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Formalism

Introduction

Formalism, also called Russian Formalism, Russian Russky Formalism, is an innovative 20th-century Russian school of literary criticism. It began in two groups: OPOYAZ, an acronym for Russian words meaning Society for the Study of Poetic Language, founded in 1916 at St. Petersburg (later Leningrad) and led by Viktor Shklovsky; and the Moscow Linguistic Circle, founded in 1915. Other members of the groups included Osip Brik, Boris Eikhenbaum, Yury Tynianov, and Boris Tomashevsky.

The Formalists based their assumptions partly on the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure and partly on Symbolist notions. The Formalists placed an “emphasis on the medium”. They stressed the importance of form and technique over content. They looked for the specificity of literature as an autonomous verbal art. They studied the various functions of “literariness” as ways to separate poetry and fictional narrative from other forms of discourse.

Formalists disagreed about what specific elements make a literary work "good" or "bad". But, generally, Formalism maintains that a literary work contains certain intrinsic features, and the theory "...defined and addressed the specifically literary qualities in the text" (Richter 699). Therefore, it is easy to see Formalism's relation to Aristotle's theories of dramatic construction.

Formalism attempts to treat each work as its own distinct piece, free from its environment, era, and even author. Formalists assume that the keys to understanding a text exist within "the text itself"

In literary criticism, Formalism refers to a style of inquiry that focuses, almost exclusively, on features of the literary text itself. It excludes biographical, historical, or intellectual contexts. The name "Formalism" derives from one of the central tenets of Formalist thought: That the form of a work of literature is inherently a part of its content. The attempt to separate the two is fallacious. By focusing on literary form and excluding superfluous contexts, Formalists 2 believed that it would be possible to trace the evolution and development of literary forms, and thus, literature itself.

In simple terms, Formalists believed that the focus of literary studies should be the text itself, and not the author's life or social class. The goal of the critic is to examine this feature of art. In the case of literature, the object of reflection is the text's "literariness," that which makes it a work of art and not a piece of journalism.

Literature is autonomous from external conditions in the sense that literary language is distinct from ordinary uses of language, not least because it is not entirely communicative. Literature has its own history, a history of innovation in formal structures, and is not determined by external, material history.

What a work of literature says cannot be separated from how the literary work says it. Therefore, the form and structure of a work is in fact an integral part of the content of the work.

Jargons

Defamiliarization

When a writer makes the familiar seem unfamiliar,it is called defamiliarization. Formalists love this because it shows you what form can do.

Story, (alias Fabula)

This is the word for the events that take place in a narrative in chronological order. Here's a story: Three pigs moved out of the mud into houses. A wolf ate two of them. Then he tried to eat the third one, but didn't.

Plot (alias Siuzhet)

This one is how the events of the fabula/story are told in a narrative. Here's a plot of the above story: One smart pig built a house out of brick because he recognized the danger of using mud or straw like his bros—both sadly devoured by a wolf because of their classic construction flaws. The brick- building pig therefore outsmarted the wolf and survived, and he lived muddily ever after. 3

It's all those things that motivate the chronological events in the story. Not just a lot of huffing and puffing.

So, the story gives us the chronological set of events (houses, huffing, brick fail). The plot sometimes scrambles the sequence of events or the way in which we learn about them because there's an emphasis on how the events get told. In the plot, the first thing we learn is that the lonely brick pig survives to defeat the wolf, even though that's after the demise of his constructionally challenged siblings.

Practical language

This is what we use when we are doing stuff with language with the single goal of communicating something to someone else. If a kid says to his mommy, "I'm hungry," for example, that is practical language. At least it is if he gets his milk and cookies.

Poetic language

We use language not only to communicate but also to make all sorts of cool sounds and rhythms. If a kid says his mother, "Me honey boo-boo chile," that's poetic language. Or the makings of a killer reality TV show. The kid isn't using language to communicate a need (for food, or water). He or she is just enjoying playing with words and sounds.

Literariness

It's the true essence of a literary text. It is the difference between saying "Gee, which street do I go down?" and "Two roads diverged in a wood and I—I took the one less traveled by."

Form

It refers to the way that something is told or written with specific use of language and stylistic devices. Another way to think about it is through the old opposition of form vs. content. The Formalists would say that form is way more important than content. In fact, they would tell you, form is content. Literary critics should be interested in how texts say things; what they're saying is secondary.

Devices 4

These are all those little strategies that writers use to make us cry, or laugh, or shake our heads in confusion, or be scared silly. Things like repetition, suspense, parallelism, foreshadowing, defamiliarization, metaphor—all those are devices. And the Formalists think that art is a sum of its devices.