Russian Formalism

Russian Formalism

Before Formalism was created, Literaary criticism was looked at as an academic activity. It wasn't taken seriously and real literary work was read biographically, seeing the author's life and private concerns peeping throughout the text. Russian scholars who rejected this view and created a new theory called Russian Formalism. These formalists used devices and the terms to develop an interpretation of the text.

Literary Schools

In the early 20th century the formalists who rejected the early

view created two schools totally opposite from each other.

• OPOJAZ- the society for the study of poetic language
• The Prague Linguistic Circle

The founder of OPOJAZ was Viktor Shklovsky.

He founded the society for the study of poetic language

in 1916....... He is most famous for his development of

defamiliarization. Defamiliarization is essentially making

something familiar, unfamiliar. An example would be

in Leo Tolstroy's "War and Peace" which depicts how capital

punishment, and war appear and make sense from a horse's

point of view.

Prague Linguistic cirlce

The circle was started in 1928 and was more focused

with the structuralist view of the literary work. This included

the aspects of syntax, diction, imagery... etc. key members were

Roman Jakobson and vladimir propp

Vladimir Propp studied under Shklovsky

in OPOJAZ in St. Petersburg. He became infatuated with semiotic literary criticism. Semiotic literary criticism is related to structuralism in which literary devices such as imageray, syntax, rhyme scheme, paradox, and a host of other decices, literary language identifies itself as deviations from every day speech patterns, ultimately producing the defining feature of literariness.

He analyzed folk tales from Russian and all over the world

Both schools were stopped by stalin in the late 1930's, so the formalism was moved to Czechoslovakia where it was continued by Roman Jakobson.

Two axes of language

These axes of language were created by Roman Jakobson, the first one is paradigmatic analysis. Paradigmatic analysis seeks to identify the various paradigms, which underlie the manifest content of texts. This aspect of structural analysis involves a consideration of the positive or negative connotations of each signifer. and the discovery of underlying thematic paradigms. --- mean you are looking for the various patterns in the literary work. Then understanding the signigier (signs physical form as distinct from its meaning) in which if its positive or negative

Syntagmatic analysis is the other axes of language and it deals with studying its structure and the relationships between its parts. The study of syntagmatic relations reveals the conventions or rules of combination underlying the production and interpretation of texts.

Formalism after wwll

Formalism didn’t really hit America until Roman Jakobson moved to New York City just before WW2. That and the other Russian Formalists began being translated into English in the 50’s and 60’s. The new concept was so foreign to America though it had to be picked up, assimilated, and further developed in France before it really made an impact in American and English literature. Roman Jokabson was lucky though when a French anthropologist named Claude Lévi-Strauss became his colleague in New York. Claude took back the idea of structuralism to France and also Russian Formalism, and that’s how Russian Formalism ended up in France.

Literary criticism is a disciplined activity that attempts to describe, study, analyze, justify, interpret, and evaluate works of art. Through the act of criticism, we can explore the questions that help define our humanity, critique our culture, evaluate our actions, or simply increase our appreciation and enjoyment of both a literary work and our fellow human beings. When analyzing a text, literary critics ask basic questions such as these about the philosophical, psychological, functional, and descriptive nature of the text itself, Does a text have only one correct meaning? Is a text always didactic- that is, must a reader learn something from every text? Can a text be read only for enjoyment? Does a text affect every reader in the same way? How is a text influenced by the culture of its author, and the culture in which it is written? Can a text become a catalyst for change in a given culture?

Further Vocabulary

•Monologism - "having one single voice, or representing one single ideological stance or perspective, often used in opposition to the Bakhtinian dialogical. In a monological form, all the characters' voices are subordinated to the voice of the author"

•Polyphony - "a term used by Mikhail Bakhtin to describe a dialogical text which, unlike a monological text, does not depend on the centrality of a single authoritative voice. Such a text incorporates a rich plurality and multiplicity of voices, styles, and points of view. It comprises, in Bakhtin's phrase, "a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices"

•Heteroglossia - "refers, first, to the way in which every instance of language use - every utterance - is embedded in a specific set of social circumstances, and second, to the way the meaning of each particular utterance is shaped and influenced by the many-layered context in which it occurs"

•Hermeneutics- The branch of knowledge that deals with interpretation, esp. of the Bible or literary texts.

• Linguistics - the scientific study of human language-- starts with grammar, moves on to morphology which is the formation and composition of words, syntax and so on

More Formalists to look at

• Yury Tynyanov
• Boris Eichenbaum
• Grigory Vinokur