Faculty of Humanities and Social Science > English

Formalism

(1/3) > >>

Gopa B. Caesar:
Formalism

Original a Russian movement
Heterogeneous school
Flourished during Russian Revolution—time of great artistic experimentation
Attempt to create scientific method of literary analysis

2 Main groups
Moscow Linguistic Circle—led by Jakobson
Opayaz—Society for the Study of Poetic Language—led by Victor Shklovsky

Formalists had to 1st counter academic critics’ preoccupations with psychology and biography
Strived to establish:
-Science or “poetics” of literature
-Linguistic basis of literature and especially poetry
-Distinctive quality of literature/literariness
-Importance of formal literary devices
-Theory of literary evolution
-Form and technique as part of content

Stalin forced critics to support socialist realism

Emphasizes the importance of artistic form

Sees literary language as language made strange

Upholds the form and structure of art (“artness”) as special and distinct from the mundane, ordinary, and practical

Theorizes defamiliarization—power of literary language and the literary to defamiliarize familiar objects

Gopa B. Caesar:
-Influential to American New Criticism and Structuralism
-Important distinctions between Formalism and New Criticism
-Formalists sought to theorize nature of “literary”
-Formalists sought to establish literary evolution
-New Critics emphasize individual literary document
-Certainly did influence New Criticism
-Also influenced Jakobson’s Prague School of Structuralism and French Post-Structuralism

Gopa B. Caesar:
Boris Eichenbaum (1886-1959)

Prominent figure in Formalism
Eventually shifted critical views—came to privilege biography
Presents Skhlovsky as intellectual leader of movement
Dubs literary language as language made strange

Gopa B. Caesar:
From The Theory of the ‘Formal Method’ (1926/1927)

Essay considers accomplishments and developments in Formalism’s 1st decade
Formal method emerges from desire for scientific method for studying literature
Formalist’s really ask of what subject matter is literary study
Trying to summarize work of Formalists—not create dogma
Formalist method not a program or a doctrine
Method adjusts theories in accordance with materials
Formalists only attempted to create independent science of literature and literary study
Formalists remained isolated from “divine” aesthetics and ready-made theories
Radical ideas
Formalists created unconventional poetics
Pre-Formalist literary thinkers used antiquated psychological and historical models
Battle between Symbolists and Formalists

Gopa B. Caesar:
From The Theory of the ‘Formal Method’ (1926/1927) Cont.

Formalists tried to unrest politics from Symbolists
Formalist passion for empirical positivism
Formalist ambition for specific scientific approach
Must study specifics of literature that distinguish it from other material
Jakobson—object is literariness, not literature
Formalists turned to linguistics rather than history or aesthetics
Formalists’ experiments in nonsense language
Used to defy claims of Symbolists
Dilemma of meaningless language
Symbolists claim of transcendent meaning
Formalists addressed question of sound in verse
Symbolists upheld primacy of image-symbol
Formalist’s reconfigure image as part of poetic language
Defamiliarization—new and special concept of mundane object
Poetic vs. practical language
Shklovsky’s work on plot and stylistic devices
Plot as constituting specific peculiarity of narrative art
Genetic approach cannot (alone?) explain literary conventions
Works of art defined by relation to other works of art
Newer work does not have new content—changes old form
Formalists become interested in literary history
Cannot see literary work in isolation
Formalists went beyond “Formalism”

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page