THE FORMALIST APPROACH TO LITERATURE
Formalistic Approach, in a sense, is an approach to literature which focuses on the formal features of literature. However, taken in the literal sense too much could be an oversimplification and accordingly one would miss out the main ideas behind ‘Formalism’ as a theoretical approach to literature. Moreover, to use the term ‘Formalism’ alone is quite unsafe because of its wide-encompassing connotation, which means, the term could be used in various fields of study. Therefore, it is safer to call it Russian Formalism which developed in the 1920s in Russia, and from which ‘Formalism’ as a literary theory evolved. So, without simply regarding Formalism as an Approach that studies the formal features of literature, it is preferable to call it as an approach to literature following the ideas and principles of the Russian Formalists.
The Russian Formalists originally includes two groups of scholars and students – the Moscow Linguistic Circle (1915), and the Petersburg OPOJAZ group (the Society for the Study of Poetic Language)[1916]. The Moscow Linguistic Circle includes Roman Jakobson, Peter Bogatyrev, and Grigory Vinokor besides others; and the Peterburg OPOJAZ group includes Boris Eichenbaum, Victor Shklovsky and Yuri Tynyanov, among others. In the 1930s the Soviets suppressed the movement, because of which the centre moved to Czechoslovakia. There it was continued by members of the Prague Linguistic Circle which included, among others, Roman Jakobson, Jan Mukarovsky, and Rene Wellek. Moreover, beginning in the 1940s both Jakobson and Rene Wellek continued the movement as professors at American universities. In this way , the Russian Formalism, since its inception, have varied practitioners and went on taking different shapes, and developing different models. Even it came to be transformed into New Formalism recently.
However, despite of its varied practitioners and models, the Russian Formalism retains certain principles which make it quite fit to be a critical theory and an Approach to literature, so to say. The main principle of the Russian Formalists is to study literature for its own sake, i.e. to the exclusion of its subject matter and social values. The Formalists sought to place the study of literature on a scientific basis; and their investigation concentrated on the functional role of the language and the technical devices of literary works. Their main endeavour consisted in defining a set of properties specific to poetic language, be it poetry or prose, recognisable by their “artfulness” and consequently analysing them as such.
Accordingly, the concepts of ‘literariness’, ‘foregrounding’, ‘defamiliarisation’ and fabula and sjuzhet are central to Formalistic Approach. Roman Jakobson in 1921 wrote: “The object of study in literary science is not literature but literariness,’ that is, what makes a given work a literary work.” This implies that the Formalists are interested in the study of the distinctive features of literature, which further implies that the linguistics of literature differs from the linguistics of practical discourse. As such, the Formalism views literature as a specialized use of language, and differentiates between the literary or poetical use of language and the ordinary or practical use of language. It proposes that the central function of practical language is to communicate or transmit a message or information to the auditors, by extrinsic references. On the contrary, Formalism conceives literary language to be self-focused, in that its function is not to convey message by extrinsic references, but to offer a special mode of experience to the readers, by drawing attention to its own ‘formal’ features- that is to the qualities and internal relations of the linguistic signs themselves.
According to Jan Mukarovsky, the literariness of a work consists “in the maximum of foregrounding of the utterance”, that is, the foregrounding of “the act of expression, the act of speech itself.” By ‘foregrounding’ is meant to give prominence to some features of a work. The idea behind this concept is that the linguistic medium of literary works is cover up by some formal features or literary devices which the reader will uncover so as to get fresh sensation. The ‘foregrounded properties’ or ‘artistic devices’, which are often described as ‘deviations’ from ordinary language primarily consists in setting up, and afterward violating, patterns in the sound and syntax of poetic language- including patterns in speech sounds, grammatical constructions, rhythm, rhyme, and stanza forms- and also in setting up prominence recurrences of keywords or images, metre, and alliteration. These formal features are not regarded as supplementary adornments of the meaning of a work, but as effecting the reorganisation of language on the semantic as well as the phonic and syntactic levels.
The foregrounding of the utterance is achieved by the defamiliarizing ability of the poetic language. Victor Shklovsky developed the concept of defamiliarization in his famous essay ‘Art as Technique’(1917). He wrote:
“And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life: it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and the length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.”
His main idea is that in most activities perception becomes a habitual, automatic process where we are often unaware of, or take for granted our view of things and the relations between them. Poetic or literary language could disturb this habitualization and make us see things differently and anew. Shklovsky’s theory is helpful in understanding experimental writing, like the modernist writing in that ‘modernism’ emphasize form rather than content. The poetry of Ezra Pound or T.S. Eliot can certainly be said to have the defamiliarizing effect. So is the prose fiction of James Joyce’s Ullysses(1922) or Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis(1916). Shklovsky, however, acknowledges that defamiliarization effects will change over time so that one generation’s defamiliarization will became the next generation’s habituation or norm.
Thus the Formalist Approach mainly is that literature ‘makes strange’ the world of everyday perception and renews the reader’s lost capacity for fresh sensation by way of foregrounding its linguistic medium so as to disrupt the modes of everyday or ordinary linguistic discourse. Significantly, Formalists have also made influential contribution to the theory of prose fiction. Their thesis lies in the distinction between the story and the plot by employing the terms- fabula and sjuzhet respectively. Fabula refers to the simple enumeration of a chronological sequence of events, whereas sjuzhet is the informing principle that gives shape to the incidents and the story proper; it is the artistically ordered narrative structure. In other words, if fabula strings together incidents, sjuzhet organises the narrative and gives it shape. An author is said to transform the raw material of a story into a literary plot by the use of a variety of devices that violate sequence and that deform and defamiliarize the story elements. The result or effect is to foreground the narrative medium and devices themselves, and in this way to disrupt and refresh and renew the sensation that remain unnoticed on the part of the reader because of habitualization.
Although Russian Formalism is often likened to the American New Criticism of the 1950s because of a similar emphasis on close critical attention to the text, the Russian Formalists were, however, more interested in method and a scientific approach. Russian Formalism emphasised a differential definition of literature, as opposed to the New Criticism’s isolation and objectification of the single text. They also rejected the mimetic or expressive function of literature more strongly. The New Criticism, while challenging some of the views of the traditional orthodoxy, remained within the humanist problematic. Russian Formalism moves away from the view of the text as reflecting an essential unity which is ultimately one of the moral or humanistic significance. The central focus of the Russian Formalists is not literature per se, but literariness, that which makes a given work a literary work. Thus the Formalists sought to uncover the system of the literary discourse, the system that made literature possible. Their interests in texts centred on the functioning of literary devices rather than on content.
Although there are strong opposition to Formalism, in both European and American varieties- by some Marxist critics who view it as the product of a reactionary ideology; and by proponents of Reader-Response criticism, Speech-Act theory, and New Historicism which reject the view that there is a sharp division between literary language and ordinary language- however in the 1990s a number of critics call for a return to the formalist mode of treating a literary work primarily as an aesthetic entity instead of referring to the political, racial, or sexual issues. Here, mention may be made of Frank Lentricchia’s “Last Will and Testament of an Ex-literary critic” (Lingua Franca, Sept./Oct.1996) who renounce his earlier writings and teachings “about literature as a political instrument,” in favour of the view “that literature is pleasurable and important, as literature, and not as an illustration of something else.”; and also Harold Bloom’s advocacy of reading literature not to apply or confirm a political or social theory but for the love of literature in The Western Canon(1994).
This return to Formalism was at first primarily proposed as a reaction against the New Historicism; but within a few years, what became to be known as the New Formalism proposed a positive program, undertaking to connect the formal aspects of literature to the historical, political, and worldly concerns, in opposition to which the Formalist movement had earlier defined itself. Some of the New Formalists argue that the formal integrity of a work of art is what protects it against ‘ideology’, idealization and the routinizing effects of everyday experience; while others emphasize that the perception of aesthetic or literary form is a necessary condition of critical thought. Thus, whether the earlier one or the new one, the Formalists’ concern is towards the ‘foregrounded properties’ (formal features) of literature; in the ‘make strange’ or ‘defamiliarize’ function of literary language; in the literariness of literature or in what makes literature a literature.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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