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58-641: 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 ( Obshchestvo Izucheniia Poeticheskogo Yazyka , Society for the Study of Poetic Language) in St. Petersburg and the Moscow Linguistic Circle . Therefore, it is more precise to refer to

116-480: A biological organism, is not an unstructured whole; its parts are hierarchically integrated. Hence the definition of the device has been extended to its function in text. "Since the binary opposition – material vs. device – cannot account for the organic unity of the work, Zhirmunsky augmented it in 1919 with a third term, the teleological concept of style as the unity of devices" (Steiner, "Russian Formalism" 19). The analogy between biology and literary theory provided

174-536: A language of estrangement, speech cannot be skimmed through. "In the routines of everyday speech, our perceptions of and responses to reality become stale, blunted, and as the Formalists would say 'automatized'. By forcing us into a dramatic awareness of language, literature refreshes these habitual responses and renders objects more perceptible" (Eagleton 3). One of the sharpest critiques of the Formalist project

232-424: A mythic "first time" of naïve experience, the loss of which to automatization is to be restored by aesthetic perceptual fullness. The influence of Russian Formalism on twentieth-century art and culture is largely due to the literary technique of defamiliarization or 'making strange', and has also been linked to Freud's notion of the uncanny . In Das Unheimliche ("The Uncanny"), Freud states that "the uncanny

290-564: A new meaning in it . According to literary theorist Uri Margolin : Defamiliarization of that which is or has become familiar or taken for granted, hence automatically perceived, is the basic function of all devices. And with defamiliarization come both the slowing down and the increased difficulty (impeding) of the process of reading and comprehending and an awareness of the artistic procedures (devices) causing them. The technique appears in English Romantic poetry, particularly in

348-483: A simplified battle cry but it fails, as an objective term, to delimit the activities of the 'Society for the Study of Poetic Language'." Russian Formalism is the name now given to a mode of criticism which emerged from two different groups, The Moscow Linguistic Circle (1915) and the Opojaz group (1916). Although Russian Formalism is often linked to American New Criticism because of their similar emphasis on close reading,

406-404: 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

464-432: A story that is defamiliarized by unfamiliar plotting. Sterne uses temporal displacements, digressions, and causal disruptions (e.g., placing the effects before their causes) to slow down the reader's ability to reassemble the (familiar) story. As a result, the syuzhet "makes strange" the fabula. Shklovsky's defamiliarization can also be compared to Jacques Derrida 's concept of différance : What Shklovskij wants to show

522-421: 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 or "priyom" is, nor how these devices are used or how they are to be analyzed in a given text. The central idea

580-593: A variation and combination of techniques and devices devoid of a temporal, psychological, or philosophical element. Shklovsky very soon realized that this model had to be expanded to embrace, for example, contemporaneous and diachronic literary traditions (Garson 403). Disappointed by the constraints of the mechanistic method some Russian Formalists adopted the organic model. "They utilized the similarity between organic bodies and literary phenomena in two different ways: as it applied to individual works and to literary genres" (Steiner, "Russian Formalism" 19). An artefact, like

638-468: Is Vladimir Propp 's "Morphology of the Folktale" (1928). Having shifted the focus of study from an isolated technique to a hierarchically structured whole, the organic Formalists overcame the main shortcoming of the mechanists. Still, both groups failed to account for the literary changes which affect not only devices and their functions but genres as well. The diachronic dimension was incorporated into

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696-619: Is fundamentally different than the language that we use every day because it is more difficult to understand: "Poetic speech is formed speech . Prose is ordinary speech – economical, easy, proper, the goddess of prose [ dea prosae ] is a goddess of the accurate, facile type, of the "direct" expression of a child." This difference is the key to the creation of art and the prevention of "over-automatization," which causes an individual to "function as though by formula." This distinction between artistic language and everyday language, for Shklovsky, applies to all artistic forms: The purpose of art

754-463: Is superfluous or disengaged, … serves well as an ultimate model for the Formalist approach to versification study" (335). In "A Postscript to the Discussion on Grammar of Poetry," Jakobson redefines poetics as "the linguistic scrutiny of the poetic function within the context of verbal messages in general, and within poetry in particular" (23). He fervently defends linguists' right to contribute to

812-402: Is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar," however, this is not a fear of the unknown, but more of a feeling about something being both strange and familiar. The connection between ostranenie and the uncanny can be seen where Freud muses on the technique of literary uncanniness: "It is true that the writer creates a kind of uncertainty in us in

870-525: Is that more general: poetic language possesses specific properties, which can be analyzed as such. Some OPOJAZ members argued that poetic language was the major artistic device. Shklovsky insisted that not all artistic texts defamiliarize language, and that some of them achieve defamiliarization ( ostranenie ) by manipulating composition and narrative. The Formalist movement attempted to discriminate systematically between art and non-art. Therefore, its notions are organized in terms of polar oppositions. One of

928-466: Is that of the German Romantic poet and philosopher Novalis : "The art of estranging in a given way, making a subject strange and yet familiar and alluring, that is Romantic poetics." To illustrate what he means by defamiliarization, Shklovsky uses examples from Tolstoy , whom he cites as using the technique throughout his works: "The narrator of ' Kholstomer ,' for example, is a horse, and it

986-426: Is that the operation of defamiliarization and its consequent perception in the literary system is like the winding of a watch (the introduction of energy into a physical system): both "originate" difference, change, value, motion, presence. Considered against the general and functional background of Derridian différance, what Shklovsky calls "perception" can be considered a matrix for production of difference. Since

1044-509: Is the artistic technique of presenting to audiences common things in an unfamiliar or strange way so they could gain new perspectives and see the world differently. According to the Russian formalists who coined the term, it is the central concept of art and poetry. The concept has influenced 20th-century art and theory, ranging over movements including Dada , postmodernism , epic theatre , science fiction , and philosophy; additionally, it

1102-408: Is the horse's point of view (rather than a person's) that makes the content of the story seem unfamiliar." As a Russian Formalist, many of Shklovsky's examples use Russian authors and Russian dialects: "And currently Maxim Gorky is changing his diction from the old literary language to the new literary colloquialism of Leskov . Ordinary speech and literary language have thereby changed places (see

1160-533: 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. Thus, defamiliarization serves as a means to force individuals to recognize artistic language: In studying poetic speech in its phonetic and lexical structure as well as in its characteristic distribution of words and in

1218-423: Is used as a tactic by recent movements such as culture jamming . The term "defamiliarization" was first coined in 1917 by Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky in his essay "Art as Device" (alternate translation: "Art as Technique"). Shklovsky invented the term as a means to "distinguish poetic from practical language on the basis of the former's perceptibility." Essentially, he is stating that poetic language

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1276-435: Is used in day-to-day communication to convey information. . . . In poetic language, according to Lev Jakubinsky, 'the practical goal retreats into background and linguistic combinations acquire a value in themselves. When this happens, language becomes de-familiarized and utterances become poetic ' " ( The Language of Literature and Its Meaning , 68). Eichenbaum criticised Shklovsky and Jakubinsky for not disengaging poetry from

1334-482: The Soviet period under Joseph Stalin , 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 ). Russian formalism was not a uniform movement; it comprised diverse theoreticians whose views were shaped through methodological debate that proceeded from

1392-451: 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 Eikhenbaum : "It is difficult to recall who coined this name, but it was not a very felicitous coinage. It might have been convenient as

1450-456: The 1960s and 1970s. "And, insofar as the literary-theoretical paradigms which Russian Formalism inaugurated are still with us, it stands not as a historical curiosity but a vital presence in the theoretical discourse of our day" (Steiner, "Russian Formalism" 29). There is no direct historical relationship between New Criticism and Russian Formalism, each having developed at around the same time (RF: 1910-20s and NC: 1940s-50s) but independently of

1508-531: The Formal method and focused on technique and device. "Literary works, according to this model, resemble machines: they are the result of an intentional human activity in which a specific skill transforms raw material into a complex mechanism suitable for a particular purpose" (Steiner, "Russian Formalism" 18). This approach strips the literary artifact from its connection with the author, reader, and historical background. A clear illustration of this may be provided by

1566-476: The Formalist study of literature: first, literature itself, or rather, those of its features that distinguish it from other human activities, must constitute the object of inquiry of literary theory; second, "literary facts" have to be prioritized over the metaphysical commitments of literary criticism, whether philosophical, aesthetic or psychological (Steiner, "Russian Formalism" 16). To achieve these objectives several models were developed. The formalists agreed on

1624-441: The Formalists, literature is set apart because it is just that: set apart. The use of devices such as imagery, rhythm, and meter is what separates "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns (Nabokov Lolita 9)", from "the assignment for next week is on page eighty four." This estrangement serves literature by forcing

1682-472: The Russian Formalists regarded themselves as developers of a science of criticism and are more interested in a discovery of systematic method for the analysis of poetic text. Russian formalism is distinctive for its emphasis on the functional role of literary devices and its original conception of literary history. Russian Formalists advocated a "scientific" method for studying poetic language, to

1740-456: The Study of Poetic Language") was a prominent group of linguists and literary critics in St. Petersburg founded in 1916 and dissolved by the early 1930s. The group included Viktor Shklovsky , Boris Eikhenbaum , Osip Brik , Boris Kušner and Yury Tynianov . Along with the Moscow linguistic circle it was responsible for the development of Russian formalism and literary semiotics . It

1798-422: The arrangement of the entire text" (Jakobson 23). Jakobson opposes the view that "an average reader" uninitiated into the science of language is presumably insensitive to verbal distinctions: "Speakers employ a complex system of grammatical relations inherent to their language even though they are not capable of fully abstracting and defining them" (30). A systematic inquiry into the poetic problems of grammar and

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1856-473: The autonomous nature of poetic language and its specificity as an object of study for literary criticism. Their main endeavor consisted in defining a set of properties specific to poetic language, be it poetry or prose, recognizable by their "artfulness" and consequently analyzing them as such. The OPOJAZ, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language group, headed by Viktor Shklovsky was primarily concerned with

1914-472: The beginning by not letting us know, no doubt purposely, whether he is taking us into the real world or into a purely fantastic one of his own creation." When "the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality," they can situate supernatural events, such as the animation of inanimate objects, in the quotidian, day-to-day reality of the modern world, defamiliarizing the reader and provoking an uncanny feeling. Defamiliarization has been associated with

1972-422: The center of their inquiry. As Warner remarks, "Jakobson makes it clear that he rejects completely any notion of emotion as the touchstone of literature. For Jakobson, the emotional qualities of a literary work are secondary to and dependent on purely verbal, linguistic facts" (71). As Ashima Shrawan explains, "The theoreticians of OPOJAZ distinguished between practical and poetic language . . . . Practical language

2030-408: The characteristic thought structures compounded from the words, we find everywhere the artistic trademark – that is, we find material obviously created to remove the automatism of perception; the author's purpose is to create the vision which results from that deautomatized perception. A work is created "artistically" so that its perception is impeded and the greatest possible effect is produced through

2088-549: The concept in different, often more complex, terms (to differ). Shklovskij's formulations negate or cancel out the existence/possibility of a "real" perception: variously, by (1) the familiar Formalist denial of a link between literature and life, connoting their status as non-communicating vessels, (2) always, as if compulsively, referring to a real experience in terms of empty, dead, and automatized repetition and recognition, and (3) implicitly locating real perception at an unspecifiable temporally anterior and spatially other place, at

2146-548: The distinction between poetic and practical language to the overarching problem of the historical-literary study. It is mainly with this theoretical focus that the Formalist School is credited even by its adversaries such as Yefimov: The diverging and converging forces of Russian formalism gave rise to the Prague school of structuralism in the mid-1920s and provided a model for the literary wing of French structuralism in

2204-448: The exclusion of traditional psychological and cultural-historical approaches. As Erlich points out, "It was intent upon delimiting literary scholarship from contiguous disciplines such as psychology, sociology, intellectual history, and the list theoreticians focused on the 'distinguishing features' of literature, on the artistic devices peculiar to imaginative writing" ( The New Princeton Encyclopedia 1101). Two general principles underlie

2262-422: The frame of reference for genre studies and genre criticism. "Just as each individual organism shares certain features with other organisms of its type, and species that resemble each other belong to the same genus, the individual work is similar to other works of its form and homologous literary forms belong to the same genre" (Steiner, "Russian Formalism" 19). The most widely known work carried out in this tradition

2320-442: The grammatical problems of poetry is therefore justifiable; moreover, the linguistic conception of poetics reveals the ties between form and content indiscernible to the literary critic (Jakobson 34). Roman Jakobson described literature as "organized violence committed on ordinary speech." Literature constitutes a deviation from average speech that intensifies, invigorates, and estranges the mundane speech patterns. In other words, for

2378-470: The main argument of one of Viktor Shklovsky 's early texts, "Art as Device" ( Iskússtvo kak priyóm , 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

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2436-425: The most famous dichotomies introduced by the mechanistic Formalists is a distinction between story and plot, or fabula and " sjuzhet ". Story, fabula, is a chronological sequence of events, whereas plot, sjuzhet, can unfold in non-chronological order. The events can be artistically arranged by means of such devices as repetition, parallelism, gradation, and retardation. The mechanistic methodology reduced literature to

2494-455: The other hand, literature has now begun to show a tendency towards the use of dialects and/or barbarisms." Narrative plots can also be defamiliarized. The Russian formalists distinguished between the fabula or basic story stuff of a narrative and the syuzhet or the formation of the story stuff into a concrete plot . For Shklovsky, the syuzhet is the fabula defamiliarized. Shklovsky cites Lawrence Sterne 's Tristram Shandy as an example of

2552-482: The other. Despite this, there are several similarities: for example, both movements showed an interest in considering literature on its own terms, instead of focusing on its relationship to political, cultural or historical externalities, a focus on the literary devices and the craft of the author, and a critical focus on poetry. OPOJAZ OPOJAZ (ОПОЯЗ) ( Russian : Общество изучения Поэтического Языка , O bščestvo izučenija PO ètičeskogo JAZ yka , "Society for

2610-489: The outside world completely, since they used the emotional connotations of sound as a criterion for word choice. This recourse to psychology threatened the ultimate goal of formalism to investigate literature in isolation. A definitive example of focus on poetic language is the study of Russian versification by Osip Brik . Apart from the most obvious devices such as rhyme , onomatopoeia , alliteration , and assonance , Brik explores various types of sound repetitions, e.g.

2668-605: The poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht , whose Verfremdungseffekt ("estrangement effect") was a potent element of his approach to theatre. In fact, as Willett points out, Verfremdungseffekt is "a translation of the Russian critic Viktor Shklovskij's phrase 'Priem Ostranenija', or 'device for making strange'". Brecht, in turn, has been highly influential for artists and film-makers including Jean-Luc Godard and Yvonne Rainer . Science fiction critic Simon Spiegel , who defines defamiliarization as "the formal-rhetorical act of making

2726-416: The poetry of Wordsworth , and was defined in the following way by Samuel Taylor Coleridge , in his Biographia Literaria : "To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar ... this is the character and privilege of genius." Preceding Coleridge's formulation

2784-448: The reader to think about what might have been an ordinary piece of writing about a common life experience in a more thoughtful way. A piece of writing in a novel versus a piece of writing in a fishing magazine. At the very least, literature should encourage readers to stop and look closer at scenes and happenings they otherwise might have skimmed through uncaring. The reader is not meant to be able to skim through literature. When addressed in

2842-441: The ring (kol'co), the juncture (styk), the fastening ( skrep ), and the tail-piece (koncovka) ("Zvukovye povtory" (Sound Repetitions); 1917). He ranks phones according to their contribution to the "sound background" (zvukovoj fon) attaching the greatest importance to stressed vowels and the least to reduced vowels . As Mandelker indicates, "his methodological restraint and his conception of an artistic 'unity' wherein no element

2900-491: The self-regulating literary system is compelled to rejuvenate itself constantly. Even though the systemic Formalists incorporated the social dimension into literary theory and acknowledged the analogy between language and literature the figures of author and reader were pushed to the margins of this paradigm. The figures of author and reader were likewise downplayed by the linguistic Formalists Lev Jakubinsky and Roman Jakobson . The adherents of this model placed poetic language at

2958-499: The slowness of the perception. This technique is meant to be especially useful in distinguishing poetry from prose, for, as Aristotle said, "poetic language must appear strange and wonderful." As writer Anaïs Nin discussed in her 1968 book The Novel of the Future : It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see

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3016-450: 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" (180, 171). The leaders of the movement began to be politically persecuted in the 1920s, when Stalin came to power, which largely put an end to their inquiries. In

3074-411: The study of poetry and demonstrates the aptitude of the modern linguistics to the most insightful investigation of a poetic message. The legitimacy of "studies devoted to questions of metrics or strophics, alliterations or rhymes, or to questions of poets' vocabulary" is hence undeniable (23). Linguistic devices that transform a verbal act into poetry range "from the network of distinctive features to

3132-491: The term différance refers to the dual meanings of the French word difference to mean both "to differ" and "to defer", defamiliarization draws attention to the use of common language in such a way as to alter one's perception of an easily understandable object or concept. The use of defamiliarization both differs and defers, since the use of the technique alters one's perception of a concept (to defer), and forces one to think about

3190-449: The work of Vyacheslav Ivanov and many others)." Defamiliarization also includes the use of foreign languages within a work. At the time that Shklovsky was writing, there was a change in the use of language in both literature and everyday spoken Russian. As Shklovsky puts it: "Russian literary language, which was originally foreign to Russia , has so permeated the language of the people that it has blended with their conversation. On

3248-665: The work of the systemic Formalists. The main proponent of the "systemo-functional" model was Yury Tynyanov. "In light of his concept of literary evolution as a struggle among competing elements, the method of parody, 'the dialectic play of devices,' become an important vehicle of change" (Steiner, "Russian Formalism" 21). Since literature constitutes part of the overall cultural system, the literary dialectic participates in cultural evolution. As such, it interacts with other human activities, for instance, linguistic communication. The communicative domain enriches literature with new constructive principles. In response to these extra-literary factors

3306-418: 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

3364-621: Was dissolved under political pressure as "formalism" came to be a political term of opprobrium in the Soviet state. This article about a linguistics organization is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This article about a literary society or organization is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This article about Russian culture is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Defamiliarization Defamiliarization or ostranenie (Russian: остранение , IPA: [ɐstrɐˈnʲenʲɪjə] )

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