Formalism
Formalism
Formalism
criticism, in Russia, during and after the pivotal, tragic time of the
1917 Bolshevik revolution, is itself a paradoxical phenomenon on
both a historical and a cultural level: it would require a special
study to clarify the complex causes of an impossible cohabitation
between a dogmatic cultural establishment and an apparently
elitist, context-free ideology.
Indeed, it was for the first time in the history of criticism
centers, where the foci of their studies were slightly different: the
Moscow Linguistic Circle, founded in 1915 by Roman Jakobson,
Petr Bogatyrev and Grigori Vinokur, adopted a linguistic
perspective on literariness; the other group, Opojaz (i.e. “The
Society for the Study of Poetic Language”), which began its
activity in Petrograd in 1916, was formed of literary historians
(Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Boris Eikhenbaum, Boris
Tomashevsky) who were rather bent on studying literature as an
independent form of art, having its own principles and methods.
1[1] Recent Russian Poetry, Sketch 1 (Prague, 1921), 11, quoted in Boris
Eikhenbaum’s article “Introduction to the Formal Method”. See Note 11.
greater import than meaning itself. Thus rhythm is, for
Tomashevsky, the foundation upon which all the other elements
of verse lie, be it classical metrics or any speech-like rhythmic
impulse:
2[3] Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”, in Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer
(eds.), Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies (New York:
Longman, 1986), 262. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
may be obscure, with “roughened” forms that make pronunciation
difficult.
[4] [4] Cf. V. Shklovsky, “Sterne’s Tristram Shandy” (1921), in Russian Formalist
Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 27-44.
In his study
Later on the rather sweeping, diffuse concept of
defamiliarization was taken over and expanded by Jan
Mukarovsky, a member of the Prague Linguistic Circle, into
foregrounding, which describes more coherently the intentional
distortion of the linguistic elements in the literary work.
3[5] B. Eikhenbaum, “Introduction to the Formal Method”, in Julie Rivkin and Michael
Ryan (eds.), Literary Theory: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 15.
In a narrative, PLOT (SJUZET) should be distinguished from
only in the plot construction, but also in the role which the
narrative voice played within the framework of the story. That
kind of narrative which is fashioned so as to give the impression
of spontaneous speech was called SKAZ by Eikhenbaum (from the
Russian skazat’, to relate, to tell). In it the voice of the narrator is
foregrounded (as different from that of the author): his or her
lexicon, grammar, intonation are significant in themselves,
sometimes outweighing the composition or the interplay of
narrative motifs. Skaz may be based on puns, idioms and folk
etymology (as in the stories of the 19th century writer Nikolai
Leskov); in other cases it makes use also of gestures, miming and
sound gestures (as in Nikolai Gogol’s story The Overcoat).
4[6] The syntagm is taken from Mihaela Irimia’s study, The Stimulating Difference:
Avatars of a Concept (Editura Universitatii Bucuresti, 1995), 26.
with other cultural systems and their dynamics were also the foci
of their analyses especially in the second phase of formalism.