Russian formalism is the critical practice of strict
adherence to prescribed forms as in religion and giving attention to
arrangement, style and artistic means, free from its background, period and
even the author. So, to the formalists,
the literary study should deal not with the author, the reader or the
historical context but with the specific text at hand. It emerged in Russia and Poland in
1910s. The Moscow linguistic circle and
the society for the study of poetic language (opojaz) reacted against the
methods of literary theories of, 19th and early 20th
century. Formalists viewed literature as
a distinct and separate entity, unconnected to historical or social causes or
effects. They gave greater importance to
metaphor and other linguistic devices.
So, they can be said to be the fore runners of structuralists.
The important formalists are Roman Jacobson, Viktor
Shklovsky and Boris Eikhenbaum. In 1921
Jacobson declared that ‘literariness’ that makes given work, a literary
work. Literature is really
‘foregrounding the utterances’, a feature that distinguishes literature from
other human creations, which is made of certain artistic techniques or devices
employed in literary works such as metaphor, rhyme and other patterns of sound
and repetition. The sum total of all the
stylistic devices employed in it is to be taken into account. Actually, these devices became the primary
object of the formalist analysis. It is
to focus on ‘form’ of literary work and not on the content. To the formalists the form is device and the
content is material.
Boris Eikhenbaum in his ‘Theory of formal Method’,
(1926) surveys formalists’ history and their central theoretical concepts, he
emphasizes Viktor Shklovsky’s role as the intellectual leader of the formalist
movement and his most influential concept ‘defamiliarization’. Defamiliarization is one of the important
devices of the formalists. According to
Victor Shklovsky (1893-1984) defamiliarization is a typical device of all
literature and art that presents a familiar phenomenon in an uncommon fashion
for the purpose of renewed and prolonged aesthetic perception. It is a literary device where ordinary and
familiar objects are made to look different.
The Russian formalists believed that how something is said is more
important than what is said. No doubt,
this concept has influenced the post modernism and epic theatre later in the 20th
century. Shklovsky illustrates
defamiliarization through Tolstoy’s ‘Kholstomer’, where the story is narrated
by a horse at its point of view. Thus
the content of the story becomes unfamiliar.
The purpose of defamiliarization is making the reader question their
perception of reality and as a result ultimately redefine it. It helps them to see the strange aspects in
the familiar and the unusual in the ordinary things of life.
However, in 1920s, due to the Stalinist pressure the
Russian Formalists had to accept the notions of literary evolution. Literary
change and evolution was explained by them that the modifications of literary
tradition, the development of art forms are all related to the aspects of
culture, which brought gradual shifts in the laws of literary process. Thus formalists skillfully examined the
notion of literary history and pointed out the mechanics of continuity in the
development of literature. But the
Russian Formalists were attacked by Russian Marxists, who saw literature as an
integral, not a separate part of social forces.
So, by 1930, the formalist in Russia had been silenced. Though the
formalists talked about the aesthetic function of poetic language and had a
detailed study of sound and its role in poetry, their emphasis on form at the
expense of thematic content was not well received after the Russian Revolution
of 1917. Moreover the Russian Formalism
could not survive because of its neglecting the social world with which the
human beings who wrote and read literature were brought up. So the Russian formalism had to get absorbed in other systems of thought and lost its identity as a separate literary movement.
----Thulasidharan V
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