Russian Formalism

Formalism

ALTHOUGH the roots of Russian Formalism go back

to the 1880s, it existed as an identifiable critical movement only during the years immediately preceding the October Revolution of 1917 and in the decade or so succeeding it.1 Yet the term 'movement' is misleading. For the Formalists could not be described as members of a unified school of critical thought working, from an organizational basis, toward the realization of an agreed programme or manifesto. Indeed, even the name 'Formalism' was not of their choosing but was a pejorative label applied to them by their opponents in the turbulent critical arena of post-revolutionary Russia.

The so-called Formalists, then, were merely a group

of like-minded scholars--Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, Jurij Tynyanov and Roman Jakobson were perhaps the most prominent--who shared theoretical interests in common. The only organizational bases of the 'movement' were the Moscow Linguistic Circle, founded in 1915 and headed by Jakobson, and the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (Opoyaz), founded in 1916 and dominated by Shklovsky.

Formalism aims to explore what is specifically literary in texts, and rejects the limp spirituality of late Romantic poetics in favour of a detailed and empirical approach to reading.That being said, it must be admitted that the Russian Formalists were much more interested in 'method', much more concerned to establish a 'scientific' basis for the theory of literature. The first Russian Formalists considered that human 'content' (emotions, ideas and 'reality' in general) possessed no literary significance in itself, but merely provided a context for the functioning of literary 'devices'. As we shallsee, this sharp division of form and content was modified by the later Formalists, but it remains true that the Formalists avoided endowing aesthetic form with moral and cultural significance. They aimed rather to outline models and hypotheses (in a scientific spirit) to explain how aesthetic effects are produced by literary devices, and how the 'literary' is distinguished from and related to the 'extra-literary'. the Formalists thought of literature as a special use of language.

Peter Steiner discriminated three phases in the history of formalism. The model of the 'machine' governs the first phase, which sees literary criticism as a sort of mechanics and the text as a heap of devices. The second is an 'organic' phase which sees literary texts as fully functioning 'organisms' of interrelated parts. The third phase adopts the metaphor of 'system' and tries to understand literary texts as the products of the entire literary system and even of the meta-system of interacting literary and non-literary systems.

It is convenient to treat Ferdinand de Saussure's work as the main thing that influenced formalism. Saussure's central methodological perception was that the value and function of a given unit of language, its accepted meaning, depends on its relationship to other such units within the system of language. His recommendation was that the study of this system of relationships--la langue--should be the proper concern of linguistics. To the extent that the Formalists did argue that the value and function of a literary device depends on its relationship to other devices within the system of relationships established by the literary text as a whole. But the argument has its limits, chiefly because it depends considerably on the work of Jakobson which was atypical of that of Formalism as a whole.

Poetry became, for Jakobson, the manifestation of a particular set of linguistic operations which, by setting the poetic word free from the normal associations which define and restrict its meaning in prosaic speech, served to call attention to the act of communication itself. Poetry, on this definition, is the self-consciousness of language.