Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 61 views

    Formalism and Russian Formalism

    Uploaded by

    Abhishek M N
    Formalism is an approach to literary criticism that focuses on analyzing the formal elements and artistic techniques of a work rather than its subject matter. The Russian Formalism movement emerged around 1915 and aimed to scientifically describe literature through observable features, deliberately ignoring contents. Key concepts included "literariness" and "defamiliarization." The movement was suppressed in the 1930s in the Soviet Union but influenced later schools of thought. It proved useful for analyzing shorter works but longer forms like novels were too complex. The Formalists looked at both isolated passages and how parts relate to the whole structure.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Formalism and Russian Formalism

    Uploaded by

    Abhishek M N
    61 views2 pages
    Formalism is an approach to literary criticism that focuses on analyzing the formal elements and artistic techniques of a work rather than its subject matter. The Russian Formalism movement emerged around 1915 and aimed to scientifically describe literature through observable features, deliberately ignoring contents. Key concepts included "literariness" and "defamiliarization." The movement was suppressed in the 1930s in the Soviet Union but influenced later schools of thought. It proved useful for analyzing shorter works but longer forms like novels were too complex. The Formalists looked at both isolated passages and how parts relate to the whole structure.

    Original Description:

    notes

    Original Title

    1.1F

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    Formalism is an approach to literary criticism that focuses on analyzing the formal elements and artistic techniques of a work rather than its subject matter. The Russian Formalism movement emerged around 1915 and aimed to scientifically describe literature through observable features, deliberately ignoring contents. Key concepts included "literariness" and "defamiliarization." The movement was suppressed in the 1930s in the Soviet Union but influenced later schools of thought. It proved useful for analyzing shorter works but longer forms like novels were too complex. The Formalists looked at both isolated passages and how parts relate to the whole structure.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as doc, pdf, or txt
    61 views2 pages

    Formalism and Russian Formalism

    Uploaded by

    Abhishek M N
    Formalism is an approach to literary criticism that focuses on analyzing the formal elements and artistic techniques of a work rather than its subject matter. The Russian Formalism movement emerged around 1915 and aimed to scientifically describe literature through observable features, deliberately ignoring contents. Key concepts included "literariness" and "defamiliarization." The movement was suppressed in the 1930s in the Soviet Union but influenced later schools of thought. It proved useful for analyzing shorter works but longer forms like novels were too complex. The Formalists looked at both isolated passages and how parts relate to the whole structure.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as doc, pdf, or txt
    You are on page 1of 2

    FORMALISM and RUSSIAN FORMALISM

    FORMALISM is, in the most general sense, the cultivation of artistic


    technique at the expense of subject-matter, either in literary practice or in literary
    criticism. In this second sense, the aim of a Formalist critique of literature is to
    provide readers not only with the means of explaining the content of works
    (What, specifically, does this say?), but also with the critical tools needed for
    evaluating the artistic quality of individual works and writers (How well is it
    said?). The term has been applied, often in a derogatory sense, to a number of
    types of criticism that emphasize a works structural design or pattern, or its style
    and manner its form in isolation from its content. In Formalism, it is usually these
    formal characteristics upon which aesthetic evaluations are based. The concept
    of form itself has played a somewhat troubled role in critical discussions of art
    and literature at least since Plato and the Phaedrus, when the notion was poorly
    defined for the first, but by no means last, time. In recent years charges of
    Formalism have been leveled at New Criticism, deconstruction, some
    psychoanalytic criticism, and even some varieties of new historicism. Primarily
    these accusations come from leftist or liberal critics who believe that literary
    criticism should be oriented toward social criticism more than a discussion of
    aesthetic abstractions. The term formalism also is often used in contemporary
    theoretical parlance to denote the Russian Formalists, especially Victor
    Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp, and Roman Jakobson, whose work became important
    to later movements like the Czech Prague Circle, French structuralism, and
    semiotics.
    Formalist criticism, which now survives less as a distinct movement and
    more as an influential method, proved most useful in the analysis of poetry and
    shorter works of fiction--longer works like novels were too unwieldy. For it was
    the Formalist procedure not only to look closely at isolated passages of the text,
    but also to relate the functioning of parts of the structure to the structure as a
    whole.

    1
    RUSSIAN FORMALISM: a school of literary theory and analysis that emerged in
    Russia around 1915, devoting itself to the study of literariness, i.e. the sum of
    "devices" that distinguish literary language from ordinary language. In reaction
    against the vagueness of previous literary theories, it attempted a scientific
    description of literature (especially poetry) as a special use of language with
    observable features. This meant deliberately disregarding the contents of literary
    works, and thus inviting strong disapproval from Marxist critics, for whom
    formalism was a term of reproach. With the consolidation of Stalin's dictatorship
    around 1929, Formalism was silenced as a heresy in the Soviet Union, and its
    center of research migrated to Prague in the 1930's. Along with "literariness," the
    most important concept of the school was that of defamiliarization: instead of
    seeing literature as a "reflection" of the world, Victor Shklovsky, Boris
    Tomashevsky, and their Formalist followers saw it as a linguistic dislocation, or a
    "making strange". In the period of Czech Formalism, Jan Mukarovsky further
    refined this notion in terms of foregrounding. In their studies of narrative, the
    Formalists also clarified the distinction between plot (sjuzet) and story (fabula).
    Apart from Shklovsky and his associate Boris Eikhenbaum, the most prominent
    of the Russian Formalists was Roman Jakobson, who was active both in Moscow
    and in Prague before introducing Formalist theories to the United States. A
    somewhat distinct Russian group is the "Bakhtin school" comprising Mikhail
    Bakhtin, Pavlev Medvedev, and Valentine Voloshinov; these theorists combined
    elements of Formalism and Marxism in their accounts of verbal multi-accentuality
    (the ability of words and other linguistic signs to carry more than one meaning
    according to the contexts in which they are used) and of the dialogic text.
    Rediscovered in the West in the 1960's the work of the Russian Formalists has
    had an important influence on structuralist theories of literature, and on some of
    the more recent varieties of Marxist literary criticism.

    You might also like

    pFad - Phonifier reborn

    Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.

    Note: This service is not intended for secure transactions such as banking, social media, email, or purchasing. Use at your own risk. We assume no liability whatsoever for broken pages.


    Alternative Proxies:

    Alternative Proxy

    pFad Proxy

    pFad v3 Proxy

    pFad v4 Proxy