I Russian Formalism and Prague Structuralism

I RUSSIAN FORMALISM AND PRAGUE STRUCTURALISM The origins of Russian Formalism date back before the Russian Revolution to the activities of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and the St Petersburg-based group, Opojaz, both of which con cerned themselves with the study of poetic language. The major figures were Victor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Boris Eikhenbaum, Osip Brik and Yury Tynyanov. The Russian Formalists rejected the unsystematic and eclectic critical ap proaches which had previously dominated literary study and endeavoured to create a 'literary science'. As Jakobson put it: The subject of literary science is not literature, but literariness, i.e. that which makes a given work a literary work'. The Formalists were uninterested, therefore, in the representational or expressive aspects of literary texts; they focused on those elements of texts which they considered to be uniquely literary in character. Initially they emphasised the differences between literary language and non-literary or practical language. The best known Formalist concept is that of 'defamiliarisation' (ostranenie) , a concept particularly associated with Shklovsky and discussed in his 'Art as Device', first published in 1917, where he argues that art renews human perception through creating devices which undercut and undermine habitual and automatised forms of perception. In later Formalism the emphasis shifted from the relation between literary and non-literary language to the linguistic and formal aspects ofliterary texts themselves. Jakobson and Tynyanov argued that literary devices themselves also became familiar. They shifted the focus to the means by which certain devices become dominant in literary texts and take on a defamiliarising role in relation to other devices or aspects of the text which are perceived in familiar or automatic terms. Jakobson's essay The Dominant' represents this aspect of Formalism. P. N. Medvedev's and Mikhail Bakhtin's The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, excerpts from which are reprinted here, was first published under Medvedev's name in 1928, but was probably written by Bakhtin. It is on the surface a critique of Formalism from a Marxist viewpoint, but it is possible that Marxism was emphasised for reasons of political necessity as Bakhtin seems not to have been a committed Marxist in a 1 2 TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERARY THEORY doctrinal sense. Fundamental to Bakhtin's thought is his view that language is 'dialogic', that is, any use of language assumes the existence of a listener or addressee. Language must be seen as a social event. The focus for investigation should thus be on language in a social and communicative context. Bakhtin and Medvedev criticise Formalism for refusing to recognise that literary language cannot be discussed in isolation from the sociological context of language. They are, however, clearly unsympathetic to anti-Formalist tendencies in Marxist criticism. Prague Structuralism was essentially in continuity with Russian Formalism. Jakobson had moved to Czechoslovakia as early as 1920. Indeed, 'The Dominant' was given as a lecture in Czechoslovakia in 1935. Jan Mukarovsky, the leading Czech literary theorist, was heavily influenced in his earlier work by Russian Formalism, as, for example, when he described literari ness as 'the maximum fore grounding of the utterance', an idea clearly derived from the Formalist concept of the dominant. In MukarovskY's later writings, however, he moves from a strictly Formalist position to one in which the perceiver or reader plays an important role, and he argues that the perceiver of a work of art must be seen in social terms, as a product of society and its ideologies, and not as an isolated individual. In Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts, written in 1938, he anticipates semiotic approaches to the study ofliterature (see 'Structuralism and Semiotics', section V, pp. 112-141). FURTHER READING Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems in Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. R.W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1973). Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (London, 1979). Paul de Man, 'Dialogue and Dialogism', Poetics Today, 4 (1983),99-107 (Critique of Bakhtin). Victor Ehrlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine (The Hague, 1980). Paul L. Garvin (ed.), A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style (Washington, DC, 1964). L. M. O'Toole, Ann Shukman (eds), Russian Poetics in Translation (Colchester), Vols 4, 5. Peter Steiner (ed.), The Prague School: Selected Writings 1929-1946 (Austin, Texas, 1982). Rene Wellek, 'The Literary Theory and Aesthetics of the Prague School', in Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, Conn., 1970). .

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