Russian Formalism

Russian formalism was an influential school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars (Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, and Grigory Vinokur) who revolutionised literary criticism between 1914 and the 1930s by establishing the priority and autonomy of poetic language in the study of literature. Russian formalism exerted a major influence on thinkers such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Yuri Lotman, and on structuralism as a whole. The movement's members are widely considered the founders of modern literary criticism. Under Stalin it became a pejorative term for elitist art.

Russian formalism was a diverse movement, producing no unified doctrine, and no consensus amongst its proponents on a central aim to their endeavours. In fact, "Russian formalism" describes two distinct movements: the OPOJAZ (Obscestvo izucenija POeticeskogo JAZyka - Society for the Study of Poetic Language) in St. Petersburg and the Linguistic Circle in Moscow. Therefore, it is more precise to refer to the "Russian Formalists", rather than to use the more encompassing and abstract term of "Formalism".

The term "formalism" was first used by the adversaries of the movement, and as such it conveys a meaning explicitly rejected by the Formalists themselves. In the words of one of the foremost Formalists, Boris Eichenbaum: "It is difficult to recall who coined this name, but it was not a very felicitous coinage. It might have been convenient as a simplified battle cry but it fails, as an objective term, to delimit the activities of the "Society for the Study of Poetic Language...."[1]

Distinctive ideas

Russian formalism is distinctive for its emphasis on the functional role of literary devices and its original conception of literary history. Russian Formalists advocated a "scientific" method for studying poetic language, to the exclusion of traditional psychological and cultural-historical approaches. As Erlich points out, "[i]ntent upon delimiting literary scholarship from contiguous disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and intellectual history, the formalist theoreticians focused on the 'distinguishing features' of literature, on the artistic devices peculiar to imaginative writing" (The New Princeton Encyclopedia 1101).

Two general principles underlie the Formalist study of literature: First, literature itself, or rather, those of its features that distinguish it from other human activities must constitute the object of inquiry of literary theory; second, 'literary facts' have to be prioritized over the metaphysical commitments of literary criticism (whether philosophical, aesthetic or psychological) (Steiner, "Russian Formalism" 16). To achieve these objectives several models were developed.

The formalists agreed on the autonomous nature of poetic language and its specificity as an object of study for literary criticism. Their main endeavour consisted in defining a set of properties specific to poetic language (be it poetry or prose) recognisable by their "artfulness" and consequently analysing them as such.

Mechanistic Formalism

The OPOJAZ (the Society for the Study of Poetic Language) group headed by Viktor Shklovsky was primarily concerned with the Formal method and focused on technique and device. "Literary works, according to this model, resemble machines: they are the result of an intentional human activity in which a specific skill transforms raw material into a complex mechanism suitable for a particular purpose" (Steiner, "Russian Formalism" 18). This approach strips the literary artefact from its connection with the author, reader, and historical background.

A clear illustration of this may be provided by the main argument of one of Viktor Shklovsky's early texts, "Art as Device" (Iskusstvo kak priem, 1916): art is a sum of literary and artistic devices that the artist manipulates to craft his work.

Shklovsky's main objective in "Art as Device" is to dispute the conception of literature and literary criticism common in Russia at that time. Broadly speaking, literature was considered, on the one hand, to be a social or political product, interpreted (in the tradition of the great critic Belinsky) as an integral part of social and political history. On the other hand, literature was considered to be the personal expression of an author's world vision, expressed by means of images and symbols. In both cases, literature is not considered as such, but evaluated on a broad socio-political or a vague psychologico-impressionistic background. The aim of Shklovsky is therefore to isolate and define something specific to literature (or "poetic language"). The object of literary investigation should be the "device," or, more properly, the collection of devices, or the strategy which makes up the "artfulness" of literature.

Formalists do not agree with one another on exactly what a "device" (priem) is, nor how these devices are used or how they are to be analysed in a given text. The central idea, however, is more general: poetic language possesses specific properties, which can be analyzed as such.

Some OPOJAZ members argued that poetic language was the major artistic device. Shklovsky, however, insisted that not all artistic texts de-familiarize language, some of them achieve defamiliarization or ostranenie by manipulating composition and narrative.

The Formalist movement attempted to discriminate systematically between art and non-art. Therefore its notions are organized in terms of polar oppositions. One of the most famous dichotomies introduced by the mechanistic Formalists is a distinction between story and plot, or fabula and syuzhet. Story (fabula) is a chronological sequence of events, whereas plot (syuzhet) can unfold in non-chronological order. The events can be artistically arranged by means of such devices as repetition, parallelism, gradation, and retardation.

The mechanistic methodology reduced literature to a variation and combination of techniques and devices devoid of a temporal, psychological, or philosophical element. Shklovsky very soon realized that this model had to be expanded to embrace, for example, contemporaneous and diachronic literary traditions (Garson 403).

Organic Formalism

Disappointed by the constraints of the mechanistic method some Russian Formalists adopted the organic model. "They utilized the similarity between organic bodies and literary phenomena in two different ways: as it applied to individual works and to literary genres" (Steiner, "Russian Formalism" 19).

An artifact, like a biological organism, is not an unstructured whole; its parts are hierarchically integrated. Hence the definition of the device has been extended to its function in text. "Since the binary opposition – material vs. device – cannot account for the organic unity of the work, Zhirmunsky augmented it in 1919 with a third term, 'the teleological concept of style as the unity of devices'" (Steiner, "Russian Formalism" 19).

The analogy between biology and literary theory provided the frame of reference for genre criticism. "Just as each individual organism shares certain features with other organisms of its type, and species that resemble each other belong to the same genus, the individual work is similar to other works of its form and homologous literary forms belong to the same genre" (Steiner, "Russian Formalism" 19). The most widely known work carried out in this tradition is Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928).

Having shifted the focus of study from an isolated technique to a hierarchically structured whole, the organic Formalists overcame the main shortcoming of the mechanists. Still, both groups failed to account for the literary changes which affect not only devices and their functions but genres as well.

Systemic Formalism

The diachronic dimension was incorporated into the work of the systemic Formalists. The main proponent of the "systemo-functional" model was Yury Tynyanov. "In light of his concept of literary evolution as a struggle among competing elements, the method of parody, 'the dialectic play of devices,' becomes an important vehicle of change" (Steiner, "Russian Formalism" 21).

Since literature constitutes part of the overall cultural system, the literary dialectic participates in cultural evolution. As such, it interacts with other human activities, for instance, linguistic communication. The communicative domain enriches literature with new constructive principles. In response to these extra-literary factors the self-regulating literary system is compelled to rejuvenate itself constantly. Even though the systemic Formalists incorporated the social dimension into literary theory and acknowledged the analogy between language and literature the figures of author and reader were pushed to the margins of this paradigm.

Linguistic Formalism

The figures of author and reader were likewise downplayed by the linguistic Formalists (e.g. Lev Jakubinsky, Roman Jakobson). The adherents of this model placed poetic language at the centre of their inquiry. As Warner remarks, "Jakobson makes it clear that he rejects completely any notion of emotion as the touchstone of literature. For Jakobson, the emotional qualities of a literary work are secondary to and dependent on purely verbal, linguistic facts" (71).

The theoreticians of OPOJAZ distinguished between practical and poetic language. Practical language is used in day-to-day communication to convey information. In poetic language, according to Lev Jakubinsky, "'the practical goal retreats into background and linguistic combinations acquire a value in themselves". When this happens language becomes de-familiarized and utterances become poetic'" (Steiner, "Russian Formalism" 22).

Sound Patterns in Poetry

Russian Formalists were the first to study the function of sound patterns in poetry systematically and objectively. "In so doing, they initiated a method for the quantitative examination of the linguistic structure of literary texts; an approach which has proven productive for twentieth century scholarship" (Mandelker 327).

In their first collective work, Sborniki po teorii poeticheskogo iazyka (1916; Anthologies on the Theory of Poetic Language), the contributors (Shklovsky, Jakubinsky, Polivanov, and Kushner) assigned sound a central role in poetic speech. In addition, they argued that in poetry, words are selected on the basis of their sound, not their lexical meaning. This line of criticism detached poetic language from practical language.

Eichenbaum, however, criticised Shklovsky and Jakubinsky for not disengaging poetry from the outside world completely, since they used the emotional connotations of sound as a criterion for word choice. This recourse to psychology threatened the ultimate goal of formalism to investigate literature in isolation.

A definitive example of focus on poetic language is the study of Russian versification by Osip Brik. Apart from the most obvious devices such as rhyme, onomatopoeia, alliteration, and assonance, Brik explores various types of sound repetitions, e.g. the ring (kol'co), the juncture (styk), the fastening (skrep), and the tail-piece (koncovka) ("Zvukovye povtory" (Sound Repetitions); 1917). He ranks phones according to their contribution to the "sound background" (zvukovoj fon) attaching the greatest importance to stressed vowels and the least to reduced vowels. As Mandelker indicates, "[h]is methodological restraint and his conception of an artistic 'unity' wherein no element is superfluous or disengaged, … serves well as an ultimate model for the Formalist approach to versification study" (335).

Linguistic Analysis of the Text

In "A Postscript to the Discussion on Grammar of Poetry," Jakobson redefines poetics as "the linguistic scrutiny of the poetic function within the context of verbal messages in general, and within poetry in particular" (23). He fervently defends linguists' right to contribute to the study of poetry and demonstrates the aptitude of the modern linguistics to the most insightful investigation of a poetic message. The legitimacy of "studies devoted to questions of metrics or strophics, alliterations or rhymes, or to questions of poets' vocabulary" is hence undeniable (23). Linguistic devices that transform a verbal act into poetry range "from the network of distinctive features to the arrangement of the entire text" (Jakobson 23).

Jakobson opposes the view that "an average reader" uninitiated into the science of language is presumably insensitive to verbal distinctions: "Speakers employ a complex system of grammatical relations inherent to their language even though they are not capable of fully abstracting and defining them" (30). A systematic inquiry into the poetic problems of grammar and the grammatical problems of poetry is therefore justifiable; moreover, the linguistic conception of poetics reveals the ties between form and content indiscernible to the literary critic (Jakobson 34).

Legacy

In the Soviet period, the authorities further developed the term's pejorative associations to cover any art which used complex techniques and forms accessible only to the elite, rather than being simplified for "the people" (as in socialist realism).

Russian formalism was not a uniform movement, it comprised diverse theoreticians whose views were shaped through methodological debate that proceeded from the distinction between poetic and practical language to the overarching problem of the historical-literary study. It is mainly with this theoretical focus that the Formalist School is credited even by its adversaries such as Yefimov:

The contribution of the Formalist School to our literary scholarship lies … in the fact that it has focused sharply on the basic problems of literary study, first of all on the specificity of its object, that it modified our conception of the literary work and broke it down into its component parts, that it opened up new areas of inquiry, vastly enriched our knowledge of literary technology, raised the standards of our literary research and of our theorizing about literature … effected, in a sense, a Europeanization of our literary scholarship…. Poetics, … once a sphere of unbridled impressionism, became an object of scientific analysis, a concrete problem of literary scholarship ("Formalism v russkom literaturovedenii", quoted in Erlich, "Russian Formalism: In Perspective" 225).

The diverging and converging forces of Russian formalism gave rise to the Prague school of structuralism in the mid-1920s and provided a model for the literary wing of French structuralism in the 1960s and 1970s. "And, insofar as the literary-theoretical paradigms which Russian Formalism inaugurated are still with us, it stands not as a historical curiosity but a vital presence in the theoretical discourse of our day" (Steiner, "Russian Formalism" 29).

There is no direct historical relationship between New Criticism and Russian formalism, each having developed at around the same time (RF 1910-20s & NC 1940s-50s) but independently of the other. However, despite this, there are several similarities: for example, both movements showed an interest in considering literature on its own terms (instead of focusing on its relationship to politicial, cultural or historical externalities), a focus on the literary devices and the craft of the author, and a critical focus on poetry.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

Bibliography of Russian Formalism in English

Gorman, David. "Bibliography of Russian Formalism in English." Style 26:4 (1992): 554-76.

---. "Supplement to a Bibliography of Russian Formalism in English." Style 29:4 (1995): 562-64.

Select bibliography

Any, Carol. "Boris Eikhenbaum in OPOIAZ: Testing the Limits of the Work-Centered Poetics." Slavic Review 49:3 (1990): 409-26.

"Boris Eichenbaum." The Norton Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. 1058-87.

Brown, Edward J. "The Formalist Contribution." The Russian Review 33:3 (1974): 243-58.

---. "Roman Osipovich Jakobson 1896-1982: The Unity of his Thought on Verbal Art." The Russian Review 42 (1983): 91-99.

Erlich, Victor. "Russian Formalism: In Perspective." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 13:2 (1954): 215-25.

---. "Russian Formalism." Journal of the History of Ideas 34:4 (1973): 627-38.

---. "Russian Formalism." The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Alex Preminger and Terry V. F. Brogan. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993. 1101-02.

Garson, Judith. "Literary History: Russian Formalist Views, 1916-1928." Journal of the History of Ideas 31:3 (1970): 399-412.

Jakobson, Roman. "A Postscript to the Discussion on Grammar of Poetry." Diacritics 10:1 (1980): 21-35.

Mandelker, Amy. "Russian Formalism and the Objective Analysis of Sound in Poetry." The Slavic and East European Journal 27:3 (1983): 327-38.

Rydel, Christine A. "Formalism (Russian Formalists)." Encyclopedia of the Novel. Ed. Paul Schellinger et al. Vol. 1. Chicago; London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998. 422-24. 2 vols.

Steiner, Peter. "Russian Formalism." The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Ed. Raman Selden. Vol. 8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 11-29. 8 vols.

---. Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.

Warner, Nicholas O. "In Search of Literary Science the Russian Formalist Tradition." Pacific Coast Philology 17 (1982): 69-81.

[1] Boris Eichenbaum, "Vokrug voprosa o formalistah" (Russian: "Вокруг Вопроса о Фоpмалистах") (Around the question on the Formalists), Pecat' i revolucija, no5 (1924), pp.2-3.

See also

• Philosophy in the Soviet Union

External links

Petrov, Petre. "Russian Formalism." 2 Feb. 2002. 21 Dec. 2005

Everard, Jerry. "Introduction to Russian Formalism." 21 Dec. 2005

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In literary studies, formalism sometimes refers to inquiry into the form (rather than the content) of works of literature, but usually refers broadly to approaches to interpreting or evaluating literary works that focus on features of the text itself (especially properties of its language) rather than on the contexts of its creation (biographical, historical or intellectual) or the contexts of its reception. The term groups together a number of different approaches to literature, many of which seriously diverge from one another. Formalism, in this broad sense, was the dominant mode of academic literary study in the US at least from the end of the Second World War through the 1970s, especially as embodied in René Wellek and Austin Warren's Theory of Literature (1948, 1955, 1962). Beginning in the late 1970s, formalism was substantially displaced by various approaches (often with political aims or assumptions) that were suspicious of the idea that a literary work could be separated from its origins or uses. The term has often had a pejorative cast and has been used by opponents to indicate either aridity or ideological deviance. Some recent trends in academic literary criticism suggest that formalism may be making a comeback.

Russian Formalism

"Russian Formalism" is the name given to a trend in literary analysis that developed in pre-revolutionary Russia. It is associated primarily with two schools of criticism, OPOJAZ (Obshchestvo izuchenija POeticheskogo JAZyka—Society for the Study of Poetic Language), founded in 1916 in St. Petersburg (then Petrograd) by Boris Eichenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky and Yury Tynyanov, and the Moscow Linguistic Circle founded in 1914 by Roman Jakobson. (The folklorist Vladimir Propp is also often associated with the movement.) Eichenbaum's 1926 essay "The Theory of the 'Formal Method'" (translated in Lemon and Reis) provides a good summary and overview of the approach the Formalists advocated, which included the following basic ideas:

• The aim is to produce "a science of literature that would be both independent and factual," which is sometimes designated by the term poetics.
• Since literature is made of language, linguistics will be a foundational element of the science of literature.
• 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 (as some crude versions of Marxism have it) by external, material history.
• What a work of literature says cannot be separated from how the literary work says it, and therefore the form and structure of a work, far from being merely the decorative wrapping of an isolable content, is, in fact, an integral part of the content of the work.

According to Eichenbaum, Shklovsky was the lead critic of the group, and Shklovsky contributed two of their most well-known concepts: defamiliarization (ostraneniye, more literally, 'estrangement' or 'making it strange') and the plot/story distinction (syuzhet/fabula). "Defamiliarization" is one of the crucial ways in which literary language distinguishes itself from ordinary, communicative language, and is a feature of how art in general works, namely by presenting the world in a strange new way that allows us to see things differently. Innovation in literary history is, according to Shklovsky, partly a matter of finding new techniques of defamiliarization.

The plot/story distinction separates out the sequence of events that transpires in the text (the story) from the sequence in which those events are presented in the text (the plot). Both of these concepts are attempts to describe the significance of the form of a literary work in order to define its "literariness." The story can be described in an ordinary commuicative act, but the plot makes it into a work of art. A text's formal properties is what makes it art to begin with, so in order to understand a work of art as a work of art (rather than as an ornamented communicative act) one must focus on its form.

This emphasis on form, seemingly at the expense of thematic content, was not well-received after the Russian Revolution of 1917. One of the most sophisticated critiques of the Formalist project was Leon Trotsky's Literature and Revolution (1924). Trotsky does not wholly dismiss the Formalist approach, but insists that "the methods of formal analysis are necessary, but insufficient" because they neglect the social world with which the human beings who write and read literature are bound up: "The form of art is, to a certain and very large degree, independent, but the artist who creates this form, and the spectator who is enjoying it, are not empty machines, one for creating form and the other for appreciating it. They are living people, with a crystallized psychology representing a certain unity, even if not entirely harmonious. This psychology is the result of social conditions." The Formalists were thus accused of being politically reactionary because of such unpatriotic remarks as Shklovsky's (quoted by Trotsky) that "Art was always free of life, and its color never reflected the color of the flag which waved over the fortress of the City." The leaders of the movement suffered political persecution beginning in the 1920s, when Stalin came to power, which largely put an end to their inquiries. But their ideas continued to influence subsequent thinkers, partly due to Tzvetan Todorov's translations of their works in the 1960s and 1970s, including Todorov himself, Barthes, Genette and Jauss.

Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky (or Shklovskii; Russian: Виктор Борисович Шкловский; Saint Petersburg, 24 January [O.S. 12 January] 1893; Leningrad, 6 December, 1984) was a Russian and Soviet critic, writer, and pamphleteer.

He was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and attended St. Petersburg University. During the war served as a Commissar in the Russian army, as described in his memoirs, Sentimental'noe puteshestvie, vospominaniia (A Sentimental Journey). He died in Leningrad (St. Petersburg).

He was the founder of the OPOJAZ. In addition to literary criticism and biographies about such authors as Laurence Sterne, Maxim Gorky, Lev Tolstoy and Vladimir Mayakovsky, he wrote a number of semi-autobiographical works disguised as fiction.

Shklovsky developed the concept of ostranenie or defamiliarization in literature. (see above) He explained this idea in a famous essay, "Art as Technique":

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important." (Shklovsky, "Art as Technique", 12)

The Russian term generally translated as "technique" can (and probably should) also be rendered as "strategy." For Shklovsky, art is the deployment of various linguistic strategies. Different artistic strategies create different artistic results.

Shklovsky's work pushes Russian Formalism towards understanding literary activity as integral parts of social practice, an idea that becomes important in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Russian and Prague School scholars of semiotics.

Yury Tynyanov

Yury Tynyanov Тынянов Юрий Николаевич (October 18, 1894 - December 20, 1943) was a famous Russian writer, literary critic, translator, scholar and scriptwriter born in Rezhitsa, present day Latvia.

Life and work

Tynyanov was an authority on Pushkin and an important member of the Russian Formalist school.

In 1928, together with the linguist Roman Jakobson, he published a famous work titled Theses on Language, a predecessor to structuralism, which could be summarised in the following manner (from [1]):

1. Literary science had to have a firm theoretical basis and an accurate terminology.
2. The structural laws of a specific field of literature had to be established before it was related to other fields.
3. The evolution of literature must be studied as a system. All evidence, whether literary or non-literary must be analysed functionally.
4. The distinction between synchrony and diachrony was useful for the study of literature as for language, uncovering systems at each separate stage of development. But the history of systems is also a system; each synchronic system has its own past and future as part of its structure. Therefore the distinction should not be preserved beyond its usefulness.
5. A synchronic system is not a mere agglomerate of contemporaneous phenomena catalogued. 'Systems' mean hierarchical organisation.
6. The distinction between langue and parole, taken from linguistics, deserves to be developed for literature in order to reveal the principles underlying the relationship between the individual utterance and a prevailing complex of norms.
7. The analysis of the structural laws of literature should lead to the setting up of a limited number of structural types and evolutionary laws governing those types.
8. The discovery of the 'immanent laws' of a genre allows one to describe an evolutionary step, but not to explain why this step has been taken by literature and not another. Here the literary must be related to the relevant non-literary facts to find further laws, a 'system of systems'. But still the immanent laws of the individual work had to be enunciated first.

Tynyanov also wrote historical novels, and applied his theories to many of his fictional works.

He died of multiple sclerosis.

Selected Bibliography

(in English)

Works by Yury Tynyanov

• Formalist theory, translated by L.M. O'Toole and Ann Shukman (1977)
• Lieutenant Kije / Young Vitushishnikov: Two Novellas (Eridanos Library, No. 20), translated by Mirra Ginsburg (1990)

Works edited by Yury Tynyanov

• Russian Prose, edited by Boris Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum and Yury Tynyanov, translated by Ray Parrot (1985)

(in Russian)

Novels:

• Кюхля, 1925
• Смерть Вазир-Мухтара, 1928
• Пушкин, 1936

Novellas and stories:

• Подпоручик Киже, 1927
• Восковая персона, 1930
• Малолетный Витушишников, 1933
• Гражданин Очер

On Pushkin and his era:

• Архаисты и Пушкин, 1926
• Пушкин, 1929
• Пушкин и Тютчев, 1926
• О "Путешествии в Арзрум", 1936
• Безыменная любовь, 1939
• Пушкин и Кюхельбекер, 1934
• Французские отношения Кюхельбекера, 1939

1. Путешествие Кюхельбекера по Западной Европе в 1820 - 1821 гг.
2. Декабрист и Бальзак.

• Сюжет "Горя от ума", 1943

External links

• A brief article on Tynyanov's historical novels
• a Russian site with links to several online texts

Bibliography

In English, by Viktor Shklovsky:

• A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917-1922 (1923, translated in 1970)
• Zoo or Letters Not About Love (translated in 1971)
• Mayakovsky and his circle (1941, translated in 1972)
• Third Factory (translated in 1979)
• Theory of Prose (translated in 1990)
• Leo Tolstoy (1928, translated in 1996)
• The Technique of the Writer's Craft (1928)

Vladimir Propp (St Petersburg, April 29, 1895 – Leningrad August 22, 1970) was a Russian structuralist scholar who analysed the basic plot components of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irreducible narrative elements. His Morphology of the Folk Tale was published in Russian in 1928; although it represented a breakthrough in both folkloristics and morphology and influenced Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, it was generally unnoticed in the West until it was translated in the 1950s.

Propp extended the Russian Formalist approach to the study of narrative structure. In the Formalist approach, sentence structures in narrative had been broken down into analysable elements, or "morphemes". Propp used this method by analogy to analyse folk tales. Ignoring narrative tone or mood, or extraneous decorative detail, and breaking down a large number of Russian folk tales into their smallest narrative units, which he called functions, and some of his modern followers like to call "narratemes", Propp was able to arrive at a typology of narrative structures. By analysing types of characters and kinds of action in a hundred tales, Propp was able to arrive at the conclusion that there were just thirty-one generic "narratemes" in the traditional Russian folk tale. While not all are present in every tale, he found that all the tales he analysed displayed the functions in unvarying sequence.

An interesting on-line computer project, "digital Propp" (see link) has randomly generated folk tales employing selected functions of Propp's. As the project's organizers conclude, "The randomly generated fairy tale demonstrates that it is necessary to consider several other elements besides plot components in order to create a cohesive and well-written tale."

As well as finding the 31 narrative functions of Propp's theory he also discovered that there are ONLY 8 broad character types in the thousands of tales he analysed:

1. The villain (struggles against the hero)
2. The donor (prepares the hero or gives the hero some magical object)
3. The (magical) helper (helps the hero in the quest)
4. The princess (person the hero marries, often sought for during the narrative)
5. Her father
6. The dispatcher (character who makes the lack known and sends the hero off)
7. The hero or victim/ seeker hero, reacts to the donor, weds the princess
8. False hero/ anti-hero/ usurper — (takes credit for the hero’s actions/ tries to marry the princess)

External links

• The 31 narrative units of Propp's formula
• Propp's functions simplified by critics
• The Fairy Tale Generator: generate your own.
• Assessment of Propp (in German)
• A Fairytale Outline Generator: based on Propp's Morphology

The Prague Circle and Structuralism

The Moscow Linguistic Circle founded by Jakobson was more directly concerned with recent developments in linguistics than Eichenbaum's group. Jakobson left Moscow for Prague in 1920 and in 1926 co-founded the Prague Linguistic Circle, which embodied similar interests, especially in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure.

The Prague Linguistic Circle founded as Cercle Linguistiqe de Prague or in Czech Pražský lingvistický kroužek became known around the world as the Prague School. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis during the years 1928–1939. It has had significant continuing influence on linguistics and semiotics. After WWII, the circle was disbanded but the Prague School continued as a major force in linguistic functionalism (distinct from the Copenhagen school or English Firthian — later Hallidean — linguistics).

The PLC included Russian emigrés such as Roman Jakobson, Nikolay Trubetzkoy, and Sergei Karcevskiy, as well as the famous Czech literary scholars René Wellek and Jan Mukařovský. Among its founders was the eminent Czech linguist Vilém Mathesius (President of PLC until his death in 1945).

The Circle's work before WWII was published in the Travaux Linguistique and its theses outlined in a collective contribution to the World's Congress of Slavists. The Travaux were briefly resurrected in the 60s with a special issue on the concept of center and periphery and are now being published again by John Benjamins. The Circle's Czech work is published in Slovo a slovesnost. English translations of the Circle's seminal works were published by the Czech linguist Josef Vachek in several collections.

I.A. Richards

(work in progress)

The New Criticism

(work in progress)

Stylistics

(work in progress)

Neoformalisms

(work in progress)

Critics of formalism

(work in progress)

Bibliography of formalists and their critics

• Lemon, Lee T., and Marion J. Reis. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965.
• Shklovsky, Viktor. Theory of Prose. Trans. Benjamin Sher. Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive, 1990.
• Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. Ed. William Keach. Chicago: Haymarket, 2005.
• Wellek, René, and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. 3rd. rev. ed. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.

Bibliography of accounts of formalism

• Erlich, Victor. Russian Formalism: History—Doctrine. 3rd ed. New Haven: Yale UP, 1981.

es:Formalismo (literatura) Russian Formalism includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars (Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Grigory Vinokur) who revolutionised literary criticism between 1914 and the 1930s by establishing the specificity and autonomy of poetic language and literature. Russian Formalism exerted a major influence on thinkers such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Yuri Lotman, and on structuralism as a whole. The movement's members are widely considered as the founders of modern literary criticism. Under Stalin it became a pejorative term for elitist art.

Russian Formalism was a diverse movement, producing no unified doctrine, and no consensus amongst its proponents on a central aim to their endeavours. In fact, "Russian Formalism" describes two distinct movements: the OPOJAZ (Obscestvo izucenija POeticeskogo JAZyka - Society for the Study of Poetic Language) in St. Petersburg and the Linguistic Circle in Moscow. Therefore, it is more precise to refer to the "Russian Formalists", rather than to use the more encompassing and abstract term of "Formalism".

The term "Formalism" was first used by the adversaries of the movement, and as such it conveys a meaning explicitly rejected by the Formalists themselves. In the words of one of the foremost Formalists, Boris Eichenbaum: "It is difficult to recall who coined this name, but it was not a very felicitous coinage. It might have been convenient as a simplified battle cry but it fails, as an objective term, to delimit the activities of the "Society for the Study of Poetic Language...."[1]

There is one idea that united the Formalists: the autonomous nature of poetic language and its specificity as an object of study for literary criticism. The Formalists' main endeavour consisted in defining a set of properties specific to poetic language (be it poetry or prose) recognisable by their "artfulness" and consequently analysing them as such. A clear illustration of this may be provided by the main argument of one of Viktor Shklovsky's (the founder of the OPOJAZ) early texts, "Art as Device" (Iskusstvo kak priem, 1916): art is a sum of literary and artistic devices that the artist manipulates to craft his work.

Shklovsky's main objective in "Art as Device" is to dispute the conception of literature and literary criticism common in Russia at that time. Broadly speaking, literature was considered, on the one hand, to be a social or political product, whereby it was then interpreted (in the tradition of the great critic Belinsky) as an integral part of social and political history. On the other hand, literature was considered to be the personal expression of an author's world vision, expressed by means of images and symbols. In both cases, literature is not considered as such, but evaluated on a broad socio-political or a vague psychologico-impressionistic background. The aim of Shklovsky is therefore to isolate and define something specific to literature (or "poetic language"): these, as we saw, are the "devices" which make up the "artfulness" of literature.

Formalists do not agree with one another on exactly what a "device" (priem) is, nor how these devices are used or how they are to be analysed in a given text. The central (and revolutionary) idea however is more general: poetic language possesses specific properties, which can be analysed as such. This, it may be argued, was already the view defended by Aristotle in his Poetics.

In the Soviet period, the authorities further developed the term's pejorative associations to cover any art which used complex techniques and forms accessible only to the elite, rather than being simplified for "the people" (as in socialist realism).

There is no direct historical relationship between New Criticism and Russian Formalism, each having developed at around the same time but independent of each other. However, despite this, there are several similarities: for example, both movements showed an interest in considering literature on its own terms (instead of focus on its relationship to politicial, cultural or historical externalities), a focus on the literary devices and the craft of the author, and a critical focus on poetry.

[1] Boris Eichenbaum, "Vokrug voprosa o formalistah" (Russian: "Вокруг Вопроса о Фоpмалистах") (Around the question on the Formalists), Pecat' i revolucija, no5 (1924), pp.2-3.

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