Formalism - Notes on the distinction between two formalist movements. PDF

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Notes on the distinction between two formalist movements....

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FORMALISM (S) Definition: An early 20th century movement which began to consider style, as well as substance, within literary works (the way it was written as well as what it was written about). Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text. Both critical movements of Russian Formalism and American New Criticism considered the proper object of literary study to be literary texts and how they worked rather than authors’ lives/ the social and historical worlds to which the literature reflects. There is a strong historical as well as methodological link between the two intellectual movements of Formalism and Structuralism.

RUSSIAN FORMALISM The first movement, led by a group of young scholars (Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Boris Tomashevsky, Boris Eichenbaum) influenced by philosophers of science [i.e. Edmund Husserl] to isolate objects of knowledge in their unmixed purity.

AMERICAN NEW CRITICISM The second movement, stemmed from idealist philosophers [i.e. Benedetto Croce] to develop a new aesthetics, or philosophy of art, which would rebut the claim of science that all truth is grounded in empirical facts knowable through scientific methods; art provides access to a different kind of truth, available only through connotative language i.e. metaphor, symbolism etc. Led by Cleanth Brooks, William K. Wimsett, John Literature would now be considered as something with specifically literary characteristics; it has a palpability of Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, who all agreed with the its own, rather than merely as a medium for philosophy, aesthetic philosophy that literature should be studied for sociology etc. The devices used by the author alone are the unique truths conveyed through literary language as what makes literature literary. opposed to practical language. Their most famous general claim = literary language The intentional fallacy: Meaning resides in the verbal consists of an act of defamiliarization; literature presents design of a literary work, not in statements regarding the things in an unusual perspective in unconventional/ self- authorial intention, made by the author. conscious language. The Formalists were interested in analysing literature The affective fallacy: The subjective effects/ emotional into its component parts and in describing its principle reactions a work provokes in readers are irrelevant to the devices and modes of operation. Two major genres = study of the verbal object itself, since its objective prose narrative [operations of narrative] and poetry structure alone contains the meaning of the work. [sound in verse]. Narrative literature in two major components = the Guided by values displaced by science i.e. Christian PLOT and the STORY. Techniques = point of view, theology and idealist aesthetics (aesthetics rooted in the delayed disclosure, narrative voice etc. From this belief universal truth is available through art that is not distinction between the plot and story, literary works can determined by material socio-historical circumstances). be studied for their narrative strategies rather than These values have receded across time and thus their simply their subject. continuing legacy is the value of close reading. Poetry = poetic language demands different disciplines/ The practical denotative language of science cannot name universal truths as it is limited to the naming of logic than practical language. The distinction between positive empirical facts that are only grasped by the the literary/ non-literary is more pronounced in this senses. The realm of universal meaning, however, is genre; devices/ motifs are foregrounded i.e. euphony, beyond sensory experience; it cannot be analysed using rhythm, alliteration, consonance, repetition, rhyme. scientific methods. It can only be alluded to indirectly Poetry is a distinct linguistic undertaking, a mode of language use with autonomous rules of operation which, through poetic language; American New Criticism is thus inseparable from a theory of universal meaning that unlike grammar, are not subordinated to a practical was a polemic response to modern positivist science. function. Poetry has no interest in ensuring language is as transparent as possible; poetic language is instead a contortion [Roman Jakobson called this ‘organized violence’]. Though they acknowledged literary disciplines, the Formalists agreed literature inevitably varies from one historical epoch to another as literary evolution is the result of the constant attempt to disrupt existing literary conventions and generate new ones; literary change is the result of the autonomous evolution of literary devices. This means they would argue against the premise that literature changes when the world changes

as, for literature to be literature, it must constantly defamiliarize the familiar, meaning changes are entirely autonomous of the social/ historical world. Roman Jakobson = the most influential of the Russian Formalists; he was also a linguist, part of the linguistic circles which inspired French Structuralism in the 40s/50s. The Russian Formalists’ work was suppressed by the Stalinist Govt in the 20s, but was borne West by East European emigres. The work of Mikhail Bakhtin, while it is historically at odds with the Formalists in its emphasis on the social/ideological features of literature, shares their concern with describing those formal elements that make a literary genre i.e. the novel, distinct from other literary forms. Scientific and Rational; seeking a value-free mode of critical description which would scientifically specify what it is about literature which is literary Concerned with elucidating the modes of operation of entire genres i.e. the novel

Anti-scientific and interested in the nonrational dimension of Art. Concentrated their energies on individual literary works i.e. a singular poem – CLOSE READING TO DISCERN CONCRETE UNIVERSALS. Poetry differs from practical speech in that it is connotative rather than denotive; it evokes secondary meanings, allowing its language to be both concrete/specific and universal/general. Poetry is thus a mode of RECONCILLIATION between otherwise opposing terms i.e. tropes such as metaphor join concrete objects to universal meaning

Russian Formalism and Defamiliarization This is a picture of Viktor Shklovsky, one of the main voices behind a way of thinking about literature that today is known as Russian Formalism. Russian Formalism emerged in the opening decades of the twentieth century as a reaction to the mystification of literature found in the influential pan-European arts movement of Symbolism. Whereas Symbolism thought of literature as a means to apprehend a universal truth – a truth that could only be revealed by looking sideways at the world in order to glimpse the (platonic) Ideal form that gave birth to all -, Russian Formalism thought of literature on an altogether more prosaic, scientific basis – that is, as a kind of machine that could be adequately analyzed by concentrating on language and the employ of formal literary device. For this reason, it is right to say that Russian Formalism was concerned more with the notion of literariness – what makes a text “literary” – than with the concept of literature itself. Indeed, this was the concern of Viktor Shklovsky’s critical work. In his wellread essay “Art as Technique” (which is also known as “Art as Device”), Shklovsky argues that literariness is simply the product of a particular use of language – it is our language of the everyday defamiliarized. That is to say, literariness is the result of working language so that it “makes strange” or interrupts our habituated or automatic perception of the word. By interrupting our automatic perception of the word in this way, the reader is forced to make extra effort in determining the meaning of the text and in so doing, Shklovsky argues, our wonder of the world is reenlivened. He puts it like this: “Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war … Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” (“Art as Technique”). So, the writer’s job is to recover “the sensation of life” – that is, to render the world unusual or unfamiliar to the extent that the reader experiences the world anew. To return to his own example, it is to make the reader experience the artfulness of the stone rather than simply regard the stone as object. If one could sum up

defamiliarization in a single sentence then, it might look something like this – defamiliarization is a technique by which the author can re-enliven the naturally inquisitive and literally awesome gaze of the child in the reader. Perhaps the most important implication of thinking of the literary in this way is that literature itself can never again settle down. Clearly, those literary devices which once unsettled the reader will at some point become naturalized, just as the repetition of an inspiring metaphor means that it will eventually become a worn cliché. If literariness is a product of “making strange” then literature will always have to search out new ways of defamiliarizing the reading experience. Understood like this, literary history becomes the domain of discontinuities and interruptions rather than the smooth “progression” that some of the more conservative critics would advocate.

Russian Formalism: A school of literary theory and analysis that emerged in Russia around 1915, devoting itself to the study of literariness, i.e. the sum of ‘devices’ that distinguish literary language from ordinary language. In reaction against the vagueness of previous literary theories, it attempted a scientific description of literature (especially poetry) as a special use of language with observable features. This meant deliberately disregarding the contents of literary works, and thus inviting strong disapproval from Marxist critics, for whom formalism was a term of reproach. With the consolidation of Stalin's dictatorship around 1929, Formalism was silenced as a heresy in the Soviet Union, and its centre of research migrated to the Prague School in the 1930s. Along with ‘literariness’, the most important concept of the school was that of defamiliarization: instead of seeing literature as a ‘reflection’ of the world, Victor Shklovsky and his Formalist followers saw it as a linguistic dislocation, or a ‘making strange’. In the period of Czech Formalism, Jan Mukařovský further refined this notion in terms of foregrounding. In their studies of narrative, the Formalists also clarified the distinction between plot (sjuzet) and story (fabula). Apart from Shklovsky and his associate Boris Eikhenbaum, the most prominent of the Russian Formalists was Roman Jakobson, who was active both in Moscow and in Prague before introducing Formalist theories to the United States (see function). A somewhat distinct Russian group is the ‘Bakhtin school’ comprising Mikhail Bakhtin, Pavlev Medvedev, and Valentin Voloshinov; these theorists combined elements of Formalism and Marxism in their accounts of verbal multi ‐accentuality and of the dialogic text. Rediscovered in the West in the 1960s, the work of the Russian Formalists has had an important influence on structuralist theories of literature, and on some of the more recent varieties of Marxist literary criticism. For a fuller account, consult Peter Steiner, Russian Formalism (1984).

THE FORMAL METHOD : BORIS EICHENBAUM, 1926 Polemicizing against the Symbolists, who believed literary form was the clothing of spiritual meaning, the formal critics countered that the primary motivating factor in literature is form itself, the techniques and devices an artist uses. The organization of the Formal method was governed by the principle that the study of literature should be made specific and concrete; the object of literary science ought to be the investigation of the specific properties of literary material which distinguishes such material. Roman Jakobson: ‘The object of study in literary science is not literature but “literariness”, that is, what makes a given work a literary work.’ The Principle of Specificity: Required the literary order of facts to be juxtaposed with a contiguous existent order [sharing common features] which would contrast with it in terms of function [poetic language vs. practical language]. This opposition served as the activating principle for the Formalists’ treatment of poetics. Rather than the literary scholars before them who had considered literature in relation to ‘environment, psychology, politics, philosophy’, the Formalists devised their own characteristic orientation toward linguistics. Lev Jakubinskij, ‘On Sounds in Verse Language’: The phenomena of language ought to be classified according to the purpose for which the speaker uses his language resources in any given instance. … practical language (discursive thought) … have no autonomous value and are merely a means of communication. … [there are] language systems in which the practical aim retreats to the background … and language resources acquire autonomous value.’ With this, the stage was set for a re-examination of Potebnja’s general theory with its basic assertion that poetry is ‘thinking in images’ (accepted by theorists of Symbolism); poetic language could now be thought of as autonomous

i.e. sounds in verse [onomatopoeia] exist outside any connection with imagery and have an independent speech function....