FORMALISM 315 Comprehension of Literal Language

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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 process, 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 explained, artistic production was a process of function” (in Matejka and Pomorska, of decontextualization and recontextualiza- 34). As the titles of a number of their studies tion, the extraction of language from the would suggest—e.g., Eikhenbaum’s “How setting of everyday discourse and its rein- Gogol’s Overcoat Is Made” (1919) or sertion into the new semantic field estab- Shklovsky’s “How Don Quixote Is Made” lished by the artwork. The aesthetic function (1921)—the formalists wanted to under- was realized in this act of transposition from stand not the content of the artwork but one discursive register into another. This how it operates. understanding of the aesthetic act as a mnoz- Since the formalists found the distinction hestvennaia perekodirovka sistem (“multiple between subject matter and formal organi- recoding of systems”), as Tartu semiotician zation to be analytically untenable, they Iurii Lotman called it, legitimated what was substituted for the familiar dualism of con- essentially a poetics of montage and of the tent and form the operational distinction readymade. Despite the manifest partiality between (extra-aesthetic) material and (aes- that this model of the aesthetic process

(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 318 FORMALISM exhibited toward modernist works of liter- Literary Evolution” (1927). Explaining that ature, the formalists found it on occasion to “the study of isolated genres outside the be equally applicable to readings of more features characteristic of the genre system traditional literary forms such as the realist with which they are related is impossible,” novel (see REALISM). In fact, one of the most Tynianov identified two aspects of the lit- impressive scholarly artifacts of this method erary construction: one was the auto-func- was Shklovsky’s study Material and Style in tion, which designated the relationship of a Tolstoy’s Novel ‘War and Peace’ (1928), single element to other elements within the which described the aesthetic devices at structural totality of the aesthetic object; the work in Tolstoy’s classic through a juxta- other was the syn-function, which designat- position of passages from War and Peace ed the relationship of an element to isomor- (1865–69) with coeval source material. phically comparable elements within other aesthetic objects (in Matejka and Pomorska, 70–71). According to the formalists, all of THE EVOLUTION OF AESTHETIC the components of the aesthetic object were, SYSTEMS moreover, functionally subordinated to a single distinctive feature that they called Whereas the first phase of formalism the “dominant.” At certain points in history, (1916–21), exemplified by the work of rhyme, for example, is the “dominant” of critics such as Shklovsky and Eikhenbaum, poetry. By organizing the work of art foregrounded the phenomenological quali- into a hierarchically ordered system, the ties of the artwork using a critical method “dominant” feature secures the integrality that was synchronic in nature, the second of the work of art as an aesthetic gestalt. phase (1921–30) enhanced the initial forays Through their proto-structuralist studies into aesthetic structure with disquisitions of literature as a “system of systems,” the into the laws of literary evolution. The later formalists arrived at the question of literary studies focused on the relationship between history. According to the formalists, the literature and other social systems of an dynamics of literary evolution were driven economic, political, or technological nature. by the constant interaction between litera- The scholar spearheading this shift in em- ture and extraneous, nonliterary systems. phasis from structure to evolution was Iurii To understand literary history it thus be- Tynianov (1894–1943). This development comes necessary to investigate those neigh- was ultimately not a reorientation of or boring social systems which were the correction to the original trajectory of the sources of literature, as well as those which, formalists, as critics of formalism were eager conversely, literature influenced. For exam- to insinuate, for Shklovsky’s initial model of ple, Tynianov noted that, while private “art as device” had already defined literature letters and documents had once been of as a transformation of material taken from no literary value, in the nineteenth century other nonliterary systems. Indeed, from the these minor domestic forms were relocated very beginning formalist analysis of litera- to the center of literary production. He ture presumed the dialectical interdepen- discerned a law at work in this exchange dence of aesthetic and extra-aesthetic sys- between the nonliterary and the literaturnyi tems. Although these notions were present fakt (“literary fact”): “At a period when a in Shklovsky’s early work, it was Tynianov GENRE is disintegrating, it shifts from the who first tried to theorize systematically center to the periphery, and a new phe- the mechanisms of this exchange, in “On nomenon floats in to take its place in the

(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved. FORMALISM 319 center, coming up from among the trivia, icism. While this influence was more ob- out of the backyards and low haunts of lique in certain instances (e.g., New Criti- literature” (33). Published at a moment when cism and French STRUCTURALISM), in others formalist research was keenly interested in these filiations were quite explicit. Such was excavating the minor genres, hack authors, the case with the Prague Linguistic Circle and forgotten epigones of Russian literary and the Tartu School of Semiotics. The history, Tynianov’s collection of essays enti- former, commonly called the Prague tled ArchaistsandInnovators(1929) presented School, was established in 1926 by Vilem the work of art as an effect of the ceaseless Mathesius (1882–1945) and included metabolism between a culturally valued aes- members from the Russian formalist circles thetic order and the reservoir of unrecognized such as Petr Bogatyrev (1893–1971), Boris devices available in everyday life. Tomashevsky, and, most importantly, Ro- Through their inquiry into the evolution- man Jakobson, who had moved to Prague in ary laws of literature the formalists discov- 1920. In 1929 Jakobson coined the term ered a cultural dynamic that derives aesthet- STRUCTURALISM to designate their shared ic value from the interchanges between the method, which emphasized the synchronic sacred and the profane, the valorized and analysis of the artwork. Recognizing the the quotidian, the innovator and the epi- arbitrary nature of the sign, whose value gone. What they discovered, in other words, and meaning, as Ferdinand de Saussure was the basic logic of aesthetic modernity (1857–1913) had discovered, emerge dif- (see MODERNISM). First explored by Tynianov ferentially vis-a-vis other signs within the in “The Literary Fact” and elaborated much same system, Prague Structuralists such as later by Lotman and Boris Uspenskii in their Jan Mukarovsky (1891–1975) viewed the “Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian artwork from a purely functionalist perspec- Culture” (in A. Nakhimovsky and A.S. Na- tive, namely, as the aggregate of relations khimovsky, eds., 1985, Semiotics of Russian established among a work’s constituent Cultural History), the cultural economy signs. But in contrast to the Russian form- posited by the formalists contradicted mod- alists, whose conceptualization of the work ernity’s celebrated apotheosis of the new. In of art was in most cases derived from and true structuralist fashion Tynianov demon- restricted by a model of signification that strated that there is no authentic novelty or was exclusively linguistic in nature, the Pra- invention, only the constant relocation of gue Structuralists expanded their studies to a readymade features and devices from one variety of semiotic systems. And so, for ex- system to another, the endless recycling of ample, the Prague School succeeded in ana- elements that have been moved to the periph- lyzing a number of dramatic works, which are ery (automatized) and then reinstated (defa- semiotically heterogenous compounds of miliarized). Investigating the laws of literary gestural, linguistic, and plastic signs. evolution, the formalists arrived at the ulti- Founded in 1964 at the University of mate identity of Archaists and Innovators. Tartu in Estonia, the Tartu School of Se- miotics revived the formalist impulse while incorporating new scientific developments AFTERLIFE OF FORMALISM from the fields of information processing, machine translation, and mathematical The techniques and approaches of Russian modeling. Iurii Lotman (1922–93), the formalism influenced a number of later most prominent scholar in the Tartu movements within poetics and literary crit- School, characterized art as a “modeling

(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 320 FRAME system,” which he defined as “a structure of Jameson, F.R. (1972), Prison-House of Language. elements and of rules for combining them Lemon, L. and M.J. Reis, eds. (1965), Russian that is in a state of fixed analogy to the Formalist Criticism. entire sphere of an object of knowledge, Lucid, D.P., ed. (1977), Soviet Semiotics. Matejka, L. and K. Pomorska, eds. (1971), Readings insight or regulation. Therefore a modeling in Russian Poetics. system can be regarded as a language” (qtd. Matejka, L. and I. Titunik, eds. (1976), Semiotics of in Lucid, 7). Lotman’s definition reveals Art. the predominance of the linguistic model O’Toole, L.M. and A. Shukman, eds. (1977), in the thought of the Tartu School, which Formalist Theory. defined not just literature but also visual O’Toole, L.M. and A. Shukman, eds. (1978), art, cinema, and music as “secondary Formalism. Pike, C., ed. (1979), Futurists, the Formalists, and the modeling systems.” Despite the shortcom- Marxist Critique. ings of this linguistic maximalism, the ini- Pomorska, K. (1968), Russian Formalist Theory and tial conjunction of formalism and cyber- Its Poetic Ambiance. netic theory developed by the Tartu School Shklovsky, V. (1991), Theory of Prose. in the 1960s proved to be highly productive Striedter, J. (1989), Literary Structure, Evolution and in the next decade, when the Tartu scholars Value. turned away from the institutions of art Tynianov, I. (1999), “The Literary Fact,” in Modern and began to develop a general semiotics of Genre Theory, ed. D. Duff. social behavior. Reiterating the evolution of formalism in the mid-1920s, when it abandoned the immanent analysis of art- Foucault, Michel see Authorship works and began investigating instead laws that regulate the interactions of literature with other social systems, in the 1970s the Frame Tartu School shifted its focus to the dy- BRONWEN THOMAS namics between forms of cultural production and their social context. The result was The term frame is used in a metaphorical a type of cultural ANTHROPOLOGY that, in sense when applied to the novel. It borrows many cases, was conceptually more capa- from the idea of a frame to a painting and is cious and versatile than the work of the primarily used to denote borders and levels original formalists. within the narrative, or how the actions and words of the fictional characters are shaped SEE ALSO: Fiction, Mikhail Bakhtin, and presented to the reader. In theory, Novel Theory (20th Century). therefore, the metaphor suggests that a novel has stable and clearly defined boundaries. It also intrinsically implies a clear dichoto- BIBLIOGRAPHY my between “outer” and “inner” worlds. This is most clearly the case where the frame Bakhtin, M.M. and P.N. Medvedev (1978), narrator’s account of events is portrayed as Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, trans. A. objective, in contrast to the subjectivity of Wehrle. the inset narratives. The extent to which this Bann, S. and J. Bowlte, eds. (1973), Russian Formalism. framing is foregrounded and overt may vary Garvin, P., ed. (1964), Prague School Reader on considerably, but the device typically serves Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style. to remind readers that the story world is Hansen-Love,€ A. (1978), Russische Formalismus. separate from their own and draws attention

Edited by Peter Melville Logan

Associate Editors: Olakunle George, Susan Hegeman, and Efraın Kristal

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The encyclopedia of the novel/edited by Peter Melville Logan; Olakunle George, Susan Hegeman, and Efraın Kristal, associate editors. v. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: Introduction – v. 1. The novel A-Li – v. 2. The novel Lo-Z – Indexes. ISBN 978-1-4051-6184-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Fiction– Encyclopedias. I. Logan, Peter Melville, 1951– II. George, Olakunle. III. Hegeman, Susan, 1964– IV. Kristal, Efraın, 1959– PN41.E485 2011 809.30003–dc22 2010029410

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