Russian Formalism

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

Main article: 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, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOYAZ) 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 was the founder of the OPOJAZ (Obshchestvo izuchenija POeticheskogo JAZyka—Society for the Study of Poetic Language), one of the two groups, with the Moscow Linguistic Circle, which developed the critical theories and techniques of Russian Formalism.

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. He explained this idea as follows:

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)

In other words, art presents things in a new, unfamiliar light by way of formal manipulation. This is what is artful about art.

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.

He died in Leningrad (St. Petersburg).

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]):

Literary science had to have a firm theoretical basis and an accurate terminology.
The structural laws of a specific field of literature had to be established before it was related to other fields.
The evolution of literature must be studied as a system. All evidence, whether literary or non-literary must be analysed functionally.
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.
A synchronic system is not a mere agglomerate of contemporaneous phenomena catalogued. 'Systems' mean hierarchical organisation.
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.
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.
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

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

Сюжет "Горя от ума", 1943

External links

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:

The villain (struggles against the hero)
The donor (prepares the hero or gives the hero some magical object)
The (magical) helper (helps the hero in the quest)
The princess (person the hero marries, often sought for during the narrative)
Her father
The dispatcher (character who makes the lack known and sends the hero off)
The hero or victim/ seeker hero, reacts to the donor, weds the princess
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

Main article: Prague linguistic circle

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

Main article: 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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