Formalism

The Formalist movement appeared in the Soviet Union in the 1910s and 1920s. Its leading theorists were Victor Shklovsky, Eikenbaum, and Murakofsky. The movement’s attentions were deliberately focused on the formal specificity of literary works. Victor Shklovsky said that literature has the ability to make us see the world anew, to make that which has become familiar, strange again. The Formalists wanted to know how literature works and how it achieves its defamiliarization effects. They sought to define literature’s distinct ‘literariness’ and found this in the devices that distinguished literary from ordinary language. For example, poetry achieves defamiliarisation by employing devices like repetition, rhyme, meter, stanzas etc, which ordinary language does not use.

What these devices have in common is that they always draw attention to themselves: they remind us that we are dealing with language and not the real world because they signal their own difference from the language that we use in the real world. Roman Jakobson said in 1921 that poetry is a form of language characterized by an orientation towards its own form. If a work of art draws attention to its own form, then that form becomes a part of its content: its form is part of what it communicates. Later, the Prague structuralists replaced defamiliarization with ‘foregrounding’. Jan Murakofsky, a Russian formalist said that poetic language is an effect of ‘foregrounding of utterance’.

Unlike defamiliarization, which would not seem to affect its immediate textual environment, foregrounding has the effect that it ‘automizes’ neighboring textual elements. It draws the reader’s attention to itself and obscures whatever else may be going on beside it. While defamiliarisation points to a contrastive, but static relationship between the defamiliarising element and the other elements, foregrounding points to the dynamism of the relationship: what one element gains through foregrounding is lost by other elements that constitute its background. In other words, foregrounding sees the text as a structure of interrelated elements. 

(Foregrounding is structuralist in orientation)

A further enduring distinction introduced by formalism was in the field of narrative, between ‘syuzet’ and ‘fabula’. Vladimir Propp (not a formalist) developed on these ideas in his book ‘The Morphology of the Russian Folktale’. Here he tried to show how a hundred different tales are in fact variations or syuzhets of one and the same underlying formula or the fabula. He further illustrated how this structure works through ‘actants’ or ‘functions’ such as a helper in a tale.

Early Formalism looked at the study of literature as a ‘systematic science’, but there were still certain issues with its tenets. First, it saw a poem as a totality of its ‘devices’ that were not related in any way. Next, it assumed that the ‘literariness’ of literature was the product of the inherent qualities of those devices. These qualities and the resulting literariness can be pointed at. Moreover, the Formalists were interested in establishing general rules, and although one rule was that literariness is created by defamiliarising devices, it was impossible to establish rules with regard to these devices.

Later, it was brought out that defamiliarisation works by way of contrast, of ‘difference’. The way/s in which literary language differed from ordinary language was only one step to study how literature worked. They later brought out that the process of familiarization is responsible for our relative blindness with regard to our environment, including language at work within literature itself. Familiarization worked at two levels: that of a single literary work and that of literature as a whole. Next, the Formalists started looking for defamiliarization within literary works themselves. They showed through examples from poetry that whether a certain poetic technique serves as a defamiliarising device depends on the larger background. So, the ability to defamiliarize our perception is not a quality that a technique inherently possesses, it is in fact a a matter of how that technique ‘functions’ within a given literary work, and that function can change from text to text. What counts is that way and the extent to which it differs from its environment.

Every literary technique then, can have either a familiarizing or a defamiliarising effect. Everything depends on the way it functions within a given text. Differentiation is the crucial factor. This led to a view of the literary work as a system that establishes a textual environment that is again and again made new with the help of defamiliarising techniques.

It is not only the individual literary work that can be seen as a system, as a structure, in which everything is interrelated and interdependent, but literature as a whole can and should be seen in those terms. The individual texts that that together constitute ‘literature’ first of all position themselves with reference to other individual texts, to the genre to which they belong, and then to the whole corpus of texts that we call literature.

Difference between new criticism and formalism

For the New critics, the formal aspects of literature were not unimportant because from their perspective, meaning was always bound up with form. They were interested in the form in which a poem presented itself, because a close scrutiny of its formal aspects would reveal the complex oppositions and tensions that constituted the poem’s real meaning. However, the formalist ignored literature’s referential function, the way it reflects the world in which we live, and gave it an autonomous status, in what Jakobson called ‘literariness’. Literary language always draws attention to itself. Whereas practical criticism and new criticism concentrated on the individual meaning of texts, Formalist wanted to discover general laws that make literature work.