FORMALISM and RUSSIAN FORMALISM

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.

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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