Literariness

Literariness is the organisation of language which through special linguistic and formal properties
distinguishes literary texts from non-literary texts (Baldick 2008). The defining features of a literary work
do not reside in extraliterary conditions such as history or sociocultural phenomena under which a
literary text might have been created but in the form of the language that is used. Thus, literariness is
defined as being the feature that makes a given work a literary work. It distinguishes a literary work
from ordinary texts by using certain artistic devices such as metre, rhyme, and other patterns of sound
and repetition.

literariness, the sum of special linguistic and formal properties that distinguish literary texts from
non‐literary texts, according to the theories of Russian Formalism. The leading Formalist Roman
Jakobson declared in 1919 that ‘the object of literary science is not literature but literariness, that
is, what makes a given work a literary work’. Rather than seek abstract qualities like imagination
as the basis of literariness, the Formalists set out to define the observable ‘devices’ by which
literary texts—especially poems— foreground their own language, in metre, rhyme, and other
patterns of sound and repetition. Literariness was understood in terms of defamiliarization, as a
series of deviations from ‘ordinary’ language. It thus appears as a relation between different uses
of language, in which the contrasted uses are liable to shift according to changed contexts. See
also function, literature.

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/literariness#ixzz3CeaIcp3H

History
The term ‘literariness’ was first introduced by the Russian Formalist Roman Jacobson in 1921.
He declared in his work Modern Russian Poetry that ‘the object of literary science is not
literature but literariness, i.e. what makes a given work a literary work’ (Das 2005, p. 78).
Russian formalism preceded the Russian Revolution as it originated in the second decade of the
20th century and flourished in the 1920s. It had its origin in two centres: the Moscow Linguistics
Circle and the St. Petersburg based group OPOJAZ (the Society for the Study of Poetic
Language) (Makaryk 2000, p. 53). The focus of their attention was on the analysis of the features
that make up literary texts in opposition to the former traditional study of literature which
focussed on studying literature in conjunction with other disciplines such as history, biography,
sociology and psychology (Makaryk 2000, p. 53). It insisted that literary scholars should solely
be concerned with the component parts of a literary text and should exclude all intuition or
imagination. It emphasised that the focus resides on the literary creation itself rather than the
author/reader or any other extrinsic systems (Erlich 1973, p. 628).

To Russian Formalists, and especially to Victor Shklovsky, literariness, or the distinction

between literary and non-literary texts, is accomplished through ‘defamiliarization’ (Ekegren
1999, p. 44). A main characteristic of literary texts is that they make the language unfamiliar to
the reader and deviate from ordinary language. They have the capacity to defamiliarise our
habitual perceptions of the real world and the capacity to estrange it (Ekegren 1999, p. 44).
Shklovsky stated that the purpose of art is to disrupt the automatic response to things and give it
a new and unforeseen perception (Makaryk 2000, p. 54). Defamiliarised language will draw
attention to itself: as our perceptions are automatic, it will force the reader to notice the
unfamiliar through a variety of different techniques i.e. wordplay, rhythm, figures of speech and
so on (Lemon 1965, p. 5).

Another key term in defamiliarisation and literariness introduced by Shklovsky is the concept of
‘plot’. For Shklovsky, the plot is the most important feature of a narrative as he claims that there
is a distinctive difference between ‘story’ and ‘plot’. The story of a narrative entails the normal
temporal sequence of events whereas the plot is a distortion of the normal storyline and thus
associated with defamiliarisation (Williams 2004, p. 5).

The idea of defamiliarisation was further explored by the Prague School Theory with one of the
main scholars, Jan Mukarovsky, and by later developments in the theory of Roman Jakobson.
Jan Mukarovsky postulates the idea that linguistic deviation, such as foregrounding, is the
hallmark of poetic texts (Pilkington 2000, p. 16). He claimed that the use of linguistic devices
such as tone, metaphor, ambiguity, patterning and parallelism distinguish ordinary language from
poetic language. In the 1960s, Jacobson introduced the poetic function of literary texts and
further developed the idea that the use of certain linguistic choices draw attention to the language
of texts. He placed poetic language at the centre of his inquiry and emphasized that phonetically
and syntactically repeated linguistic elements distinguish literary from non-literary texts. He tried
to define literariness by distinguishing between six functions of language: the emotive,
referential, phatic, metalingual, conative and poetic function (Zwaan 1993, p. 7) . To Jacobson,
the poetic function is the most important function as it mainly focuses on the message itself
(Zwaan 1993, p. 7). The different linguistic devices in a piece of literary text initiate the reader to
have a closer look at the happenings in the text which without linguistic distortion, might have
been left unnoticed. Thus, Roman Jakobson emphasised that what makes a literary text is merely
associated with the language as self-sufficient entity while reference to social life, history, or
anything outside the language is irrelevant.

Literary and non-literary texts

Literary texts

Literary poems

Some examples of defamiliarisation in poetic literary texts are Shakespeare’s sonnet starting with
‘My mistresses eyes are nothing like the sun’ in which rhyme and metre supply a poetic
framework or Dickinson’s I felt a funeral in my brain in which the strategic use of the words in
the title already create a notion of new and unfamiliar (Pope 2002).

Literary novels

Two British eighteenth century writers were often cited as a reference for narrative literary texts
by Russian Formalists i.e. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver's Travels and Laurence Sterne’s The Life
and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Selden 1997, p. 33). In Gulliver’s Travels, the
overt disproportion between the characters i.e. between Gulliver and the Lilliputians, is an
example of defamiliarisation from the real world as it draws attention to the unusual size of the
characters (Pope 2002, p. 90). In Tristram Shandy, familiar actions are defamiliarised by being
slowed down i.e. the narration is overtly and playfully interrupted, slowed down or accelerated.
Furthermore, there is a distortion of the storyline, as the narrative structure and plot patterns are
highlighted by positioning chapter 18 and 19 after chapter 25 (Klarer 2004, p. 78). The same can
be noticed in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in which he tells the entire novel
retrospectively, from the past to the present (Ryan 2011, p. 2).

Non-literary texts

While in Russian Formalism and Prague structuralism literary texts were seen as the ones that
use language in aesthetic and estranged ways, non-literary texts were those that used everyday
language precisely and accurately. They consisted of everyday texts, such as newspaper or
magazine articles, letters, brochures, advertisements, reports, or editorials.

Development of new theories on literariness

New Theories

In the 1970s, some scholars moved away from the solely linguistic theory adopted by the
Russian Formalists and started acknowledging the role of the reader to establish a theoretical
discipline. Many of these scholars, which included Jonathan Culler, Stanley Fish, Umberto Eco
to name a few, stated that literariness cannot be defined solely on the basis of linguistic
properties found within a text but that the reader is also a crucial factor in the construction of
meaning (Zwaan 1993, p. 8).

They acknowledged the fact that foregrounding is a feature of poetry, however, claimed that
language structures such as foregrounding can also be found in ordinary texts e.g. advertisement.
Jakobson agrees that such poetic functions can be found in any text but argues that the
dominance of those functions over other functions is what makes a text a poetic text (Pilkington
2000, p. 19). Although this justification was accepted by later scholars, Jakobson’s theory was
still not perceived as a perfectly acceptable condition for the separation of literary from ordinary
texts. As a result, Culler and Fish emphasized that the crucial aspect of literariness is not the
poetic construction of a text but the conventional expectations that are involved. Their main
emphasis was on a reader-oriented theory which goes beyond a solely textual perception and
focuses on the role of the reader in processing and interpreting a text. Fish argued that meaning
and literariness are not textual properties but rely on interpretative constructions by the reader
(Zwaan 1993). Readers are members of certain social communities in which certain conventions
and patterns persist and in which they acquire certain interpretive strategies. (Zwaan 1993). He
argued that a certain interpretation of a text will only occur because of the conventional
strategies that determine the interpretive community.

Strong opposition to the Formalist theory has not only been voiced by reader-oriented theories
but also by Marxist critics, speech act theory and new historicism. They all agreed that the view
on a distinct definition between ordinary and literary texts should be rejected (Abrams 2009,
p. 128).
Two views on literariness

Thus, the search for a definition of literariness has developed in two directions. The first
direction is the Russian Formalist's approach which assumes that there is a difference between
literary and ordinary texts with features specific to literary language. The second approach
rejects this assumption, as those linguistic features can be found in any other instance of
language use. This approach moves the interest from the grammatical structures, syntax and
semantics, to that of pragmatics which analyses the author's and the reader's view on the text
(Nöth 1990, p. 350).

Modern theories on literariness

Nowadays, theorists disagree on the issue of what is understood by literariness. In the 1990s, a
number of scholars reintroduced the model of formalism to define literariness. Theorists such as
Van Dijk (1979) or Van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) focus on the cognitive aspects of meaning
representation and say that literariness must seek a basis not in linguistic theory but in a
cognitive pragmatic one. Zwaan (1993) claims that readers develop cognitive control systems for
specific types of discourse which monitors the comprehension of literary texts. Yet other
scholars think that a theory of literariness is merely impossible

Defamiliarization or ostranenie
Defamiliarization or ostranenie (остранение) is the artistic technique of presenting to audiences
common things in an unfamiliar or strange way, in order to enhance perception of the familiar. A central
concept in 20th century art and theory, ranging over movements including Dada, postmodernism, epic
theatre, and science fiction, it is also used as a tactic by recent movements such as culture jamming.

History
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. (Margolin
2005)

The term “defamiliarization” was first coined in 1917 by Viktor Shklovsky in his essay “Art as
Device” (alternate translation: “Art as Technique”) (Crawford 209). Shklovsky invented the term
as a means to “distinguish poetic from practical language on the basis of the former’s
perceptibility” (Crawford 209). Essentially, he is stating that poetic language is fundamentally
different than the language that we use every day because it is more difficult to understand:
“Poetic speech is framed 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” (Shklovsky 20). 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”
(Shklovsky 16). This distinction between artistic language and everyday language, for
Shklovsky, applies to all artistic forms:

The purpose of art 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. (Shklovsky 16)

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 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 the slowness of the perception. (Shklovsky 19)

This technique is meant to be especially useful in distinguishing poetry from prose, for, as
Aristotle said, “poetic language must appear strange and wonderful” (Shklovsky 19).

Defamiliarization in Russian literature

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 is the horse’s point of view (rather than a person’s) that makes the content of the
story seem unfamiliar” (Shklovsky 16). 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 the work of Vyacheslav Ivanov and many
others)” (Shklovsky 19-20).

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 the other hand, literature has now begun to show a tendency towards the use of
dialects and/or barbarisms” (Shklovsky 19).

Defamiliarization and différance

Shklovsky’s defamiliarization can also be compared to Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance:

What Shklovskij wants to show 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 Shklovskij calls
“perception” can be considered a matrix for production of difference. (Crawford 212)

Since 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 the concept in different, often more complex,
terms (to differ).

Shklovskij’s formulations negate or cancel out the existence/possibility of “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 a mythic “first time” of naïve experience, the loss of which to automatization is to be
restored by aesthetic perceptual fullness. (Crawford 218)

Foregrounding
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Foregrounding is the practice of making something stand out from the surrounding words or
images.[1] It is “the ‘throwing into relief’ of the linguistic sign against the background of the
norms of ordinary language.”[2] The term was first associated with Paul Garvin in the 1960s, who
used it as a translation of the Czech aktualisace (literally "to actualise"), borrowing the terms
from the Prague school of the 1930s.[3]

There are two main types of foregrounding: parallelism and deviation. Parallelism can be
described as unexpected regularity, while deviation can be seen as unexpected irregularity. [4] As
the definition of foregrounding indicates, these are relative concepts. Something can only be
unexpectedly regular or irregular within a particular context. This context can be relatively
narrow, such as the immediate textual surroundings (referred to as a 'secondary norm' [5]) or wider
such as an entire genre (referred to as a 'primary norm'[6]).

For example, the last line of a poem with a consistent metre may be foregrounded by changing
the number of syllables it contains. This would be an example of a deviation from a secondary
norm. In the following poem by E. E. Cummings,[7] there are two types of deviation:

light’s lives lurch

a once world quickly from rises

army the gradual of unbeing fro

on stiffening greenly air and to ghosts go

 drift slippery hands tease slim float twitter faces

Only stand with me, love! against these its

until you are, and until i am dreams...

Firstly, most of the poem deviates from 'normal' language (primary deviation). In addition, there
is secondary deviation in that the penultimate line is unexpectedly different from the rest of the
poem. Nursery rhymes, adverts and slogans often exhibit parallelism in the form of repetition
and rhyme, but parallelism can also occur over longer texts. For example, jokes are often built on
a mixture of parallelism and deviation. They often consist of three parts or characters. The first
two are very similar (parallelism) and the third one starts out as similar, but our expectations are
thwarted when it turns out different in end (deviation).

Foregrounding can occur on all levels of language [8] (phonology, graphology, morphology, lexis,
syntax, semantics and pragmatics). It is generally used to highlight important parts of a text, to
aid memorability and/or to invite interpretation.

Fabula and syuzhet

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Timeline of fabula vs syuzhet in Memento

Fabula and syuzhet (also sjuzhet, sujet, sjužet, or suzet (сюжет)) are terms originating in
Russian Formalism and employed in narratology that describe narrative construction. Syuzhet is
an employment of narrative and fabula is the chronological order of the events contained in the
story. They were first used in this sense by Vladimir Propp and Viktor Shklovsky.[citation needed]

The fabula is "the raw material of a story, and syuzhet, the way a story is organized." [1] Since
Aristotle (350 BC, 1450b25) narrative plots are supposed to have a beginning, middle, and end.
For example: the film Citizen Kane starts with the death of the main character, and then tells his
life through flashbacks interspersed with a journalist's present-time investigation of Kane's life.
This is often achieved in film and novels via flashbacks or flash-forwards. Therefore, the fabula
of the film is the actual story of Kane's life the way it happened in chronological order; while the
syuzhet is the way the story is told throughout the movie, including flashbacks.

Critical reviews of fabula and syuzhet

Critiques of fabula and syuzhet fall under the headings of poststructuralism, symbolic
interaction, language studies, and Native story writers.
Poststructuralism

Jonathan Culler (1981: 170-172) notes a certain contradiction in assigning priority to either
fabula or sjuzet: the operative assumption amongst many literary critics is that fabula precedes
the sjuzet, which provides one of many ways of rendering what took place in the story. Culler
argues that one can also understand fabula as a production of the sjuzet, whereby certain events
are created and ordered at the level of story in order to produce a meaningful narrative. Critics,
he argues, subscribe to a view in which fabula precedes sjuzet when debating the significance of
a character's actions, but adopt the opposite view (in which sjuzet precedes fabula) when they
discuss the "appropriateness" of a narrative's ending (178).

Jacques Derrida (1979) is also critical of the logocentric hierarchic ordering of syuzhet and
fabula. He raises the question, "What if there are story ways of telling as well as narrative ways
of telling? And if so, how is it that narrative in the American-European tradition has become
privileged over story?" One answer is that narrative is both syuzhet (employment) and a
subjection of fabula (the stuff of story, represented through narrative). For example, Derrida
views narrative as having a terrible secret, in its way of oppressing story:

The question-of-narrative covers with a certain modesty a demand for narrative, a violent
putting-to-the-question an instrument of torture working to wring out the narrative as if it were a
terrible secret in ways that can go from the most archaic police methods to refinements for
making (and even letting) one talk unsurpassed in neutrality and politeness, most respectfully
medical, psychiatric, and even psychoanalytic. (Derrida, 1979: 94).

If story is more than fabula, dominated by narrative, it could have its own manner of discourse,
rather than being subordinate to narrative. Derrida plays with just such an idea as follows in
setting story in relation to its homonym:

Each “story” (and each occurrence of the word “story”, (of itself), each story in the story) is part
of the other, makes the other part (of itself), is at once larger and smaller than itself, includes
itself without including (or comprehending) itself, identifies itself with itself even as it remains
utterly different from its homonym. (Derrida, 1979: 99-100).

Symbolic Interactionism

Jerome Bruner also raises issues about fabula and syuzhet. Bruner summarizes syuzhet as the
plot of narrative, and fabula as a timeless underlying theme (Bruner, 1986, pp. 7, 17-21). Bruner
wants fabula to be a little more "loose fitting a constraint on story": "I think we would do well
with as loose fitting a constraint as we can manage concerning what a story must 'be' to be a
story" (p. 17).

The problem for Bruner is to explore the underlying narrative structures (syuzhets) in not only
Russian Formalism, but also French Structuralists (Barthes, Todorov, and others). The European
formalists posit narrative grammars (i.e. Todorov's simple transformations of mode, intention,
result, manner, aspect & status, as well as complex transformations of appearance, knowledge,
supposition, description, subjectification, & attitude). For Bruner, the story (fabula stuff)
becomes the "virtual text" (p. 32) to the narrative grammars. "Nevertheless, Shotter suggests that
Bruner failed to engage these 'particularities of otherness' in favour of abstractive explanation of
meaning-making processes rather than in a description of dialogical performances" (Mos, 2003:
2). In other words, there is a need to consider how narrative pursues grammars and abstract
meaning frames, whereas story can be dialogic and in the web of the social.

Language studies

Mikhail Bakhtin is also not convinced that fabula and syuzhet is a complete explanation of the
relationship of narrative and story. Like Derrida, Bakhtin is suspicious of the hegemonic relation
that narrative has over story.

For Bakhtin (1973: 12) “narrative genres are always enclosed in a solid and unshakable
monological framework.” Story, for Bakhtin, is decidedly more dialogical, for example in the
“polyphonic manner of the story” (Bakhtin, 1973: 60).

Benjamin Whorf (1956: 256), following up an observation by Franz Boas, contended that the
Hopi Indians do not experience themselves, or life as narrative grammar, or pattern. Rather than
past-present-future, as segregated narrative syuzhet, the Hopi experience is one of "eventing."
Shotter (1993: 109) refers to Whorf's "eventing" and to the Hopi's differences with Euro-
American space and time. Parr-Davis (see web resources) poses several critiques of Whorf's
theory that it was just the linguistic patterns of speech that changed how time and space were
being narrated (or emplotted via syuzhet).

Native American writers on story

An increasing number of Native American authors are positing a more vibrant role of story,
beyond fabula, and in resistance to Euro-American formalist and structuralist narrative. For
example Leslie Marmon Silko (1981) says "White ethnologists reported that the oral tradition
among Native American groups has died out" (p. 28). Narrative syuzhet/fabula tends to turn
native story into museum artifacts, as archetype narratives devoid of "harsh realities of hunger,
poverty and injustice" (p. 280), and that Native story traditions were "erroneously altered by the
European intrusion - principally by the practice of taking the children away from the tellers who
had in all past generations told the children an entire culture, an entire identity of a people"
(p. 6). The idea here is that story competencies are taught in the tribe, and the story memory,
passed from generation to generation is disrupted by pulling children out of the home, forbidding
their language, etc. Thomas King (2005) in The Truth About Stories, argues that narrative
compromises story. The fabula of story, the social fabric of story loses its voice. King argues that
story shapes identity differently from narrative. In particular the Indian identity concocted in
American-European ethnology, folklore, anthropology, history, and literature --- is being
challenged by Native writers. James Cox (2006) looks at narrative (in the tradition of Euro-
American enterprise of syuzhet/fabula) as "tools of domination: (p. 24), and a "colonial
incursion" (p. 25).