Russian Formalism

INTRODUCTION

The field of literary criticism has been moulded by various criticisms like Mimetic criticism,
Pragmatic criticism, Expressive criticism, Historical criticism, biographical criticism, Sociological
criticism, Psychological criticism and Archetypal criticism etc. It has a long history and was
started by Plato and Aristotle in the ancient Greek. They conceived ideas about the
phenomena of the world. And those ideas in course of time turned out to be literary theory
and criticism. Theoretical criticism proposes an explicit theory of literature, in the sense of
general principles, together with a set of terms, distinctions, and categories, to be applied to
identifying and analysing works of literature, as well as the criteria by which these works and
their writers are to be evaluated, as Abrams writes in his Glossary of Literary Terms. Literary
criticism is applied to various given texts. Literary theory is devoted to examining the
principles behind such practice.

In the twentieth century there emerged two very remarkable movements of literary theory
and criticisms which changed the scenario of literary criticism totally. These two brought new
styles of analysing and interpreting literary works. Both of them talked about the
independence of any literary work. The socio- historical, political, economic areas were kept
aside while the literary works were brought into consideration. The readers of the time,
especially the students were taught to look at literary texts applying these two approaches to
get better understanding of the literary work. Though emerged in two different nations, New
Criticism and Russian Formalism are linked in some ways. Both the theory and criticism are
found to be dealing with the ‘textual tradition’, where the language of the text is given the
basic importance. They say that literary works have their own independence and can stand

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alone. They are the assimilation of various literary devices; poetic devices in the case of
poetry.

This paper will try to show the emergence of these two movements as well as the influence
that they left in the scenario of literary criticism and theory and also it will show how poems
can be analysed and interpreted using this two approaches.

RUSSIAN FORMALISM

It is a type of literary theory and analysis which emerged in the second decade of the
twentieth century. As it was started in St. Petersburg and Moscow, henceforth the name
Russian Formalism. This movement includes some crucial names like Viktor Shklovsky, Boris
Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Jan Mukarovsky, Rene Wellek, Peter Bogatyrev, G. O. Vinokur,
Boris Tomashevsky, Osip Brik and Yuri Tynyanov. They were mainly linguists and historians and
forms two groups which are—

(a) Moscow Linguistic Circle, which was formed in 1915

(b) The OPOYAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language), formed in Petrogard in 1916

Formalism views literary works mainly as a specialised use of language and draws line of
distinction between the literary (or poetic) and the ordinary, “practical” use of language, as
M. H. Abrams writes in his book ‘A Glossary of Literary Terms.’ He also writes that this
literary movement proposes that the central function of ordinary language is to
communicate to auditors a message or information by references to the world existing
outside of language. But on the other hand, it conceives literary language to be self-focused
which means to offer the reader a special mode of experience by drawing attention to its
own “formal” features- that is, to the qualities and the internal relations of the linguistic
signs themselves. And this way they developed a reaction against the dominant intellectual
trends of Russia like- literary history, social criticism that focused on the message of a
literary work. Rather they advocate for the autonomy of a literary work, which according to
them doesn’t depend on the author’s social background; the author’s psyche isn’t
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important. The most important thing for the formalists is to find out the ‘literariness’ in it as
Roman Jakobson wrote in 1921: ‘The object of study in literary science is not literature but
‘literariness’, that is which makes a given work a literary work. The rejected the role of
intuition, imagination and genius in the production of a literary work. Rather, they say that
accumulating literary devices, a literary is produced. For them literary devices like –
ambiguity, metaphor, parallelism, imagery, personification, allusion, diction, paradox,
epigraph, foreshadowing, alliteration and euphemism etc., are the most important
elements of literary work. Here we can mention Shklovsky’s words “the literary work is the
sum total of literary devices.’
Russian Formalism invented two most important terms while analysing a work of literature
and they are – (a) Defamiliarization and (b) Foregrounding.
These two play very important role in the production of literary works according to the
formalists. Viktor Shklovsky is the main figure who talked about ‘defamiliarization’ in his
seminal book ‘Art as Technique (1917). The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Theory
says about defamiliarization (or ostrananie): “To defamiliarize is to make fresh, new, strange,
different what is familiar and known.” And this removes the automatism of the text delaying
the perception of the reader. Because according to Shklovsky the process of perception is an
aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.
Aktualisace is the Czech word for the English term ‘Foregrounding’ that denotes the use f
devices and techniques which push the act of expression into the foreground so that
language draws attention to itself. Foregrounding occurs especially in poetic language. The
Czech linguist Jan Mukarovsky (in his essay Standard language and Poetic Language)
observes: “The function of poetic language consists in the maximum foregrounding of the
utterance……it is not used in the services of communication, but in order to place in the
foreground the act of expression, the act of speech itself.’ In a sense, foregrounding is the
art which reveals art rather than concealing it.

THE USE OF RUSSIAN FORMALISM IN A LITERARY WORK

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Formalism can be used in analysing a literary text. Poetry and fiction can be discussed using
this theory. And we will find out the validity of the formalist ideas as already mentioned
above. Here we have taken a poem by American poet Emily Dickinson and we will try to
analyse the poem using Formalism. Let’s read the poem first:-

A Bird, came down the Walk

“A Bird, came down the Walk -

He did not know I saw -
He bit an Angle Worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,

And then, he drank a Dew

From a convenient Grass -
And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass -

He glanced with rapid eyes,

That hurried all abroad -
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought,
He stirred his Velvet Head. -

Like one in danger, Cautious,

I offered him a Crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers,
And rowed him softer Home -

Than Oars divide the Ocean,

Too silver for a seam,
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plashless as they swim.”

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 After going through the poem, we can find a ‘form’ or ‘structure’ underlying the whole
poem. There are five stanzas in this poem and each of them is consisted of four lines. Poetic
rhythm is prevalent in each stanza as we can find out the rhyming of words as we move
ahead with the poem. There can be found prominent recurrences of key words and images in
these five stanzas. The pronoun ‘He’ is used many a time throughout the whole poem to
mean the bird. An alliteration of the same word as Formalists would like to call it. It’s a
simple experience of seeing a bird but the ‘perception’ is prolonged through the use of words
in a peculiar manner. The activities of the bird are foregrounded in the poem and we, the
readers are given a special mode of experience. The most important thing is the words that
are used in this particular poem. First of all we find the ‘personification’ device in the form of
‘A Bird’ who is seen walking down the road. A bird in this poem is given the qualities of a
human being. He is met on the ‘Walk’ and this way the meeting is ‘defamiliarized’. The use of
‘Angle Worm’ is a poetic use of language as it is called ‘fellow’ which generally used to signify
a human being but here in the poem it has been used to mean the worm. Here in this very
first stanza we can find the rhythm of poetic language. The words ‘saw’ and ‘raw’ are used to
bring home the musicality of the lines. Next we can find the word ‘Dew’ which is personified
as it is written as ‘a Dew’ drunk by the bird that is performing his daily activities quite
rhythmically. An image of a convenient grass field is brought into focus, the very next
moment. Some words are found in capital letters to emphasise the meanings of those words.
Even a beetle is used in capital letter to signify the act of passing by the side of the bird. An
use of metaphor comes into focus when we read the line ‘They looked like frightened Beads,
I thought’, here the eyes are compared to the ‘beads’ which look frightening, a poetic use
word. Then we have the image of bird in ‘danger’, when birds become very ‘cautious’ as
shown in the fourth stanza of the poem. And in the last stanza we have the act of flying
compared to the ‘Oars’ which are used in rowing boats. This imagery brings into
consideration the flying of the bird. Then the bird is compared to the butterflies, used as a
metaphor of smooth flying in off banks noon. The device of personification continues here

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too in the words ‘Ocean’, ‘Butterflies’, ‘Banks’, ‘Oars’ and ‘Noon’ which bring the ‘literariness’
of the poem to focus according to the words of the Formalists.

NEW CRITICISM

The term was made prominent by John Crowe Ransom in his book The New Criticism
published in 1941. It refers to a kind of movement in literary criticism which developed in the
in the 1920s (for the most part Americans). Notable critics in this mode were the
Southerners, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, who’s textbook Understanding Poetry
(1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943) worked remarkably to make this criticism dominant
method of teaching literature in American Colleges. Other prominent critics of this
movement were- Allen Tate, W. K. Wimsatt, William Empson, Yvor Winters, R. P. Blackmur,
and Kenneth Burke. They advocated for the ‘autonomy’, of a literary text which can stand
alone according their point of view. For them the author is not important. The words of the
independent text are the most relevant thing of a reader. They wanted the readers to look
deep into the language of a text which is basically poetry in this case. Talking about New
Criticism, J. A. Cuddon in his book The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Theory
writes: “The New Critics advocated 'close reading ‘and ‘detailed textual analyses of poetry
rather than an interest in the mind and personality of the poet, sources, the history of ideas
and political and social implications.”

Principles of New Criticism

The first law of this criticism is that it shall be objective, shall cite the nature of the object
and shall recognize the autonomy of the work itself as existing for its own sake. In analysing
and evaluating a particular work, they avoid reference to the biography and temperament
and personal experiences of the author, to the social conditions at the time of its production,
or to its psychological and moral effects on the reader. For its focus on the literary work in
isolation from its attendant’s circumstances and effects, the New Criticism is often classified
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as a type of critical formalism. The formalistic approach adopted by the new critics implied
an awareness of form. Awareness of form is seen in –sensitivity to the words of the text;
denotative and connotative values and implications; awareness of multiple meanings. To get
the from and read in a formalistic way, we look at the overall structure, shape, interplay,
tone/mood, interrelationships, denotations and connotations, contexts, images,
symbols..etc, trying to discover what constitutes the uniqueness of the work.
The principles of the New Criticism are basically verbal. That conceives literature to be a
special kind of language whose attributes are defined by systematic opposition to the
language of science and of practical and logical discourse, and the explicative procedure is to
analyse the meanings and interactions of words, figures of speech, and symbols. The
emphasis is on the “organic unity” in a successful literary work, of its overall structure with
its verbal meanings.
The third principle is that the essential components of any literary work of literature,
whether lyric, narrative, or dramatic, are conceived to be words, images, and symbols rather
than character, thought, and plot. These linguistic elements, whatever the genre, are often
said to be organized around a central and humanly significant theme, and to manifest high
literary value to the degree that they manifest “tension”, “irony”, and “paradox”, in achieving
a “reconciliation of diverse impulses” or an “equilibrium of opposed forces”; that’s what
Abrams writes in his book “A Glossary of Literary Terms.”
The new critics distrusted paraphrase. Because it necessarily means the loss of the context,
of the experience of the poem, and hence of the poem’s full meaning. For the New Critics,
paraphrase was, as Brooks put it in The Well-Wrought Urn, a ‘heresy’. As well as the ‘heresy
of paraphrase’ there are two major textual approaches associated with New Criticism. These
are the ‘intentional fallacy’ and ‘affective fallacy’. Both were developed in essays published in
1946 and 1949 by Wimsatt in collaboration with Monroe Beardsley, and were collected in
The Verbal Icon. Intentional fallacy signifies what is claimed to be the error of interpreting
and evaluating a literary work by reference to evidence, outside the text itself, for the
intention- the design and purposes- of its author. And on the other hand, affective fallacy

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signifies confusion between the poem and the results (what it is and what it does)’. It’s the
error of evaluating a poem by its effects –especially its emotional effects –upon the reader.
As a result of this fallacy “the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgement, tends
to disappear,” so that criticism “ends in impressionism and relativism.”

Applying New Criticism in Hopkin’s The Windhover

The Windhover

To Christ Our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-

dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

We can find from the title of the poem that, it’s a religious poem dedicated to Christ. It is a
usual Hopkinsian sonnet that begins with description of nature and ends in meditation about
God and Christ and his beauty, greatness and grace. The poem also uses his usual “sprung
rhythm”, Anglo-Saxon diction, alliteration, internal rhyming, new compound metaphors,

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elliptical grammar and complex threads of connotation. The title of the poem may refer to
Christ himself because it’s him who has created everything in the world according to the
poet. The bird, an image of the Christ himself has been given various names in the first few
lines of the poem- “morning’s minion”, “daylight’s dauphin”, “dapple-dawn-drawn-Falcon” to
attract the reader’s attention to the language itself. It’s a poetic use of words by the poet.
Then we can find the bird referred to as “he”, “his”, “him” that shows how a simple bird is
given all the mighty qualities of a God.

The opening of the sestet serves as both a further elaboration on the bird’s movement and
an injunction to the poet’s own heart. The “beauty,” “valour,” and “act” (like “air,” “pride,”
and “plume”) “here buckle.” “Buckle” is the verb here; it denotes either a fastening (like the
buckling of a belt), a coming together of these different parts of a creature’s being, or an
acquiescent collapse (like the “buckling” of the knees), in which all parts subordinate
themselves into some larger purpose or cause. In either case, unification takes place. At the
moment of this integration, a glorious fire issues forth, of the same order as the glory of
Christ’s life and crucifixion, though not as grand. The confusing grammatical structures and
sentence order in this sonnet contribute to its difficulty, but they also represent a masterful
use of language. Hopkins blends and confuses adjectives, verbs, and subjects in order to echo
his theme of smooth merging: the bird’s perfect immersion in the air, and the fact that his
self and his action are inseparable. Also need to note  how important the “-ing” ending is to
the poem’s rhyme scheme; it occurs in verbs, adjectives, and nouns, linking the different
parts of the sentences together in an intense unity. A great number of verbs are packed into
a short space of lines, as Hopkins tries to nail down with as much descriptive precision as
possible the exact character of the bird’s motion which is compared to a skate’s heel.

The horse-and-rider metaphor with which Hopkins depicts the windhover’s motion now give
way to the phrase “my chevalier”—a traditional Medieval image of Christ as a knight on
horseback, to which the poem’s subtitle (or dedication) gives the reader a clue. The
transition between octave and sestet comes with the statement in lines 9-11 that the natural

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(“brute”) beauty of the bird in flight is but a spark in comparison with the glory of Christ,
whose grandeur and spiritual power are “a billion times told lovelier, more dangerous.” The
last stanza associatively brings together unrelated words, each telling something about Christ
and his suffering and sacrifice for human beings. Hopkins uses this image so as to relate the
concept back to the Crucifixion: The verb “gash” (which doubles for “gush”) suggests the
wounding of Christ’s body and the shedding of his “gold-vermilion” blood.

Comparison between New Criticism and Russian Formalism

Both the approaches advocate for the special use of language in literary works. The literary
language is different from non-literary language according to them. Literary languages use
various literary devices to attract the reader’s attention to itself. The author’s role is
irrelevant for both the approaches. The language of the text is all that readers need to be
mindful of. Works of literature have been created following some forms. Consciously or
unconsciously the author follows that form. For that, formalistic point of view can be applied
to both of these movements of literary criticism and theory which originated in two different
countries. But still we can find some underlying links between the two. The readers are given
the most important roles to play in analysing and interpreting literary works while the author
or the creator of that particular work is kept aside or considered “dead”, to use Roland
Barthes term. Rather ‘close-reading’ and ‘detailed textual analysis’ are applied while literary
texts are studied. Structure and form are what need to be considered; the content is not
important for the readers to understand the text. The author’s emotion and intention are
pushed to the background, while foregrounding the literariness of the text as Jakobson
writes his seminal books about it. The formalist’s use of some new terms in their theories of
analysing the literary texts-like ‘defamiliarization’ of Shklovsky and ‘Foregrounding’ of
Mukarovsky brought sea changes to the world of criticism. By the term ‘defamiliarization’
Shklovsky means that literary language uses devices like metaphor and imagery, to make
familiar things unfamiliar. This way the readers are made to ponder over the implications of
the text.

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But New Criticisms on the other hand, only advocates for the connotative meanings of words
in poetry which is the main area of this criticism unlike Russian Formalism which can be
applied to fiction as well. New Criticism doesn’t differentiate between form and content but
Formalism does differentiate. Elemental units of analysis for the New Critics are the icons
(images) but for the Formalists they are the motifs and other devices. Unlike Russian
Formalists, New Critics value the ambiguity, paradox, irony, and intention in literature. The
new critics have pointed out two types of fallacies as already mentioned- affective and
intentional fallacy, among the readers- who sometimes become the victims of these two
errors. That’s why poetry shouldn’t be interpreted from the emotional effects of the reader
or the author’s intention of writing it. Rather the literary texts should be studied in isolation
and independently of all these. And Formalism supports this proposition too as the formalists
say that literary works are produced culminating various literary devices only, whereas the
author is pushed aside.

CONCLUSION

These two movements had tremendous impact on the readers of the time. Because they
were disillusioned by the World War I, so they needed aesthetic pleasure in literary works
and make their lives happier. That’s why it happened in the south of America among the New
Critics who taught the undergraduate students to read poetry from a new critics’ point of
view. Russian Formalism which was already in eminence when New Criticism arose had the
same ideology but they couldn’t survive. Stalinism dominated the Formalists. Moreover they
were criticised for being too linguistic. They neglected the socio-historical background in the
production of literary works. In reality, what we find is that every work of literature is the
product of its time; no doubt the authors recreate that reality using language in a peculiar
manner. That deautomatizes the perception of things among the readers of this world, to use
Formalistic term. We have already discussed illustrating two poems how simple things are
defamiliarized and that way the perception of the reader is prolonged as Shklovsky writes in
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Art as Technique (1917). We have also found how metaphors and images are used to create
the language in a literary work. The tension of Hopkin’s poem can be mentioned here
because that’s how the readers of the poem are placed in situation of conflicting thoughts.

In terms of the development of critical theory, the influence and legacy of New Criticism have
been mixed, and at times problematic. Its assumption of a bounded text as the focus of
critical study was detrimental to the development of intertextual criticism and reader-
response criticism but we must agree to the fact that this very criticism led to the
development of Structuralism and Post-structuralism of the later part of the twentieth
century.

References:

Tyson, Lois, Critical Theory Today, (Rutledge, 2006)

Waugh, Patricia, Literary Theory and Criticism, (Oxford University Press, 2006)

Abrams, M. H. & Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 10th edition (Cengage
Learning India Pvt Limited, 2012)

Cuddon, J. A. & Habib, M. A. R., Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory,
(Penguin Reference Library)

Barthes, Roland, The Death of the Author, 1967

Dickinson, Emily, A Bird Came Down the Walk

Hopkins, G. M., The Windhover

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