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Formalism

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33 views5 pages

Formalism

Uploaded by

aqaa
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© © All Rights Reserved
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1 Formalism

Started in Russia
Emerged in the early 20th century
Two groups:
OPOYAZ
Moscow Linguistic Circle
Originally focused in poetry.
The Russians who developed it are called formalists.
The formalist perspective was developed by the French before it made
an impact on the English and American theories.

Formalism
It is basically a close reading of the text.
The meaning is inherently conveyed in the text’s unique form or
structure.
The Formalist approach reduces the importance of a text’s historical,
biographical and cultural context.
Reaction against romanticism.

Erlich, Victor. Russian formalism: History-doctrine. Vol.4. Walter de


Gruyter, 2012
3
Syntax
Diction
Imagery
Metaphor
Simile
Irony
Settings
Tone

DEFAMILIARIZATION

Seeing an abject in a totally different light.


“Literature has the ability make us see the world anew- to make that which become
familiar, because we have been to it, strange again.”
Victor Shklovsky
Defamiliarization and Metaphors

Bertens, Hans. Literary theory: the basics. London: Routledge, 2014.


Print.
5
Literariness
Roman Jackobson
What makes a literary work different from other texts.
Practical Language / Poetic Language
Poetry subject’s language to a process of defamiliarization.
Language of literature is distinct from the ordinary use of language
through defamiliarization.

Bertens, Hans. Literary theory: the basics. London: Routledge, 2014.


Print.

6
FABULA AND SYUZHET
Fabula (like a short summary)
What is text about?
What happens?
Syuzhet (the story as it is actually told)
How is the story told?
How is the text arranged?
One Fabula can produce many Syuzhet.
Brooks, Peter. “Narrative desire.” Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot,
Closure, and Frames (2002): 130-37

7
Folktales
Propp was not a formalist, nor interested in literariness and hardly differentiated
between Fabula and Syuzhet.
Fairy tales might tell one and the same underlying story.
Telling these tales from the same basic story is possible by thinking in terms of
actors and functions.
Example: helper
Propp distinguishes a limited number of actors and 31 functions.

Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. Vol. 9. University of Texas Press,


2010.

Conclusion
Emphasis is on form and structure not content.
They viewed literature as a collection of devices interacting in the text.
Literariness to be a product of employed devices and it is crafted by
defamiliarizing devices.
Formalist looked into the ways in which the language of literature differs from
ordinary language.
Bertens, Hans. Literary theory: the basics. London: Routledge, 2014. Print.

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