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FORMALISM 315 Comprehension of Literal Language

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FORMALISM 315 Comprehension of Literal Language FORMALISM 315 comprehension of literal language. Yet, in Jakobson, R. and M. Halle, eds. (1956), arguing against the principled distinction Fundamentals of Language. between literal and figurative language, and Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson (1980), Metaphors We against the primacy of the former, I have Live B. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson (1999), Philosophy in the repeatedly referred to the notions of literal Flesh. and figurative meaning. This should not be Lausberg, H. (1998), Handbook of Literary Rhetoric, taken as a contradiction. The distinction trans. M.T. Bliss, A. Jansen, and D.E. Orton; ed. between literal and figurative is still useful D.E. Orton and R.D. Anderson. when recognized as context-dependent and Ortony, A., ed. (1993), Metaphor and Thought, functional, rather than absolute. It simply 2nd ed. indicates a difference in the manner of use: Searle, J. (1993), “Metaphor,” in Ortony. Semino, E. and J. Culpeper, eds. (2002), Cognitive often what is classified as a figurative expres- Stylistics. sion is more automatic and salient than a Shen, Y. (1997), “Cognitive Constraints on Poetic literal one. Figurative language, as all lan- Figures,” Cognitive Linguistics 8:33–71. guage, appears forever poised between the Shen, Y. (2007), “Foregrounding in Poetic wager of novelty and comprehensibility. As Discourse,” Language and Literature 16:169–81. this entry attests, intensive multidisciplinary Sperber, D. and D. Wilson (1995), Relevance, 2nd research since the 1970s has accumulated ed. convincing evidence that figurative language Steen, G.J. (2007), Finding Metaphor in Grammar and Usage. is best described as a vital and unique aspect Sweetser, E. (1990), From Etymology to Pragmatics. of how human beings reason about their worlds. As creativity and conventionality are the indispensable poles of that thinking pro- cess, it is easy to see how and why figurality First Novel, The see Definitions of the Novel partakes of both. Focalization see Narration; Narrative Technique Formal Realism see History of the Novel BIBLIOGRAPHY Black, M. (1979), “More about Metaphor,” in Formalism Ortony. DEVIN FORE Cohen, J. (1979), “The Semantics of Metaphor,” in Ortony. The Russian formalists were an eclectic con- Fauconnier, G. and M. Turner (2002), Way We stellation of figures from a variety of fields, Think. including literary criticism, LINGUISTICS, phi- Forceville, C. and E. Urios-Aparisi, eds. (2009), Multimodal Metaphor. lology, and ethnology who from 1915 Gibbs, R.W., Jr. (1994), Poetics of Mind. through 1930 produced a diverse corpus of Gibbs, R.W., Jr. (2000), “Making Good Psychology scholarship on aesthetic form and cultural out of Blending Theory,” Cognitive Linguistics 11: value. Although their principal objects of 347–358. study were literary texts, the formalists also Gibbs, R.W., Jr., ed. (2008), Cambridge Handbook of wrote on other modes of cultural expression Metaphor and Thought. such as film, oratory, JOURNALISM, and LIFE Gibbs, R.W., Jr. and J. O’Brien (1990), “Idioms and WRITING. Mental Imagery,” Cognition 36:35–68. Jakobson, R. (1956), “Two Aspects of Language and The two centers of formalist activity were Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in OPOIaZ, the Petersburg Society for the Jakobson and Halle. Study of Poetic Language (founded 1916), (c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 316 FORMALISM and the Moscow Linguistic Circle (or MLK, project to identify the immanent laws of the founded 1915). While OPOIaZ comprised aesthetic object required isolating the dis- chiefly literary historians—Viktor Shklovsky tinctive features of the given artwork from (1893–1984), Boris Eikhenbaum (1886– those of all other forms of cultural produc- 1959), Osip Brik (1888–1945), and Boris tion. Thus, the first move of any formalist Tomashevsky (1890–1957)—and conse- analysis is to establish the inherent structural quently had a more empirical orientation qualities of the medium under consider- than their Moscow counterparts, at the core ation. On the one hand such autonomiza- of the MLK was a group of linguists— tion did much to define the study of art on its Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) and Grigor- own terms; on the other, the isolation of the ii Vinokur (1896–1947)—whose interest in work of art from other factors tended, at language led them to poetry and literature formalism’s most extravagant polemical as privileged discourses for theorizing gen- moments, to absolutize the aesthetic object eral processes of signification. The diversity as an autotelic value. of their approaches notwithstanding, a While their emphasis on the materiality symbiosisbetweenthetwogroupsemerged, of the signifier prompted accusations that givingrise to a shared program that remains the formalists ignored the ideological and a methodological exemplum of rigorous, semantic dimensions of the work of art, it is immanent literary criticism. For the most not true that they neglected the content or part, the theoriesof the formalists remained meaning of the aesthetic work. On the closelyboundtotheformsof contemporary contrary, their contributions enlarge the avant-gardeliterature that constituted both ambit of semantic analysis by addressing the context and object of their investiga- somatic and perceptual dimensions of the tions (e.g., Futurist poetry, experimental poetic text (e.g., rhythmic, intonational, prose, factography; see SURREALISM). As a and phonic elements) that are otherwise result, it becomes difficult to separate the neglected by traditional methods of literary critical project of the formalists from a hermeneutics. general poetics of MODERNISM. DEVICES OF DEFAMILIARIZATION MEDIUM SPECIFICITY AND THE AND TRANSFORMATION MATERIALITY OF ART In his programmatic text from 1917, “Art as Formalist inquiry was initially motivated by Device,” Shklovsky declared that art’s vo- the desire to specify literature by scientific cation was to combat the natural human means. Reacting against contemporary tendency toward the automatization of per- methods of literary analysis, an unsystematic ception (in Lemon and Reis). Shklovsky admixture of psychobiographical narrative, identified ostranenie (“defamiliarization”) sociological determinism, and philosophical as a technique for restoring the vividness speculation, the formalists investigated the and tangibility of everyday experiences that autonomous laws and components of liter- otherwise fall below the threshold of con- ary systems. In Jakobson’s famous words, sciousness: through distortion and exagger- “The object of study in literary science is not ation, defamiliarization draws attention to literature but ‘literariness’ [literaturnost], the construction and conventionality of the that is, what makes a given work a literary work and increases the reader or auditor’s work” (1921, “On Realism in Art”). This awareness of the material support of the (c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved. FORMALISM 317 aesthetic object. Rather than looking thetic) device. The formalists initially artic- through a defamiliarized text or object, the ulated the latter binary as the difference reader is thereby prompted to look at it, to between practical and poetic language, be- contemplate the raw stuff, or facture, of the tween the communicative language of quo- work itself. In Shklovsky’s famous phrasing, tidian life and this language in its trans- defamiliarization makes the stone stony formed and defamiliarized state. In their once again. studies of narrative forms, specifically, this The formalists defined the aesthetic priem difference was reformulated as the distinc- (“device”) as a mechanism for defamiliariz- tion between the fabula—the “story,” or ing habituated perception, and the artwork, pre-literary found material—and the siuz- by extension, as the sum of these devices. It het, or “plot,” which was conceived as the is important to note that the formalists sum of all of the deviations from this orig- conceived of the “device” not substantively, inal material, for example in the transfor- but operationally. For them, the “device” mation and repetition of motifs or the re- was not a static, hypostatizable thing, but a tardation or diversion of the expected dynamic activity. (Priem can also be trans- course of the narrative. For this reason, lated as “method” or “technique.”) Pavel Medvedev rightly suggested in The “Device” thus designates an action carried Formal Method in Literary Scholarship out on the pre-aesthetic material available to (1928) that the formalists followed what the artist, while “form” is the result of this was essentially an apophatic conception of transformation, this act of removing mate- art: they believed that artistic production rial from one discursive system and inte- was a subtractive process and that the aes- grating it into the new system of relation- thetic object was the result of an act of ships that are constituted by the artwork as negation. Defined as the distortion of ev- an integral totality. Through the concept of eryday speech or the defamiliarization of the “device,” the formalists reconceived the habitual perception, the work of art was aesthetic object as an aesthetic operation, or perforce parasitic. function. As Eikhenbaum wrote in a resume Conceived, then, as a distorted version of of the formalists’ achievements, “We set out everyday codes and conventions of commu- with the general concept of the form in its nication, the aesthetic object was not the new currency, and came by way of the result of creation ex nihilo. As the formalists concept of the device to the new concept
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