuzhet". 

*Story, (fabula), is a chronological sequence of events, whereas plot, (sjuzhet), can unfold in non-chronological order. The events can be artistically arranged by means of such devices as repetition, parallelism, gradation, and retardation.

*Shklovsky very soon realized that this model had to be expanded to embrace, for example, contemporaneous and diachronic literary traditions.

*Disappointed by the constraints of the mechanistic method some Russian Formalists adopted the organic model. "They utilized the similarity between organic bodies and literary phenomena in two different ways: as it applied to individual works and to literary genres".

*The analogy between biology and literary theory provided the frame of reference for genre studies and genre criticism. "

*The most widely known work carried out in this tradition is Vladimir Propp's "Morphology of the Folktale" (1928).

*The diachronic dimension (Story and plot) was incorporated into the work of the systemic Formalists. The main proponent of the "systemo-functional" model was Yury Tynyanov. 

* "In light of his concept of literary evolution as a struggle among competing elements, the method of parody, 'the dialectic play of devices,' become an important vehicle of change" 

*Even though the systemic Formalists incorporated the social dimension into literary theory and acknowledged the analogy between language and literature the figures of author and reader were pushed to the margins of this paradigm.

*The figures of author and reader were likewise downplayed by the linguistic Formalists Lev Jakubinsky and Roman Jakobson. The adherents of this model placed poetic language at the centre of their inquiry. 

*"Jakobson makes it clear that he rejects completely any notion of emotion as the touchstone of literature. For Jakobson, the emotional qualities of a literary work are secondary to and dependent on purely verbal, linguistic facts"

*As Ashima Shrawan explains - Practical language is used in day-to-day communication to convey information. . . . In poetic language, according to Lev Jakubinsky, 'the practical goal retreats into background and linguistic combinations acquire a value in themselves. When this happens, language becomes de-familiarized and utterances become poetic'" 

*This recourse to psychology threatened the ultimate goal of formalism to investigate literature in isolation.