FORMALISM and RUSSIAN FORMALISM
FORMALISM is, in the most general sense, the cultivation of artistic
technique at the expense of subject-matter, either in literary practice or in literary
criticism. In this second sense, the aim of a Formalist critique of literature is to
provide readers not only with the means of explaining the content of works
(“What, specifically, does this say?”), but also with the critical tools needed for
evaluating the artistic quality of individual works and writers (“How well is it
said?”). The term has been applied, often in a derogatory sense, to a number of
types of criticism that emphasize a work’s structural design or pattern, or its style
and manner its form in isolation from its content. In Formalism, it is usually these
formal characteristics upon which aesthetic evaluations are based. The concept
of form itself has played a somewhat troubled role in critical discussions of art
and literature at least since Plato and the Phaedrus, when the notion was poorly
defined for the first, but by no means last, time. In recent years charges of
Formalism have been leveled at New Criticism, deconstruction, some
psychoanalytic criticism, and even some varieties of new historicism. Primarily
these accusations come from leftist or liberal critics who believe that literary
criticism should be oriented toward social criticism more than a discussion of
aesthetic abstractions. The term formalism also is often used in contemporary
theoretical parlance to denote the Russian Formalists, especially Victor
Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp, and Roman Jakobson, whose work became
important to later movements like the Czech Prague Circle, French structuralism,
and semiotics.
Formalist criticism, which now survives less as a distinct movement and
more as an influential method, proved most useful in the analysis of poetry and
shorter works of fiction--longer works like novels were too unwieldy. For it was
the Formalist procedure not only to look closely at isolated passages of the text,
but also to relate the functioning of parts of the structure to the structure as a
whole.
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RUSSIAN FORMALISM: a school of literary theory and analysis that emerged in
Russia around 1915, devoting itself to the study of literariness, i.e. the sum of
"devices" that distinguish literary language from ordinary language. In reaction
against the vagueness of previous literary theories, it attempted a scientific
description of literature (especially poetry) as a special use of language with
observable features. This meant deliberately disregarding the contents of literary
works, and thus inviting strong disapproval from Marxist critics, for whom
formalism was a term of reproach. With the consolidation of Stalin's dictatorship
around 1929, Formalism was silenced as a heresy in the Soviet Union, and its
center of research migrated to Prague in the 1930's. Along with "literariness," the
most important concept of the school was that of defamiliarization: instead of
seeing literature as a "reflection" of the world, Victor Shklovsky, Boris
Tomashevsky, and their Formalist followers saw it as a linguistic dislocation, or a
"making strange". In the period of Czech Formalism, Jan Mukarovsky further
refined this notion in terms of foregrounding. In their studies of narrative, the
Formalists also clarified the distinction between plot (sjuzet) and story (fabula).
Apart from Shklovsky and his associate Boris Eikhenbaum, the most prominent
of the Russian Formalists was Roman Jakobson, who was active both in Moscow
and in Prague before introducing Formalist theories to the United States.
A
somewhat distinct Russian group is the "Bakhtin school" comprising Mikhail
Bakhtin, Pavlev Medvedev, and Valentine Voloshinov; these theorists combined
elements of Formalism and Marxism in their accounts of verbal multi-accentuality
(the ability of words and other linguistic signs to carry more than one meaning
according to the contexts in which they are used) and of the dialogic text.
Rediscovered in the West in the 1960's the work of the Russian Formalists has
had an important influence on structuralist theories of literature, and on some of
the more recent varieties of Marxist literary criticism.
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