Lecture 3: Formalisms

Objectives

By the end of this lecture students will be able to:

* analyze the literature using a formalistic lens.

* analyze the structure of a text without focusing on external factors such as authorship, social structuralism, and cultural influence.

* examine the form of the work as a whole (the individual scenes and chapters), the characters, the settings, the tone, the point of view, the diction, and all other elements of the text  which join to make it a single text

§  Some notes about Formalism

Ø  from its very inception it was split geographically into two centers: the Moscow Linguistic Circle established in 1915, among whose members were Petr Bogatyrev, Roman Jakobson, and Grigory Vinokur, and the Petersburg OPOJAZ (the Society for the Study of Poetic Language) founded in 1916, with such scholars as Boris Eikhenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky, and Yuri Tynyanov.

Ø  Formalism was concerned to examine what was specifically literary about a text. Because defining “literariness” has been virtually impossible.

Ø  Early Formalism developed quite independently in America and Russia, but it was in Russia that Formalism had far more reaching effects.

Ø  Russian Formalism was more interested in the analysis of form, the structure of the text, and its use of language than in content.

Ø  Formalists wanted to establish a scientific basis in the study of literature.

Ø  They had a new passion for scientific positivism-a rejection of philosophical and aesthetic interpretations.

Ø  Positivism: is a philosophical system recognizing only that which can be scientifically verified or which can be logical and therefore rejecting metaphysics and theism.

Ø  It is an attempt to free art from serving ideological and political ends.

Ø Formalists believed that the human emotions and ideas expressed in a work of literature were of secondary concern. They provided the context only for the implementation of literary devices.

Ø  Formalists were not interested in the cultural and moral significance but wished to explore how various literary devices produced certain aesthetic effects.

Ø Formalists sought to isolate the study of literature from “secondary, incidental features” that might belong to philosophy, psychology, or history. And it is this isolation that makes the study of literature scientific.

Ø  Eichenbaum quotes Roam Jacobson’s affirmation that the “object of the science of literature is not literature, but literariness-that is, that which makes a given work a work of literature”.     

Ø  The Formalists focused on linguistics as a science/ basic principle approach to poetics thanks to the studies of Leo Jakubinsky: the contrast between poetic and practical language.

Ø  Jakubinsky argued that practical language contains a linguistic pattern of sounds and morphological features that have no independent value and are merely means of communication.

1. What formalism is?

            Before attempting to define what formalism is, it is better to know that the suffix “ism” refers to theory. So formalism refers to a particular theory and specifically, it refers to the school of literary criticism and theory which originated in the second decade of the twentieth century in Russia. There are two important schools of Russian Formalism: The Moscow Linguistic Circle founded by Roman Jacobson in 1915; including other leading members like Osip Brik and Boris Tomashevsky. The second group: the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (Opayaz was its Russian acronym) founded in 1916 with leading figures like Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, and Yuri Tynyanov (Rapaport, 2011)

            Formalists rejected the prevalent “socialist” view of literature which emphasized the historicity of the text. The formalist approach reduces the importance of a text’s historical, biographical, and cultural context. As the name suggests, formalism was more interested in the analysis of form, the structure of a text, and its use of language, than in the content. It should be recognized, therefore, that Formalism was not something new or original it is a deviation or a rejection of the previous critical views. The objectives of Formalism can be illustrated through the following quotations, “the subject of literary scholarship is not literature in its totality but literariness i.e. that which makes a given work a work of literature.” Roman Jacobson, “The literary scholar ought to be concerned solely with the inquiry into the distinguishing features of literary materials” Boris Eikenbaum. These two quotes emphasize the most important aspects of Formalism. Victor Shkolvsky says that “Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of object, the object is not important.”

2. Objectives of Formalism

            The Formalists argued that the “literariness” of literary works is an effect produced by the use of language in a specific way, different from ordinary speech. Therefore, the knowledge of the devices and strategies for producing such an effect or perception assumed importance. Unlike the New Criticism in America, formalists, especially Russians, were not interested in the cultural and moral significance of literature but wished to explore how various literary devices produced certain aesthetic effects.

3. What is the Difference between Plot (syuzhet/) and Story (fabula)?

            The syuzhet (plot) is the story that unfolds on the page or screen. It is what renders the hero’s experiences interesting to the reader and audience. It is the sequence of events that appears in a narrative.  Plot may be out of chronological order. With respect to the plot, one is going to ask: what parts of the story will be selected, how much time will be spent developing each of them, which parts will be told chronologically, and which parts will be told out of chronological order. Syuzhet denotes how the elements are going to be organized.  Arguably, the syuzhet contains the artistic fingerprints of its creators. It is the level where most of the art and craft happens. The fabula, by contrast, is the sequence of events readers and audiences piece together in their minds while the story unfolds in order to make sense of it. The Fabula (the story) is the sequence of events outside the narrative time.  It denotes all the materials that an author is going to shape into a literary work. In fibula we reconstruct the plot. For example, the story of Heart of Darkness would begin with the life of Kurtz but the novel (plot) opens with Marlow who deliberates on Kurtz’s life in a flashback. Why should the syuzhet differ from the fabula? The answer is simple: Presenting events in their naturally occurring order, without hiding, withholding, or misdirecting the audience, robs us of the element of surprise and may result in a predictable and boring story. (This would remind us of one of Barthes’s codes: the hermeneutic code (refers to any element of a story that is not explained and, therefore, exists as an enigma for the reader, creating tension that engages the audience) or Derrida’s saying: there is no literature without suspense...)  See Kafka’s first sentence of The Metamorphosis and Camus’ first sentence of The Outsider

4. Some other Devices

            Artists use acts of defamiliarization to create a special perception of the world. (Defamiliarization: a word that was coined by the early 20th-century Russian literary critic victor shklovsky in his essay “Art as Technique.” He argued that defamiliarization is, more or less, the point of all art. Art makes language strange, as well as the world that the language presents.”) It is the special task of art to give us back the awareness of things that have become habitual objects of our everyday awareness (Selden, 2016, p. 32). The purpose of the work of art is to change our mode of perception from automatic and practical to artistic. For example, “thou still unravished bride of quietness” produces an extraordinary vision of an urn Keats.  (an urn: a kind of a vase).   Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, if taken literally, would mean that the urn is married to a guy named Quietness. But wait – urns can’t get married, so he probably just means a really old pot and quietness go hand in hand. So even though the urn as an object is not familiar but the way it has been described makes its vision very extraordinary. For the Formalists, these acts through which these literary effects were produced were important.  

            Thanks to such an emphasis, the literary work assumed importance in itself. The massage or the meaning of the text was not any more important but it was the strategies and rhetorical devices which were analyzed. So the meaning of the text could be derived and emerge and could have its own particular effect, but the formalists were concerned more with the rhetorical devices. Focus was on form. The form was not only an envelope but had an independent existence and it was possible to examine the form. This is precisely what is new in the history of criticism. It is a form that takes precedence over the content. Brooks argued for a distinction between ordinary speech and poetic Language. These are one of the aspects of Formalism. Poetic Language, on the other hand, connotative (one word suggesting many meanings), is anti-scientific in spirit. Many other phrases were introduced by Formalism such as Hersey of paraphrase. Poetic language is not reductive. It encompasses disparate words and different ideas which might be contradictory to each other. A summary does not acknowledge the ideas of a poem. Notice here the complete rejection of paraphrasing for the formalists. Therefore, paraphrasing poems needs to be discouraged as the poetic language does carry a message rather than embody a world. For example Ode on a Grecian Urn. The Urn even though lifeless captures external life and is a reminder of the vivacity of life in the face of death. Thus, the poem stages the binaries of life and death, art and life, stasis and dynamic, and works through the literary devices of metaphor, irony, and paradox.

            So, the object itself which is the Grecian Urn becomes important only by the way it is brought out from that world and the way it depicts another world that surrounds it or it is depicted by it. According to Brooks paradox presents new perspectives. Brooks provides a close reading of Donne’s “Canonization”. He demonstrates the balance creative through contradictory ideas. He also argues about the unified, harmonious whole created by such use of paradox. Therefore, paradox itself contributes to a complete meaning even though the ideas used may appear so contradictory. However, Brooks was prone to many criticisms. Later critics found fault with Brooks’ unified whole theory. They argued that the poem with its inherent tension results in disruption rather than creating a harmonious whole. This is one of the criticisms that have been made against Brooks.  New Critics were also criticized for their lopsided approach to structural analysis which did not take into account the historicity of the text. In their favor, it could be argued that they were seeking to further an experimental method of criticism by focusing only on the text, not extra-textual material. They taught us the methods of “close reading” which informed later schools of thought which eventually went on to criticize them.

            The basic difference between practical language and poetic language had its origins in the study of Russian linguist Leo Jakubinsky. According to him, practical language is used as means of communication and has no independent value, whereas, poetic language “acquire(s) independence” (Habib 606). For example, a sentence like “you are beautiful” would communicate certain emotions depending on the context and the people involved. But a line from the poem “O my Love is like a red, red rose” does not only communicate, it also assumes a certain independent existence for its sound patterns and simile. We do not value the line for its contribution to meaning but for its sound quality, ingenuity, and beauty. This for the formalists was the key to understanding poetic language. For them form was not only an envelope but had an independent existence and it was possible to examine the form. Boris Eichenbaum in his essay “The Formal Method” argues that form was “ a complete thing, something concrete, dynamic, substantive in itself” (9). Making a departure from the Symbolists who argued that form only clothed the content, they argued that form itself was content.  For example, the simile of the red rose is imperative to drive home the poet’s impression of his lover. And the emphasis arrived at by the repetition of the word “red” suggests the depth of the emotion as well as underlies the beauty of the lover. The exaggeration is fitting as the poem ends on a note of melodrama by use of exaggeration in the phrase “ten thousand miles”. The use of “red” twice also allows the possibility of the ballad meter which bestows the poem with lyrical qualities. These are the two forms of operation in language: similarity (metaphor) and association (metonymy). Though both of them are always in operation, cultural and social factors of certain eras favor one of them.

            Another example might illustrate Jakubinsky’s claim: if I say to a friend “There is a strong wind blowing,” my purpose is primarily to communicate information, perhaps about weather conditions or my reaction to them. And the various parts of my statement depend on one another for their meaning; they are not independent. But when the poet Shelley states: “O Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,” the purpose here is not merely or primarily to communicate a message: as such, the various elements of this line (such as consecutive stress on four syllables, the alliteration of the “w” and “b” sounds) achieve independence (a kind of excess) over their merely communicative content. We value the sounds for their own sake, not merely as they contribute to meaning.

            The formalists were seeking to understand the general nature of literature and literary devices, as well as the historical evolution of literary techniques. Their structural analysis model was followed closely by another school of thought New Criticism, which appeared in the Anglo-American world in the 1950s and 1960s.

5. Formalism as Literary Criticism

            Literary criticism analyzes, interprets, and evaluates works of literature.  Authors produce works that can have multiple meanings, expecting readers to consider thoughtfully and interpret them. Noted authors have a body of criticism attached to their work.  Critics evaluate and debate the ideas of fellow critics.  Good criticism can help readers have a better understanding of a work.

            Formalism is a school of literary criticism and a literary theory having mainly to do with the structural purposes of a particular text. It is the study of a text without taking into account any outside influence. Formalism rejects or sometimes simply brackets: i.e. ignores for the purpose of analysis notions of cultural or societal influence, authorship, and content; and instead focuses on modes, genres, discourse, and forms.

            In literary theory, formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. These features include not only grammar and syntax but also literary devices such as meter and tropes. The formalist approach, moreover, minimizes or sometimes simply brackets the importance of a text’s historical, biographical, and cultural context. Formalism disregards altogether authorial intention and cultural influence, proclaiming that the art object alone is all that is needed to work critically towards a single, correct meaning.  (Davis and Womack, 2002, p. 31)

            Formalism came to prominence in the early twentieth century as a reaction against Romanticist theories of literature, which centered on the artist and individual creative genius. It rather put the text itself back into the spotlight so as to show how the text was indebted to forms and other works that had preceded it. Subsequently, two schools of formalist literary criticism developed Russian formalism, and soon after Anglo-American New Criticism. Formalism was the dominant mode of academic literary study in the US at least from the end of the Second World War through the 1970s, especially as embodied in René Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature (1948, 1955, 1962).

6. Russian Formalism

            The driving force behind Formalist theorizing was the desire to bring to an end the methodological confusion which prevailed in traditional literary studies and to establish literary scholarship as a distinct and integrated field of intellectual endeavor.  It is high time, argued the Formalists, that the study of literature limits its area and defines its subject of inquiry.

            Russian Formalism refers to the work of the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOYAZ) founded in 1916; and secondarily to the Moscow Linguistic Circle founded in 1914 by Roman Jakobson. Eichenbaum’s 1926 essay “The Theory of the 'Formal Method’” (translated in Lemon and Reis) provides an economical overview of the approach the Formalists advocated including the following basic ideas:

·         The aim is to produce “a science of literature that would be both independent and factual,” which is sometimes designated by the term poetics. Poetics is the study of linguistic techniques in poetry and literature. It may refer specifically to the theory of poetry.

·         Since literature is made of language, linguistics will be a foundational element of the science of literature. Russian Formalists emphasized that the study of language should confine itself to the explication of the linguistic features of a literary text: they take the poetic language as the object of their inquiry; the text and only the text should be considered. The locus of the peculiarly literary should be sought in the work itself.

·         Literature is autonomous from external conditions in the sense that literary language is distinct from ordinary uses of language, not least because it is not (entirely) communicative.

·         Literature has its own history, a history of innovation in formal structures, and is not determined (as some crude versions of Marxism have it) by external, material history.

·         That the form of a work, far from being merely the decorative wrapping of an isolable content, is in fact part of the content of the work.

Shklovsky, in his essay “Art as Technique”(1916) contributed two of the most important concepts: defamiliarization (ostranenie, more literally, 'estrangement') and the plot/story distinction (syuzhet/fabula).

“Defamiliarization” is one of the crucial ways in which literary language distinguishes itself from ordinary, communicative language, and is a feature of how art in general works, namely by presenting the world in a strange and new way that allows us to see things differently. It is the writer’s authorial magic wand that renders familiar object weird and unfamiliar to us. Innovation in literary history is, according to Shklovsky, partly a matter of finding new techniques of defamiliarization. The plot/story distinction separates out the sequence of events the work relates (the story) from the sequence in which those events are presented in the work (the plot). Both of these concepts are attempts to describe the significance of the form of a literary work in order to define its “literariness.”

 For the Russian Formalists as a whole, form is what makes something art to begin with, so in order to understand a work of art as a work of art (rather than as an ornamented communicative act) one must focus on its form.

            Russian formalism was a school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It was championed by the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Boris Tomashevsky, Grigory Gukovsky who revolutionized literary criticism between 1914 and the 1930s by establishing the specificity and autonomy of poetic language and literature. Russian formalism exerted a major influence on thinkers like Mikhail Bakhtin and Yuri Lotman, and on structuralism as a whole. The movement’s members had a relevant influence on modern literary criticism, as it developed in the structuralist and post-structuralist periods. Under Stalin, it became a pejorative term for elitist art. ^“Russian Formalism”, Erlich writes, “keeps the work of art itself in the center of attention: it sharply emphasizes the difference between literature and life, it rejects the usual biographical, psychological, and sociological explanations of literature” (Erlich, 1980, p. 9). Thus, the representation of Russian Formalism as a mere version of the doctrine “art for art’s sake” is quite misleading. This is evident because the Russian Formalists were not primarily concerned with the essence or purpose of art.

10.7. Philosophy and Formalism

            Philosophically speaking, formalism describes an emphasis on form over content or meaning in the arts, literature, or philosophy. A practitioner of formalism is called a formalist. A formalist, with respect to some disciplines, holds that there is no transcendent meaning to that discipline other than the literal content created by a practitioner.

§  Typical Questions

• How does the work use imagery to develop its own symbols? (i.e. making a certain road stand for death by constant association)
• What is the quality of the work's organic unity "...the working together of all the parts to make an inseparable whole..." (Tyson 121)? In other words, does how the work is put together reflect what it is?
• How are the various parts of the work interconnected?
• How do paradox, irony, ambiguity, and tension work in the text?
• How do these parts and their collective whole contribute to or not contribute to the aesthetic quality of the work?
• How does the author resolve apparent contradictions within the work?
• What does the form of the work say about its content?
• Is there a central or focal passage that can be said to sum up the entirety of the work?
• How do the rhythms and/or rhyme schemes of a poem contribute to the meaning or effect of the piece?

 References

Appleman, Deborah. (2009). Critical Encounters in High School English, 2nd Ed., Teachers College Press

Balogun, Jide. ‗Approaches to Modern Literary Theories. www.unilorin.edu.ng/publications/balogun/Doc5.pdf.

Beaty, J. et al. (2002). The Norton Introduction to Literature, 8th edition. New York: W.W Norton Company

Blamires, H. (1991).  A History of Literary Criticism. London: Macmillan Press Ltd,

Childs, Peter & Fowler, Roger. (2006). The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms. Routledge: USA

Culler, Jonathan. (1997). Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Davis, Todd F. and Kenneth Womack. (2002). Formalist Criticism and Reader-Response Theory.  Palgrave. New York

Eagleton, T. (1996). Literary Theory: An Introduction, Second Edition. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press

Erlich, Victor. (1980). Russian Formalism History – Doctrine. Netherlands, Mouton Publishers

 Frye, N.  (1957). Anatomy of Criticism. New Jersey: Princeton University Press

 Gbenoba, F.E. (2006). Contextuality in Ritual Performances of Osiezi Festival in Agbor, Nigeria. Unpublished thesis submitted at the University of Ibadan

Rice, Philip & Waugh Patricia. (1998). Modern Literary Theory: A Reader. (4th ed.). New York: Routledge,

 Rivkin, Julie & Ryan, Michael. (1998). (Eds.) Literary Theory: An Anthology. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell

Tyson, Lois. (2006). Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. New York: Routledge

Welleck, Rene & Warren, Austin. (1973). Theory of Literature. Middlesex: Penguin Books Limited.