Dr Alexandra Smith. Lecture notes on Formalism. 2020-21.

Source: https://literariness.org/2016/03/17/roman-jakobsons-contribution-to-russian-
formalism/
Source : https://literariness.org/2016/03/17/defamiliarization/

Source: https://www.slideshare.net/mraiyah/literary-criticism-ii-russian-formalism

Russian Formalism is a major school of literary criticism that lasted in Russia from 1915 till
1930. It comprised linguists, literary scholars and specialists in folklore. Following the 1917
Bolshevik revolution, in 1920, Roman Jakobson (1896-1982), one of the important members
of the group, emigrated to Prague where he founded the Prague Linguistic Circle that
influenced structural linguistics in Europe. He held several university positions, serving as
Professor at Masarykova University of Brno (1933-37); Professor at Columbia University in
New York (1943-49), and Professor of Slavic Linguistics and Literatures at Harvard
University (1949-67). The term “Formalism” is used as an umbrella form for several
theoretical trends but the main purpose of the movement was to develop literary study as an
independent discipline. Many Formalist ideas had influenced other subsequent movements,
including Structuralism and Semiotics.
Two main centres related to the movement appeared around the same time: Moscow
Linguistic Circle was founded in 1915, and Society for the Study of Poetic Language
(OPOIAZ) was launched in 1916. Emily Van Buskirk links the emergence of the movement
to the methodological crisis and the demise of positivism in the 1900s-1910s. She writes:
“The Formalists rebelled against the theories and scholarship practiced by academics and also
by Symbolist poets and philosophers. Competition from the academy was weak: literary
scholarship had largely become timid and eclectic, having entered a methodological crisis at
the turn of the century, when new speculative philosophies (such as those of Henri Bergson)
had cast doubt on positivist and determinist assumptions. Nevertheless, a few scholars stand
out as having strongly influenced the Formalists' development: Aleksandr Potebnia,
Aleksandr Veselovsky, and Gustav Shpet. Shpet was a disciple of Edmund Husserl, and
spread to the Moscow Linguistic Circle Husserl's idea that language was a product of social
interaction, which could not be explained in terms of individual psychological processes”
(Van Buskirk, Emily. "Russian Formalism". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04
December 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=979, accessed 18
January 2021.] Russian Formalists advocated the autonomy of literary criticism from
anthropology, sociology and history. Yet they incorporated some concepts from linguistics.
One of the important Formalist contributions to literary theory pertains to the function of
poetic language that differs from everyday life language. Lev Jakubinsky’s article “On
Sounds in Verse Language” suggests that sound and rhythm add a special value to the
reception of the poetic speech as opposed to the practical language of communication
performed on a daily basis. Other scholars wrote on the use of repetition in poetry and on
verbal orchestration in literary texts. Boris Eichenbaum (1886-1959) had written on skaz as a
narrative mode/device that informs writing with an illusion of orality. (See, for example,
“The Illusion of Skaz”, 1918). He has also contributed significantly to the analysis of self-
talk/inner speech in literary texts. In general, Russian Formalists made a distinction between
literary language and non-literary language. By analysing formal aspects of literary language,
they have established a concept of literariness. In their view, literary language is different
from practical language because it employs a range of devices that produce a defamiliarizing
effect. For example, you can compare these texts: the statement “London Bridge is falling
down. Do not come near it.” contains information, and it tells the person who reads this
message to be careful; in contrast one famous nursery rhyme creates a sense of novelty by
using repetition, rhythm, and rhymes. It says: “London Bridge is falling down, falling down,
falling down. London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady”. We could recognise that the
language used in the poem is a literary language.
In addition to the concept of literariness, Russian Formalists had developed a
principle of defamiliarization as a moving force in literary history/evolution. They also had
emphasised the importance of the function of literary devices. In his article “The Theory of
the Formal Method,” Eichenbaum explains that the Formalists had developed a critical view
of the idea that beauty is an external ideal. They promoted the view that any artefact is
created with the help of artistic devices and therefore its reception derives from the skilful
application of these devices. His article includes a quote from Roman Jakobson’s article. It
states: “The object of science of literature is not literature, but literariness – that which makes
a given work a work of literature” (Boris Eichenbaum. “The Theory of the Formal Method”,
in Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, eds. Russian Formalist Criticism:Four Essays, Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1965, pp. 868-884, p.870). Eichenbaum also defines literary
evolution “as the dialectical change of forms” (Eichenbaum 1965, p.882) and explains that
the Formalist promote the study of literature as “the problem of evolution without
personality” and “as a self-formed social phenomenon” (ibid., p.883).
Viktor Shklovsky’s seminal study (1917, 1919) “Art as Technique”, or “Art as
Device” promotes the view that poetry should not be seen as a special mode of thinking in
images (as was suggested by the Ukrainian scholar Alexander Potebnya). He states that
poetic language should be seen as something different from practical language. He thinks that
the goal of art is to “restore our sensation of life” that became habitualised and automatic. He
writes: “And so this thing we call art exists in order to restore the sensation of life, in order to
make us feel things, in order to make a stone stony. The goal of art is to create the sensation
of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things; the device of art is the ‘enstrangement’ of
things and the complication of the form, which increases the duration and complexity of
perception, as the process of perception is, in art, an end in itself and must be prolonged. Art
is the means to live through the making of a thing; what has been made does not matter in art.
The life of a poetic (artistic) text proceeds from seeing to recognizing, from poetry to prose,
from the concrete to the general […]”. He analyses several examples from Tolstoy’s fiction
and concludes that: “Tolstoy’s method of estrangement consists in not calling a thing or event
by its name but describing it as if seen for the first time, as if happening for the first time.
While doing so, he also avoids calling parts of this thing by their usual appellations; instead,
he names corresponding parts of other things”. (Viktor Shklovsky; Art, as Device. Poetics
Today, 1 September 2015; 36 (3): 151–174).
Tom Gunning summarises the influence of Russian Formalism in literary and films
studies thus: “Although formalism can have a variety of meanings and associations, I believe
the dominant ones in Film Studies relate directly to the Russian Formalists. The introduction
to the Lemon and Reis anthology relates the Russian movement to Anglo-American New
Criticism. I imagine there may be a strong similarity, but the key aspects of Russian
Formalism, such as the link to linguistics, the inspiration provided by avant-garde movements
such as Futurism, and, most important for defamiliarization (ostranenie), a strong theoretical
basis claiming a relation between literature and perception. These seem to me define a unique
tradition. The rediscovery of the Russian Formalists, of course, went far beyond Lemon and
Reis’s important, but slim, anthology originally published in 1965. With later translations and
publications, especially by Slavicists, our access to the original texts and informed
commentaries multiplied in the 1970 s and 1980 s. The larger context for the reception of the
Russian Formalists, such as the importance given to linguistics and semiotics, was partly due
to the influence of Structuralism – primarily French writers such as Levi- Strauss and Roland
Barthes, but also the Prague School, especially Roman Jakobson. All of these modernist
critical methods treated the cinema seriously, whereas I don’t believe cinema had been very
important to Anglo-American New Criticism. So, while the Formalist method goes far
beyond defamiliarization (ostranenie), texts by the Russian Formalists, and Shklovsky in
particular, played a key role in film studies in the ‘70 s and ‘80 s. The Neo- Formalists,
especially in key texts by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, emphasized this debt
explicitly”. (Annie van den Oever & Tom Gunning (2020). “Viktor Shklovsky’s Ostrannenie
and the ‘Hermeneutics of wonder’,” Early Popular Visual Culture, 18:1, pp. 15-28, p.16.)