THE FORMALIST APPROACH TO LITERATURE

Formalistic Approach, in a sense, is an approach to literature which

focuses on the formal features of literature. However, taken in the literal
sense too much could be an oversimplification and accordingly one would
miss out the main ideas behind ‘Formalism’ as a theoretical approach to
literature. Moreover, to use the term ‘Formalism’ alone is quite unsafe
because of its wide-encompassing connotation, which means, the term
could be used in various fields of study. Therefore, it is safer to call it
Russian Formalism which developed in the 1920s in Russia, and from
which ‘Formalism’ as a literary theory evolved. So, without simply
regarding Formalism as an Approach that studies the formal features of
literature, it is preferable to call it as an approach to literature following
the ideas and principles of the Russian Formalists.
The Russian Formalists originally includes two groups of scholars
and students – the Moscow Linguistic Circle (1915), and the Petersburg
OPOJAZ group (the Society for the Study of Poetic Language)[1916]. The
Moscow Linguistic Circle includes Roman Jakobson, Peter Bogatyrev, and
Grigory Vinokor besides others; and the Peterburg OPOJAZ group
includes Boris Eichenbaum, Victor Shklovsky and Yuri Tynyanov, among
others. In the 1930s the Soviets suppressed the movement, because of
which the centre moved to Czechoslovakia. There it was continued by
members of the Prague Linguistic Circle which included, among others,
Roman Jakobson, Jan Mukarovsky, and Rene Wellek. Moreover, beginning
in the 1940s both Jakobson and Rene Wellek continued the movement as
professors at American universities. In this way , the Russian Formalism,
since its inception, have varied practitioners and went on taking different
shapes, and developing different models. Even it came to be transformed
into New Formalism recently.

However, despite of its varied practitioners and models, the Russian

Formalism retains certain principles which make it quite fit to be a critical
theory and an Approach to literature, so to say. The main principle of the
Russian Formalists is to study literature for its own sake, i.e. to the
exclusion of its subject matter and social values. The Formalists sought to
place the study of literature on a scientific basis; and their investigation
concentrated on the functional role of the language and the technical
devices of literary works. Their main endeavour consisted in defining a set
of properties specific to poetic language, be it poetry or prose,
recognisable by their “artfulness” and consequently analysing them as
such.
Accordingly, the concepts of ‘literariness’, ‘foregrounding’,
‘defamiliarisation’ and fabula and sjuzhet are central to Formalistic
Approach. Roman Jakobson in 1921 wrote: “The object of study in literary
science is not literature but literariness,’ that is, what makes a given work
a literary work.” This implies that the Formalists are interested in the
study of the distinctive features of literature, which further implies that
the linguistics of literature differs from the linguistics of practical
discourse. As such, the Formalism views literature as a specialized use of
language, and differentiates between the literary or poetical use of
language and the ordinary or practical use of language. It proposes that
the central function of practical language is to communicate or transmit a
message or information to the auditors, by extrinsic references. On the
contrary, Formalism conceives literary language to be self-focused, in that
its function is not to convey message by extrinsic references, but to offer a
special mode of experience to the readers, by drawing attention to its own
‘formal’ features- that is to the qualities and internal relations of the
linguistic signs themselves.
According to Jan Mukarovsky, the literariness of a work consists “in
the maximum of foregrounding of the utterance”, that is, the
foregrounding of “the act of expression, the act of speech itself.” By
‘foregrounding’ is meant to give prominence to some features of a work.
The idea behind this concept is that the linguistic medium of literary
works is cover up by some formal features or literary devices which the
reader will uncover so as to get fresh sensation. The ‘foregrounded
properties’ or ‘artistic devices’, which are often described as ‘deviations’
from ordinary language primarily consists in setting up, and afterward
violating, patterns in the sound and syntax of poetic language- including
patterns in speech sounds, grammatical constructions, rhythm, rhyme,
and stanza forms- and also in setting up prominence recurrences of
keywords or images, metre, and alliteration. These formal features are not
regarded as supplementary adornments of the meaning of a work, but as
effecting the reorganisation of language on the semantic as well as the
phonic and syntactic levels.
The foregrounding of the utterance is achieved by the
defamiliarizing ability of the poetic language. Victor Shklovsky developed
the concept of defamiliarization in his famous essay ‘Art as
Technique’(1917). He wrote:
“And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life: it exists to make one
feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of
things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make
objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and the 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.”
His main idea is that in most activities perception becomes a
habitual, automatic process where we are often unaware of, or take for
granted our view of things and the relations between them. Poetic or
literary language could disturb this habitualization and make us see things
differently and anew. Shklovsky’s theory is helpful in understanding
experimental writing, like the modernist writing in that ‘modernism’
emphasize form rather than content. The poetry of Ezra Pound or T.S.
Eliot can certainly be said to have the defamiliarizing effect. So is the prose
fiction of James Joyce’s Ullysses(1922) or Franz Kafka’s
Metamorphosis(1916). Shklovsky, however, acknowledges that
defamiliarization effects will change over time so that one generation’s
defamiliarization will became the next generation’s habituation or norm.
Thus the Formalist Approach mainly is that literature ‘makes
strange’ the world of everyday perception and renews the reader’s lost
capacity for fresh sensation by way of foregrounding its linguistic medium
so as to disrupt the modes of everyday or ordinary linguistic discourse.
Significantly, Formalists have also made influential contribution to the
theory of prose fiction. Their thesis lies in the distinction between the
story and the plot by employing the terms- fabula and sjuzhet
respectively. Fabula refers to the simple enumeration of a chronological
sequence of events, whereas sjuzhet is the informing principle that gives
shape to the incidents and the story proper; it is the artistically ordered
narrative structure. In other words, if fabula strings together incidents,
sjuzhet organises the narrative and gives it shape. An author is said to
transform the raw material of a story into a literary plot by the use of a
variety of devices that violate sequence and that deform and defamiliarize
the story elements. The result or effect is to foreground the narrative
medium and devices themselves, and in this way to disrupt and refresh
and renew the sensation that remain unnoticed on the part of the reader
because of habitualization.
Although Russian Formalism is often likened to the American New
Criticism of the 1950s because of a similar emphasis on close critical
attention to the text, the Russian Formalists were, however, more
interested in method and a scientific approach. Russian Formalism
emphasised a differential definition of literature, as opposed to the New
Criticism’s isolation and objectification of the single text. They also
rejected the mimetic or expressive function of literature more strongly. The
New Criticism, while challenging some of the views of the traditional
orthodoxy, remained within the humanist problematic. Russian
Formalism moves away from the view of the text as reflecting an essential
unity which is ultimately one of the moral or humanistic significance. The
central focus of the Russian Formalists is not literature per se, but
literariness, that which makes a given work a literary work. Thus the
Formalists sought to uncover the system of the literary discourse, the
system that made literature possible. Their interests in texts centred on
the functioning of literary devices rather than on content.
Although there are strong opposition to Formalism, in both
European and American varieties- by some Marxist critics who view it as
the product of a reactionary ideology; and by proponents of Reader-
Response criticism, Speech-Act theory, and New Historicism which reject
the view that there is a sharp division between literary language and
ordinary language- however in the 1990s a number of critics call for a
return to the formalist mode of treating a literary work primarily as an
aesthetic entity instead of referring to the political, racial, or sexual issues.
Here, mention may be made of Frank Lentricchia’s “Last Will and
Testament of an Ex-literary critic” (Lingua Franca, Sept./Oct.1996) who
renounce his earlier writings and teachings “about literature as a political
instrument,” in favour of the view “that literature is pleasurable and
important, as literature, and not as an illustration of something else.”; and
also Harold Bloom’s advocacy of reading literature not to apply or confirm
a political or social theory but for the love of literature in The Western
Canon(1994).
This return to Formalism was at first primarily proposed as a
reaction against the New Historicism; but within a few years, what became
to be known as the New Formalism proposed a positive program,
undertaking to connect the formal aspects of literature to the historical,
political, and worldly concerns, in opposition to which the Formalist
movement had earlier defined itself. Some of the New Formalists argue
that the formal integrity of a work of art is what protects it against
‘ideology’, idealization and the routinizing effects of everyday experience;
while others emphasize that the perception of aesthetic or literary form is a
necessary condition of critical thought. Thus, whether the earlier one or
the new one, the Formalists’ concern is towards the ‘foregrounded
properties’ (formal features) of literature; in the ‘make strange’ or
‘defamiliarize’ function of literary language; in the literariness of literature
or in what makes literature a literature.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Rice Philip & Waugh Patricia ed., Modern Literary Theory: A Reader,
New York, Edward Arnold, 1992.
2. Webster Roger, Studying Literary Theory- An Introduction, London,
Arnold, 1990.
3. Lodge David ed., Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, London,
Longman, 1988.
4. Nagarajan M.S., English Literary Criticism and Theory: An Introductory
History, Hyderabad, Orient Blackswan, 2008, Reprint 2010.
5. Abrams M.H & Harpham Galt Geoffrey, A Handbook of Literary Terms,
India edition, New Delhi, Cengage Learning, 2009.