Formalism April25

7/31/2019 Formalism April25

1/30

1

Naser al-Hujelan

SID# 000 041 6682

Summer I, 2004 (3 credits)

N594 Individual Readings in Modern Arabic Literature

Formalism and Early Structuralism (1914-1960)

Introduction

In the recent decades, theory and criticism studies have become more

prominent as they have been used more often in literary and cultural studies. The

American critic and scholar Jonathan Culler (introduced early literary theories to

the American reader) notes that formerly, the history of criticism was part of the

history of literature (the story of changing conceptions of literature advanced by

great writers), but now the history of literature is part of the history of criticism.1

This change in literature studies in the twentieth century indicates that the history

of criticism and theory studies can provide a coherent contextualized perspective

as well as a general framework for studying literature and culture. Thus, they can

also serve as authentic tools for text interpretation and analysis. This paper will

present a historical background of two western literary theories (Formalism and

Early Structuralism) with emphasis on their contribution to literary criticism.

1Culler, Jonathan. Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions. (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma

Press, 1988),pp. 31-32.


2/30

2

Before Formalism

In the nineteenth century and early twentieth centaury, there were two

common ways to deal with literature before Russian Formalism. One of them was

the historical approach and the other was the physiological approach2. However,

since the 1920s until 1960s, New Criticism, in UK and United States, provided a

methodological route into text interpretations3. Nonetheless, during these times,

another school of thought was emerging in the East, namely in Russia where

Formalism started to come into being. It is important to say that there was no

connection between these movements until the late 1940s.4

These two schools of thought (i.e. New Criticism and formalism) have

adopted different means to interpret the literary texts. The English and American

literary studies usually focus on the meaning of literary texts.5

For example,

practical criticism is mainly concerned with the study of English literature itself. It

began in the 1920s with a series of experiments by the Cambridge critic I.A.

Richards whose work encourages focusing on the words on the page rather than

2Leitch, Vincent B. (ed.) The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. (NY and London: W.W. Norton

&Company, 2001), p. 13

Groden, Michael and others (ed.). The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. (London:

The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), P. 4514

Culler. Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions, P.43.

5Eagleton, Terry.Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2

ndEdition, (Minnesota: The University of Minnesota

Press, 2001), p. 43.


3/30

3

relying on preconceived or received beliefs about a text.6

In the work of Richards

most influential student, William Empson, practical criticism provided the basis

for a different critical method of New Criticism. In his bookSeven Types of

Ambiguity in 1930, Empson developed the foundations for New Critical thought

through a study of the complex and multiple meanings of poems; his study

presented the poems as elaborate structures of complex meanings.7

New Critics

usually interpret the text based on the internal relationships within its textual

elements that give the text unique form; New Critics do not usually rely much on

the authors stated intentions, or the historical perspective such as the authors

life.8

They instead perform a close reading of the text in question emphasizing that

the structure of a work should not be separated from its meaning which can

include repetition, images or symbols, and rhythms (poetry). Hence, New Critics

pay attention to the formal aspects of literature, which contribute directly to its

meaning.

New Criticism has dominated Anglo-American literary criticism for the past

fifty years.9

It was established as the dominant way of viewing literature during the

1940s and then remained prominent for two more decades.10

The roots of the

6Richards, I. A. Coleridge on Imagination. (New York: W.W. Norton, NY and London, 1950), pp.46-49.

7Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity, (London: W.W. Norton & Company Ltd, 1966) p. 76.

8Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. (Folcroft, PA.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1971), p. 63

9Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today, (NY: Garland Publishing, Inc, 1999), p.118.

10Zima, Peter V. The Philosophy of Modern Literary Theory. (London: The Athlone Press, 1999), P. 24


4/30

4

movement can be traced back philosophically to Kant and aesthetically to the English

Romantic poets. However, going back to Formalism, formalist theory seeks to

define the distinctive knowledge that literature and the arts express.11 This is why

some consider it ontological. John Crowe Ransom, in his essay entitled Wanted: An

Ontological Critic, argues that poetry intends to recover the world of human

experience and thereby express a kind of knowledge which is radically or

ontologically distinct from the world that scientific discourse presents to us.12

In one

analysis of the subject, William C. Handy comments in his book entitled Kant and

the Southern New Critics that the ontological critics are concerned [] with

knowledge entities artistic as distinct from scientific, and equally as

significant.13

Thus, what constitutes the distinctive form of knowledge that

literature and the arts contribute to the human race in terms of a series of contrasts:

concrete rather than abstract language, image rather than concept, imagination rather

than intellect. Kant stated the essential principle when he wrote, We have a

faculty of mere aesthetical Judgment by which we judge forms without the aid of

concepts.14

11Culler, Jonathan.Literary Theory. (London: Oxford University Press, 1997), p.122.

12Ransom, The New Criticism, p. 281

13Handy, William C. Kant and the Southern New Critics, (Vancouver: Va. Downing, 1988) p. 30.

14Kant, Immanuel. Kants Kritik of Judgment. Trans. J.H. Bernard. (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 179.


5/30

5

On the other hand, new Criticism argues that each text has a central unity.

15The responsibility of the reader is to discover this unity. In their argument, The

readers job is to interpret the text, telling in what ways each of its parts

contributes to the central unity.16

Thus, the primary focus is in the themes. A text

is spoken by a persona (narrator or speaker) who expresses an attitude which must

be defined and who speaks in a tone which helps define the attitude: ironic,

straightforwardor ambiguous.17

Judging the value of a text must be based on the

richness of the attitude as well as the complexity and the balance of the text. The

key phrases are ambivalence, ambiguity, tension, irony and paradox.18

This New Criticism method of close reading and emphasis on the text

provided a corrective to vague biographical criticism and subjective enthusiasm,

but later, it became not a method of criticism, but criticism itself.19

Moreover,

though New Critics wanted to avoid impressionistic criticism which mostly relies

on the critics own thoughts, feelings, and response to the text rather than

indigenous textual elements, New Criticism did not provide a holistic view of

texts. Within the Anglo-American tradition, literature is seen as a social front that

in essence presents a psychological fabric to a given time and place within certain

15Tyson. Critical Theory Today, p.118.

16Brooks and Warren. Understanding Poetry, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1950), p. 37


18Jefferson, Ann and Robey, David (ed.).Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative Introduction. (London:

Batsford Academic Ltd, 19982), P. 69.

19Zima. The Philosophy of Modern Literary Theory, P. 21.


6/30

6

cultural conditions.20

Therefore, New Criticism though tried to serve as an

authentic medium for human nature and the human social situations; however, the

holistic picture that the Anglo-American tradition was looking for was not fully

portrayed.

This was the most common type of formalism in America, which was

known as New Criticism from 1940-1960. However, the term: formalism, mainly

describes the literature critical movements in Russia in the beginning of the twentieth

century.

Background of Formalism

Another critical theory that adopted a similar approach to practical criticism

in its focus on the texts form is Formalism. Formalism was essentially the

application of linguistics to the study of literature; and because the linguistics in

question were of a formal kind (concerned with the structures of language) the

Formalists adopted the analysis of literary 'content' for the study of literary form.21

They see the form as the expression of content, which was merely the 'motivation' of

form, an occasion or convenience for a particular kind of formal exercise.

20Raval, Suresh. Grounds of Literary Criticism. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998),

p. 29.

21Erlich, Victor.Russian Formalism: History- Doctrine, (NH: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 46.


7/30

7

The earliest beginnings of Russian Formalism can be dated

from1914-15, with the appearance of Viktor Shklovsky's essay on Futurist

poetry, The Resurrection of the Word; it had flourished in the twenties

and after that it retreated but did not disappear because structuralism later

adopted it to develop their method of studying literature.

Unlike New criticism, Formalist criticism is not interested in the feelings of

poets, the individual responses of readers, or representations of reality; instead, it

attends to artistic structure and form.22

Formalist criticism became prominent in

Prague in the late 1920s, when there was a repressive political climate in the

Soviet Union23

. Then, after the Second World War, Formalist criticism emerged in

France, where it bloomed in the 1960s and began drawing widespread

international attention24

. However, in France, Formalist criticism also provoked a

new critical movement: structuralism that achieved its power in the 1970s and

1980s and it still has a dominant presence in literary and in cultural studies.25

As stated before, the Russians who developed the formal method, which

gave them the name Formalists, were unaware of what happened in England as the

English and the Americans were not familiar with the critical debates that took

22Leitch, (ed.) The Norton Anthology: Theory and Criticism. P. 2

23Erlich.Russian Formalism: History- Doctrine, p. 63.

24Erlich.Russian Formalism: History- Doctrine, p. 65.



8/30

8

place in Russia26

. However, when a prominent Formalist, the Russian linguist

Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) moved to New York City, as the works of his

fellow Formalists began to be translated into English in the late 1950s and 1960s,

the west began to take notice of the Russian Formalist approach to literary art.27

However, Formalism as we know it was not completely created by the Russian, as

it had to be further developed by the French before it made an impact on English

and American literary thought.

Moreover, it is essential to explain that as the eastern and western

thoughts had met, formalism influenced many works in the west. For

example, Roman Jakobson and his Prague School colleague Rene Wellek

have had considerable influence on literary studies through their teaching

and work in the United States during the last three decades28

. The French

had also participated in the growth of formalism in the West. For instance, one of

the main figures in formalism who contributed a great deal to the development of

formalism was the prominent French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1908),

who also had left Europe because of the Second World War, in 1941, and became

26Selden, Raman and Widdowson, Peter. Contemporary Literary Theory. (Kentucky: The University Press

of Kentucky, 1993), p.29.

27Selden, Roman. Practicing Theory and Reading Literature. (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky,

1989), P. 29

28Raval. Grounds of Literary Criticism, p. 33.


9/30

9

one of Jakobsons colleagues at the New School of Social Research in New

York.29

However, the movement had been consistently criticized since 1924

when Trotsky30

devoted a chapter of hisLiterature and Revolution to a

critique of Formalism31

. He insisted that, as the Italian revolutionary Antonio

Gramsci put it, What ought to be is concrete - politics should be the art of the

possible rather than of the probable. Trotsky explained that because culture

feeds on the sap of economics one can tell a lot about a society from its aesthetic

developments. The development of art, he said, is the highest test of the vitality

and significance of each epoch. In this sense, literary and cultural criticism can be

a useful diagnostic instrument. Therefore, he was objecting to Formalism which

did not include the experiences of the reader and culture in the process of figuring

out the meaning of texts. Trotsky saw the essence of cultures in their literatures

and hence rejected that structures of texts could merely give a coherent view of

any society or generate a complete meaning of the text. It is because of this that

29Selden, Practicing Theory and Reading Literature, 29

30Lev Davidovich Bronstein (Leon Trotsky) was born in Yanovka, Ukraine, as the son of an illiterate

Jewish farmer. In his youth, Trotsky become an ardent disciple of Karl Marx already in his youth. In 1896

Trotsky joined the Social Democrats and two years later he was arrested as a Marxist and exiled to Siberia.

Four years later he escaped and reached England by means of a forged passport that used the name of a

jailer in Odessa's prison, Trotsky. He was assassinated in August 1940, on the orders of Joseph Stalin

(President of the former Soviet Union). See Wieczynski, Joseph.The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and

Soviet History, Volume 39, (Academic International Press, 1965), pp. 345-349.

31Trotsky, Leon.Literature and revolution. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1957)


10/30

10

Literature and Revolution performs the second of its central tasks providing an

inspirational prescription for the revolutionary society of the future. Trotskys

book involved scheme, which outlines the role of art and literature in helping to

create a world in which human beings reach their fullest capacities.32

Early Formalism

Although formalists were mainly oriented towards the form of literature

that carefully considers the form in which texts are produced, this does not mean

that they could not imagine a possible moral or social mission for literature. As the

formalist Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984), puts it in 1917, literature has the ability

to make us see the world anew - to make that which has become familiar, because

we have been overexposed to it, strange again.33

Therefore, the formalistic view

regards literature as a way to rejuvenate life to be more exciting and hence helps to

rejoice the daily routines as sources of enlightenment and thus as art. Here,

Shklovsky elaborates on the artistic mission of literature we think we know them,

we once again look at them: art exists that one may recover the sensation of life

32Trotsky'sLiterature and Revolution (1924), a collection of articles, was his most important contribution

to literature criticism. See Davis, Robert and Finke, Laurie. Literary Criticism and Theory. (NY and

London: Longman, 1889), p. 878.

33Shklovsky, Viktor. Theory of Prose. Trans Benjamin Sher. (IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991), 16.


11/30

11

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and

not as they are known34

This process of making the familiar seems new again or in some cases

even strange in a trial to bring about the excitement and appreciation is called

defamiliarization. The result of this process of defamiliarization is that it

allows the people to see the world in a whole different scope or in some cases

reinforces a view and/or abolishes a belief about life; it allows people to

experience life as art and also as reality. This is not to say that art is all fiction;

literature can certainly presents a real to life image that attains both beauty and

awfulness as it also portrays an imaginary picture of either perfection or full

ugliness. Formalists wanted to know how defamiliarization worked through

literature as it achieved its effects on readers. On the other hand, for the new

critics, the formal aspects of literary works were not essentially critical as a

separate part since they believe meaning was always coupled with form. So, for

them, form and meaning cannot be separated; and in their study of poems, they

examined the form of poems since a close scrutiny of the poems formal aspects

would reveal the complexity of oppositions and tensions that constituted the

poems real meaning. Formalists cared to study the so-called full-grown

diversion and in order to do so, they ignored literatures referential function

34Shklovsky, Victor, "Art as Technique", InRussian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T.

Lemon and Marion J. Reis (University of Nebraska, 1965), 3-24., P.18


12/30

12

whereby literature reflects the world, and gives it a distinctive status it also

formulates an aesthetic dimension of literature that produces and meaning through

refectory works, as Jakobson qualified in 1933.35

Moreover, from the earliest meetings of Formalists, they had been focused

on what Jakobson in 1921 started to call literariness which makes a literary text

different from other genres. They wanted to find the literary common denominator

among the different literary texts.36

As practical criticism and the New Criticism

focused on the individual meaning of individual texts, Formalism wanted to

discover general laws which makes literature more specific and close to science.

According to the Formalists, literariness resides in poetry the initial focus of

their interest where ordinary language becomes defamiliarized37

. It is this

linguistic defamiliarization that leads to a perceptual defamiliarization on the part

of the reader and thus to a renewed and fresh way of looking at the world.38

For

defamiliarization, poetry seems to be the ideal genre of study since it employs a

great range of linguistic devices. It uses, for instance, forms of repetition that one

does not find in ordinary language such as rhyme, a regular meter, or the

subdivision in stanzas. Poetry also uses devices that one may come across in

35Jakobson, Roman. Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics, in David Lodge (ed.)Modern Criticism

and Theory (NY and London: Longman, 1960), p. 27





13/30

13

non- poetic language like metaphors and symbols. As it does this, poetry

proclaims an impressive level of ambiguity that captures beauty through carefully

chosen words. This is one way where poetry differs from other writings. This

poetic language defamiliarizes itself from other types of language by using these

different artistic and linguistic tools which maybe familiar to some but as they are

utilized in poetry, they generate a language that is not normally spoken in

everyday life. For the Formalists, poetry draws attention to its own artificiality, to

the way it says things. As Jakobson said in 1921, poetry is a form of language

characterized by an orientation towards its own form. It allows us to see in a fresh

manner language itself. What that language refers to what it communicates is of

secondary importance. In fact, if a work of art draws attention to its own form,

then that form becomes part of its content: its form is part of what it

communicates.

39

However, as formalists tried to look for defamiliarization in other

genres of literature, they ran into some trouble as they first looked at fiction.40

The

most obvious ones is rhyme, which simply does not occur in fiction where the less

obvious ones, like imagery, can be found though not to the same degree as found

in poetry.

39 This is obvious in paintings that are completely abstract: since such paintings do not refer us to the

outside world they can only be about themselves. They force us to pay attention to their form, because

that is all they have to offer. See Jakobson, p. 32.

40Stacy, Robert H.Russian Literary Criticism, a Short History. (Syracuse University Press, 1975), p. 46.


14/30

14

The Formalists started out by seeing the literary work as a more or less

arbitrary assemblage of 'devices', and only later came to see these devices as

interrelated elements or 'functions' within a total textual system. 41 Devices included

sound, imagery, rhythm, syntax, meter, rhyme, narrative techniques, in fact the

whole stock of formal literary elements; and what all of these elements had in

common was their 'estranging' or 'defamiliarizing' effect.42

What was specific to

literary language, what distinguished it from other forms of discourse, was that it

'deformed' ordinary language in various ways. Under the pressure of literary devices,

ordinary language was intensified, condensed, twisted, telescoped, drawn out, turned

on its head.

Fabula and Syuzhet

In narrative, the Formalists preferred the term "theory of prose", the material-

device opposition translates into that between the representational elements of action

and event in their natural chronological and causal order (fab-ula) and the rearranged

manner of their textual presentation created by artistic compositional patterns (sujet).

43The deforming, hence artful, element of narrative thus consists in the particular

41Culler, Jonathan.Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. (London: Oxford University Press, 1997),

p. 59

42Culler.Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, p. 63.

43Steiner, Peter.Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 85


15/30

15

manner of its unfolding, and content (character and action) may often serve as mere

material or motivation for deformation for the sake of some aesthetic goals. Shklovsk

pointed out that the same architectonic principles are often at work in both small-

scale stylistic devices and large-scale devices ofsujetconstruction.44

These include

positive and negative parallelism, simple repetition, three-stage intensified repetition,

riddle, reversal of logical order, circular construction, transposition and rearrange-

ment of parts, digressions, and variant renderings of the same content.45

Other

compositional devices are concerned with the combination of elementary narratives

into more complex ones, or frame and embedding. Shklovsknotes that most of these

devices recur throughout time and space and serve as invariants associated with

specific content elements over time46

. Construction devices have the same function as

verse patterns, impeding and slowing the reading process and drawing attention to

the way, or "how," rather than to the goal, or "what,". An extreme form of narrative

artfulness is the "bare device," or self-reflexivity, where the text points, to its contrived

nature by playing with a technique for its own sake, without any motivation.47

The

Formalists were also interested in short narrative forms and the differences in

construction and effect creation between them and the novel. The other focus of

Formalist narrative studies was skaz, a literary (written) short story in which the overall

44Steiner.Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics, p. 87





16/30

16

manner of narration is characterized by stylistic and international forms supposedly

associated with oral storytelling addressed by an uneducated speaker to a similar

audience.48 This led to an examination of the ways in which an image or illusion is

created in literary narrative, the figure of the narrator, the perspective on the told

events adopted by this narrator, and the overall effect of this form49

.

In 1925, Boris Tomashevski, explained how to distinguish the language of

fiction from ordinary language50

. The difference, he argued, was not so much a

difference in language but a difference in presentation.51

In order to clarify this, he

came up with two concepts:fibula and synzhetwhich had been introduced by

Shklovsky in 192152

. Thefabula is a straight forward account of something; it

explains what actually happened53

. For example, applying this to Arabian nights,

Shahriyr knew of his brothers wife betrayal and then found his own wife

cheating on him. Then, he killed his wife and swore to kill all women and thus he

used to marry each night a new girl and kill her in the morning until there were no

more women for him to marry. Later, he married the daughter of the minister who

used to pick women for him, but she was not killed in the morning as she used to


49 Steiner.Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics, p. 58


51Selden, Practicing Theory and Reading Literature, p. 65.


53Selden, Practicing Theory and Reading Literature, p. 51


17/30

17

tell him a story each night and did not complete it until later. She continued on this

path for 1001 nights and in the end, Shahriyr learned more about women through

the stories and loved his wife and thus his problem was over and all women were

then salvaged. So, here in this example, only events were told. When thefabula is

manipulated to make maximum suspense, syuzhet(the story as it is actually told)

is created. Such manipulation has defamiliarizing effect much like what devices

have in poetry: like for instance rhyme; so the syuzhetcalls attention to itself.

In addition, formalists used genres as artistic tools in their study. Genre is

understood as a particular selection and combination of stylistic, thematic, and

compositional elements. It is a text model that, like the individual text, is multi-

leveled. It is additionally a historical dynamic entity whose makeup, internal

configuration, dominant element, and matching of forms and functions change

radically over time54

. And so do its relations to other genres and its place and role in

the literary system as a whole. One can study synchronically a genre's form, function,

and place in the genre system at a given period or trace its traditions and

transformations. A genre's specific nature at any one time is the product of the

interplay between its inherited features and the poetic norms of a given period or

school. Finally, one ought to distinguish clearly between genre (e.g., romantic elegy) as

a descriptive tool constructed post factum by the scholar and (sometimes the same)

genre as a normative idea in the consciousness of a given generation of readers and



18/30

18

writers. Only the latter concept of genre can explain how and why the Formalists

relegated works to a particular genre55

. The Formalists made the genre a variable in a

larger equation, and hence they transformed genre from a classificatory category

into a heuristic premise56

. The discovery of a genre's concrete historical shape thus

became one of the tasks of literary scholarship.

Folktales

Vladimir Propps (1895-1970) wrote in 1928 his bookThe Morphology of

the Folktale. He made an important link between the Formalists and the French

structuralism of the 1960s through his work about forms. Propp (1895 1970) found

that through a close examination of Russian folktales and fairytales, there was one

similar underlying story. In Folktales, he tried to show how different tales which

were in essence variations upon one story or in other words, different syuzhets of

one under lyingfabula. Propp came to this conclusion, but it is important to say

that he was not a formalist. He was not interested in literariness and in any case in

many of his tales there is hardly any difference betweenfabula and syuzhet. In a

chronologically told fairytale without flashbacks or other narrative tricks, the

syuzhetrather closely follows thefabula. Still, Propps revolutionary idea at the

time that a hundred rather widely varying folk- and fairytales might actually tell




19/30

19

one and the same underlying story is clearly inspired by the distinction between

fabula and syuzhet.57

Although it is logical to assume that having the same fabula of a wide range

of fairytales and folktales that present different characters and attain various

dramatized routs is hard. Propp solves this problem with a systematic plan which

takes into account variability yet retains the sameness among all tales. He thought

in terms of actors and functions that crucially help the story along. For example,

one of the actors that Propp identifies is the helper. Since that is not relevant to

the function, all that he or she has to offer is an act of help that keeps the story

moving. Thus, Propp did not need to specify who or what the helper was. The

helper can be either male or female, can be a forester58

or hunter,59

can be old or

young, rich or poor, and so on. The act of helping can be also different and as

variant as the helpers themselves; the emphasis is on the act of helping regardless

57Gilet, Peter. Vladimir Propp and the Universal Folktale. (Washington, DC:Peter Lang Publishing,

1998), p. 74.58

As in Little Red Riding Hood a folktale about a little girl who visits her grandmother in the forest, who

sets out through the woods to deliver a basket of freshly made custard to her grandmother. Along the way Red Riding

Hood meets up with a wicked wolf, who tricks her into believing he wants to escort her through the dangerous woods.

The wolf suggests that Red Riding Hood pick some sunflowers for her granny, and runs ahead to Granny's house. Thewolf gobbles up Granny and waits for Red Riding Hood. When Red Riding Hood arrives at Granny's house, the wolf

gobbles her up too. The end of the story finds Granny and Red Riding Hood rescued from the stomach of the wicked

wolf by a hunter. Red Riding Hood vows never to speak with strangers again-and she never does.

59As in Snow White which is set in early 16th-century Italy, in which the life of innocent, young Bianca

de Nevada is disrupted when her beloved father is sent on an errand by Cesare Borgia, leaving her in the

care of Borgia's sister Lucrezia, a decadent woman who orders the child killed .


20/30

20

of its means or medium of action60

. Hence, many tales can have this action in

common because it is broad enough to include variations and yet specific to

present one function (i.e. helping). Theoretically, this can also work the other way

around, with one and the same synzhetelement representing more than onefabula-

element. Therefore, tales can deal with two functions one leading to disaster and

one leading to a happy ending; these different ends can happen despite that they

are represented by one and the same act.

Propp distinguishes a limited number of actors dramatis personae: hero,

villain, seeker, helper, false hero, princess and thirty-one functions that always

appear in the same sequence61

. All thirty one of them do not necessarily make an

appearance in every single fairytale. Propps fairytales are carefully analyzed

through his systemic approach even if the final functions the punishment of the

villain and the wedding that symbolizes the happy ending are always the same. It

is also possible for a fairytale to interrupt itself and start a new, embedded,

sequence (and another one) or to put one sequence after another. The individual

qualities of the characters, however, are always irrelevant.62

The villain and the

helper are unimportant in terms of who they are except for what they do and that

always has the same function in the various tales. This flexible approach in terms

of actors embodied by interchangeable characters and functions allows Propp to

60Gilet. Vladimir Propp and the Universal Folktale, p. 68.

61See, Propp, Vladimir.Morphology of the folktale (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), pp. 47-51

62Erlich.Russian Formalism, p75


21/30

21

collapse a hundred different syuzhets into the skeleton of one singlefabula. For

instance, suspense stories may begin differently; they can either start off with

description or details, but, according to Propp, they all retain to a similar plot.

With the method Propp uses for the tales, he proposes one singlefabula for all

detective stories. He proposes a basicfabula with three acts or functions: that of

murdering, that of getting murdered, and that of exposing the killer. Hence, Propp

allows readers to see the folktales as systems in which the functions that he

identifies have a specific place.

In Propps book, the interrelatedness of the various elements of a text gets

more emphasis because he clearly defined functions as part of a well distinctive

chain. The helper is always there to offer help, even if what he or she actually

does may vary widely from tale to tale. Moreover, it is possible that folktales,

narratives also have a similar underlying structure that ties different narratives

together and thus retains a specific form of a different genre that once again

present meanings through different forms and styles.


22/30

22

Formalism Revisited

Formalism implies human agents and institutions striving for recognition and

acceptance. Later on Russian Formalism moved from an isolating study of devices to

a comprehensive vision of literature as both a dynamic, complex sign system and a

sociocultural action system63

.

The Formalists came to see literature in systemic terms. At the same year

that Propp published his book, Roman Jakobson and his colleague Yuri Tynyanov

(1879-1943) were already speaking of the study of literature as a systematic

science64

. Fromalisim tried to make rules of literariness assuming that literature

texts must have inhenrent qualities. This is where Formalism had trouble as it was

hard to specify such qualities. However, formalism stressed on defamiliarization

as an indicator of literariness65

. This was a general rule that Formalism adopted

instead of having to point to more specific ones about literature pieces. The

defamiliarizing manifests itself only in the right context. The only rule that can

be formulated is that defamiliarization works by way of contrast. Contrast between

the ordinary languages that people usually use as they address each other or

speak with one another and the language that is not usually used: not ordinary.

Such language can include the language of poetry (language that engulfs images

63Green, Keith and lebihan, Jill. Critical Theory and Practice. (London and NY: Routledge, 1996), P. 62.

64Erlich.Russian Formalism, p. 87

65Green and lebihan. Critical Theory and Practice, P. 65


23/30

23

and melodies-Jackobson studied the literariness of poetry) or the many types of

prose.

Acts of Defamiliarization

The idea is the capturing the difference between the process of

familiarization and acts of defamiliarization. It tries to give answers to questions

of historical change that the New Critics, with their focus on the words on the

page, were not addressing. However, the Formalists realized in the later 1920s

that literature was not wholly autonomous; it was not completely isolated from the

world it existed in. Social change and culture had consequences for the course of

literary history. Moreover, the mechanism of defamiliarization cannot say

anything about the nature of the devices that will be deployed66

. It only explains

that that change is inevitable; It does not say which new change will be

undertaken next. With their recognition of the interrelatedness of art and world, of

literature and the world we live in, the Formalists also developed an interest in the

content of literary works. But, the political changes that ended the freedom of

speech and academic freedom in Russia made further explorations impossible.

Prague structuralism

66Stacy, Robert H.Defamiliarization in Language and Literature. (NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997),

p. 36


24/30

24

In the later 1920s, the cause of Formalism continued in Prague because Jakobson

had moved there to escape the increasingly repressive regime in Russia. Prague

structuralists contributed to the literary theory; they believe that a literary text is a

structure in which all the elements are interrelated and interdependent and that

there is nothing in a literary work that can be seen and studied in isolation67

. Each

single element has a certain function that is important to the structure of the text as

a whole. The Formalists tended to focus on the defamiliarizing elements within

literary art either those elements that distinguished literary texts from non-

literature or those that served the process of defamiliarization within those texts

themselves. As a result, they paid little attention to all the elements that did not

directly contribute to the defamiliarizing process. For the structuralists, however,

everything played a role in what a text was and did.

Structuralists expanded the Formalists notion of function68. In so doing,

they explained how literature is concerned with itself as it also is connected with

the outside world. Formalists function has to do with the way textual elements

achieve effects of defamiliarization because of their difference from their

environment. For the structuralists, the text as a whole (and not only some

elements of it) has a function. A texts function is determined by its orientation

67Collier, Peter and Geyer-Ryan, Helga.Literary Theory Today. (Ithaca and NY: Cornell University Press,

1990), p. 127

68Erlich.Russian Formalism, p. 80


25/30

25

which is basically the used speech act in the text: what people do with speech69

.

Literary texts can be said to be oriented towards themselves.70

Literature focuses

on its own form; its focus is on the message rather than on the sender/ the

addressee, or any other possible target. In other words, it is oriented towards the

code of literature that it employs.

However, in reality, texts always have more than one orientation and more

than one function simultaneously. For instance, as literature refers to itself, it also

refers to the outside world since it incorporates many referential content about this

world along the artistic elements of its own identity. A text would cease to be

literature if its dominant orientation shifted from the text itself its form to the

outside world.71

Moreover, from this point of view the whole text functions as a

coherent whole text. It is a structure in which all elements, whether they

defamiliarize or not, are interrelated and interdependent.

In a second move, the Prague group further developed the idea of

defamiliarization to be included in the actual structure of the text. Structuralists

replaced defamiliarization by foregrounding which is an idea taken from the

Russian Formalists Jan Mukaiovski, who mentioned that poetic language is an

69Eagleton, Terry.Literary Theory: An Introduction, P.44.

70Eagleton.Literary Theory, p.42.

71Erlich.Russian Formalism: History- Doctrine, P. 86


26/30

26

effect of the foregrounding of the utterance72

. Unlike defamiliarization,

foregrounding has the effect that it automatizes textual elements73

. It draws the

readers attention to itself and obscures whatever else may be going elsewhere.74.

Moreover, foregrounding implies a perspective that sees a text as a structure of

interrelated elements. As MukaI put it, the mutual relationship of the components

of the work of poetry, both foregrounded and unforegrounded, constitute its

structure, a dynamic structure including both convergence and divergence, and one

that constitutes an indissociable artistic whole, since each of its components has its

value in terms of its relation to the totality.75

Foregrounding, with its structuralist

orientation, has in contemporary literary criticism replaced defamiliarization.

Conclusion

I have tried in this paper to capture what I have come across in my readings. It

is important to say that this paper does not represent everything I have read about

Formalism and early structuralism, but I meant for it to present a decent overview and

outline of the basic elements of these two theories as two intertwined and yet distinct

literary theories. Formalism has focused on estrangement of the language in a sense

that it divided ordinary spoken everyday language from language used in texts. On

72Eagleton.Literary Theory: An Introduction. P. 44.

73Eagleton.Literary Theory: An Introduction. P. 45.

74Erlich.Russian Formalism: History- Doctrine, p. 73

75Cited in Jefferson and Robey,Modern Literary Theory, p. 54


27/30

27

the other hand, structuralism is concerned with the textual elements and its

environment (both internal and external literary mediums). It is evident that literary

texts can be interrupted in different ways as they can be read differently by different

readers. These theories capture some of this difference in interpreting texts which I

regard as a healthy difference that ought to be fostered and encouraged.


28/30

28

Bibliography

Brooks and Warren. Understanding Poetry, (New York: Henry Holt and Company,

1950).

Collier, Peter and Geyer-Ryan, Helga.Literary Theory Today. (Ithaca and NY: Cornell

University Press, 1990).

Culler, Jonathan. Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions. (Oklahoma: University

of Oklahoma Press, 1988).

.Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. (London: Oxford UniversityPress, 1997).

.Literary Theory. (London: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Davis, Robert and Finke, Laurie.Literary Criticism and Theory. (NY and London:

Longman, 1889).

Eagleton, Terry.Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2nd

Edition, (Minnesota: The

University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity, (London: W.W. Norton & Company Ltd,

1966).

Erlich, Victor.Russian Formalism: History- Doctrine, (NH: Yale University Press,

1965).

Jakobson, Roman. Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics, in David Lodge (ed.)

Modern Criticism and Theory (NY and London: Longman, 1960).

Jefferson, Ann and Robey, David (ed.).Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative

Introduction. (London: Batsford Academic Ltd, 19982).


29/30

29

Handy, William C. Kant and the Southern New Critics, (Vancouver: Va. Downing, 1988).

Gilet, Peter. Vladimir Propp and the Universal Folktale. (Washington, DC: Peter Lang

Publishing, 1998).

Green, Keith and lebihan, Jill. Critical Theory and Practice. (London and NY:

Routledge, 1996).

Groden, Michael and others (ed.). The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and

Criticism. (London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

Kant, Immanuel. Kants Kritik of Judgment. Trans. J.H. Bernard. (London: Macmillan,

1982).

Leitch, Vincent B. (ed.) The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. (NY and

London: W.W. Norton &Company, 2001).

Propp, Vladimir.Morphology of the folktale (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968).

Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. (Folcroft, PA.: Folcroft Library Editions,

1971).

Raval, Suresh. Grounds of Literary Criticism. (Urbana and Chicago: University of

Illinois Press, 1998).

Richards, I. A. Coleridge on Imagination. (New York: W.W. Norton, NY and London,

1950).

Selden, Roman. Practicing Theory and Reading Literature. (Kentucky: University Pressof Kentucky, 1989).

and Widdowson, Peter. Contemporary Literary Theory. (Kentucky: The

University Press of Kentucky, 1993).


30/30

30

Shklovsky, Victor, "Art as Technique", InRussian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays,

trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (University of Nebraska, 1965).

. Theory of Prose. Trans Benjamin Sher. (IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991).

Stacy, Robert H.Defamiliarization in Language and Literature. (NY: Syracuse

University Press, 1997).

Stacy, Robert H.Russian Literary Criticism, a Short History. (Syracuse University Press,

1975).

Steiner, Peter.Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

1984).

Trotsky, Leon.Literature and revolution. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1957)

Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today, (NY: Garland Publishing, Inc, 1999).

Wieczynski, Joseph. The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History, Volume

39, (Academic International Press, 1965).

Zima, Peter V. The Philosophy of Modern Literary Theory. (London: The Athlone Press,

1999)

Documents

Formalism April25