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Literary Theory|| Lecture 4|| Russian Formalism

● Russian Formalism or East European Formalism is a school of literary criticism and

literary theory that originated in Moscow (Moscow Linguistic Circle) and St. Petersburg
(Opojaz) in the 1920s. Among the leading representatives of the movement were Boris
Eichenbaum, Victor Shklovsky, and Roman Jakobson.
●
● When this critical mode was suppressed by the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, the center
of the formalist study of literature moved to Czechoslovakia, where it was continued
especially by members of the Prague Linguistic Circle, which included Roman Jakobson,
Jan Mukarovsky, and René Wellek. A comprehensive and influential formalist essay is
Roman Jakobson’s “Linguistics and Poetics,” included in his Language in Literature
(1987). Russian Formalists emphasized the autonomous nature of literature, and insisted
that the proper study of literature lay neither in a reflection of the life of its author nor in
the historical or cultural milieu in which it was created. They believed that literature was
essentially a linguistic phenomenon, and placed literature at the centre, relegating all
related matters to the margin.
●
● They gave importance to the role of the metaphor and other linguistic devices. It is in this
sense that Russian Formalism can be seen as a forerunner to Structuralism. At first,
opponents of the movement applied the term “formalism” derogatorily, because of its focus
on the formal patterns and technical devices of literature to the exclusion of its subject
matter and social values; later, however, it became a neutral designation.

Literariness

● According to the Formalists human content in literature did not possess any significance in
defining what was ‘literary’ about the text. The formalists collapse the distinction between
form and content. They deliberately neglected the historical, sociological, biographical or
psychological dimension of literary discourse; the writer was of negligible importance too.
Explanations which base their arguments on the spirit, intuition, imagination or genius of
the poet were rejected. They propagated an intrinsic approach which regards a work of art
as an independent entity.
●
● A work of literature is related to all literature in general, and not to its author or his
personality. There is only poetry and literature, there are no poets or literary figures. The
object of literary science is ‘an authorless literariness.’ All the emphasis is on the
‘literariness’ of the formal devices of a text such as phonetic structures, rhythm, rhyme,
meter and other elements which contribute to deviations in language. Victor Shklovsky
summarises this attitude in his definition of literature as “the sum total of all the stylistic
devices employed in it.” He refuted the idea that literature is a social or political product.
Instead, literature is a personal expression of an author’s world vision expressed by means
of images and symbols. Art is a sum of literary and artistic devices that the artist
manipulates to craft his work.
●
● Formalism views literature primarily as a specialized mode of language, and proposes a
fundamental opposition between the literary (or poetical) use of language and the ordinary,
“practical” use of language. The central function of ordinary language is to communicate
a message or information, by references to the world existing outside of language. In
contrast, literary language is self-focused; its function is not to convey information by

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making extrinsic references, but to offer the reader a special mode of experience by
drawing attention to its own “formal” features—that is, to the qualities and internal
relations of the linguistic signs themselves that formalists call ‘literariness’. As Roman
Jakobson wrote in 1921: “The object of study in literary science is not literature but
‘literariness’ that is, what makes a given work a literary work.” And literariness is to be
studied by focusing on the artistic devices used in the work. Russian formalists use the term
‘deformation’ in a positive sense. It suggests the changes imposed on the material of the
poem, and the resultant effects. These include all the poetic devices and artistic instruments
which help in the creation of aesthetic effects.

Defamiliarization

● Art defamiliarizes things which have become habitual. Defamiliarization is the opposite
of automatization. The literariness of a work, as Jan Mukarovsky described it, consists “in
the maximum of foregrounding of the utterance”, that is, the foregrounding of “the act of
expression, the act of speech itself.” The referential aspect and the logical connections in
language is “backgrounded” in poetry. The primary aim of literature in thus foregrounding
its linguistic medium, as Victor Shklovsky put it, is to estrange or defamiliarize. That is,
by disrupting the modes of ordinary linguistic discourse, literature “makes strange” the
world of everyday perception and renews the reader’s lost capacity for fresh sensation.
Shklovsky’s concept of ‘Ostranenie’ or ‘defamilarization’ is the technique of art that makes
us see the strange aspects in the familiar and the unusual in the ordinary things of life. The
demands of ‘normal’ existence blunt our perception of things and they become to a great
extent ‘automatized.’ The purpose of a work of art is to change our mode of perception
from the automatic and practical to the artistic. In ‘Art as Technique’ (1917), Shklovsky
makes this clear: “The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms
difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of
perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing
the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.” Sometimes, the process of
perception is delayed or prolonged, which is called ‘retardation.’ The Formalists were
interested less in the perceptions themselves and more in the nature of the devices which
produced the effect of ‘defamiliarization’.
●
● In the “Biographia Literaria”, Coleridge had described the “prime merit” of a literary
genius to be the representation of “familiar objects” so as to evoke “freshness of sensation”;
but whereas the Romantic critic had stressed the author’s ability to express a fresh mode
of experiencing the world, the formalist stresses the function of purely literary devices to
produce the effect of freshness in the reader’s experience of a literary work. To the
formalists, what distinguishes a literary work from a non-literary work is not the subject
matter or content but the ‘mode of presentation.’ This emphasis on the actual process of
presentation is called ‘laying bare’ one’s technique.
●
● The foregrounded properties, or “artistic devices,” which estrange poetic language are
often described as “deviations” from ordinary language. They consist primarily in patterns
in the sound and syntax of poetic language, including patterns in speech sounds,
grammatical constructions, rhythm, rhyme, metre, alliteration and stanza forms. Prominent
recurrence of key words or images also constitutes ‘deviation’. These features of poetry
are not regarded as simple adornments of the meaning, but as a reorganization of language
on the semantic, phonic and syntactic levels. Shklovsky defined a work as a “sum total of
all stylistic devices employed in it.”

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Defamiliarization in Prose fiction:

● Formalists have also made influential contributions to the theory of prose fiction. With
respect to this genre, the central formalist distinction is that between the “story” (the simple
enumeration of a chronological sequence of events) and a plot. The Russian Formalists
stress that while ‘story’ (fabula) is merely the chronological sequence of events, the raw
material awaiting the organizing hand of the writer, plot (syuzhet) is the order of
presentation in the narration which is strictly literary. Fabula is the action itself, while
fabula is how the reader learns of the action. Syuzhet creates defamilarisation effect upon
fabula. The plot of “Tristram Shandy”, for instance, is not merely an arrangement of story-
incidents but also all the ‘devices’ used to interrupt and delay the narration. By frustrating
familiar plot arrangement, Sterne draws attention to plotting itself as a literary object.
●
● The writer of prose fiction uses his raw material, rearranges it and gives it a shape in such
a manner as to create a literary object out of it. The process involves not a direct,
chronological or literal representation of the material, but selection, concealment,
focalization, distancing and taking up different points of view, all of which go to create the
object. Wayne C. Booth, Tzvetan Todorov, Jakobson, Shklovsky and others have made
contributions to the analysis and understanding of prose fiction using these concepts. The
Formalists often linked plot with the notion of defamiliarization: the plot prevents us from
regarding the incidents as typical and familiar. An author transforms the raw material of
the story into a literary plot by the use of devices that violate the sequence, and deform and
defamiliarize the story elements; the effect is to foreground the narrative medium and
devices themselves, and in this way to disrupt and refresh what had been our standard
responses to the subject matter. The Formalists look upon a work’s ideas, themes and
references to reality as merely the external excuse required to justify the use of formal
devices. This dependence on external, non-literary assumptions is called ‘motivation’.
According to Shklovsky, “Tristram Shandy” is remarkable for being totally without
‘motivation’. The novel is entirely made up of formal devices which are ‘bared.’

Influence of Russian formalism

● Russian Formalism’s concepts of ‘defamilarization’ and ‘laying bare’ are notions which
influenced Bertolt Brecht’s famous ‘alienation effect.’ Like the Russian theoreticians,
Brecht was concerned with ways of demonstrating the artificiality of literary discourse. He
felt that to consider literature as a natural representation of reality would be deceitful and
politically regressive. He, therefore, rejected realism and embraced modernism. He
demanded that actors as well as the audience should maintain a critical distance from the
play. Therefore he brought in alienating elements to remind the spectators of the artificial
and illusory nature of a theatrical performance.
●
● The main influence of Russian and Czech formalism on Anglo-American criticism has
been on the development of stylistics, and of narratology. Roman Jakobson and Tzvetan
Todorov have been influential in introducing formalist concepts and methods into French
structuralism. This movement had its impact on other movements such as structuralism.

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Weaknesses

● There are many weaknesses in the Formalists’ theory of art. As Rene Wellek points out
they have chosen a technical, scientific approach to art that would dehumanize art, and
destroy criticism. The individual artist is ignored. The emphasis on form at the expense of
thematic content was not well received after the Russian Revolution of 1917. One of the
most sophisticated critiques of the formalist project was Leon Trotsky’s Literature and
Revolution (1924). Trotsky does not wholly dismiss the formalist approach, but insists that
the methods of formal analysis are necessary, but insufficient “because they neglect the
social world with which the human beings who write and read literature are bound up.”
Strong opposition to formalism, both in its Russian and American varieties, has been
voiced by some Marxist critics who called their ideology reactionary and attacked them for
ignoring the social dimension.
●
● The need to take into account the sociological dimension led to the writings of the ‘Bakhtin
School’ which draw on formalist and Marxist traditions. More recently, proponents of
reader-response criticism, speech-act theory, and new historicism reject the formalist view
that there is a sharp and definable division between ordinary language and literary
language. Julia Kristeva condemns the ‘mechanical idealism’ of the formalists.
●
● When Stalin came to power, official disapproval brought an end to the Movement in about
1930. Jakobson and Rene Wellek immigrated to the United States where they helped shape
the development of New Criticism during the 1940s and 1950s. Russian formalism got
absorbed in other systems of thought and lost its identity as a separate literary movement.
Towards the end of the last century, there was the return to formalism known as “new
formalism” which proposed a positive programme, undertaking to connect the formal
aspects of literature to the historical, political and worldly concerns in opposition to what
the formalist movement had earlier defined itself.

Sources:

1. Oxford Companion to Critical Theory

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