1. Literary Criticism
336 ENG
(II)
RUSSIAN FORMALISM
Dr Mohammed Fahmy Raiayh

2. • Russian formalism is the European counterpart of the Anglo-American
New Criticism.
• It is a school of literary criticism that originated in the former Russia
around 1915.
• In 1929 – 1930, it was censured by Stalin and its centre of activity
moved to Prague.
• The leading Figures of the school are Viktor Shklovsky, Yury Tynyanov,
Boris Eikhenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Peter Bogatyrev, Osip Brik,
Boris Tomashevskii, and Juri Tynianov.

3. Basic Principles
• In reaction against previous literary theories, Russian
Formalists rejected unsystematic, subjective and
impressionistic ways of dealing with literature,
inherited from the 19th century and attempted a
scientific description of literature as a special use of
language.
• Biographical, social, political, or cultural contexts are
not important in the critical process.
• They focused on the form of literature, rather than its
content.
• They emphasized the difference between literary
language and non-literary practical language that aims
at communicating information.

4. Literariness
• The Formalists focused on what Jakobson called
‘literariness,” or that which makes a literary text
different from other types of writing.
• The literariness or artfulness of a work of literature,
that which makes it an aesthetic object, resides entirely
in its devices, which should also form the sole object of
literary studies.
• Formalist critics read literary texts in order to discover their
“literariness”—to highlight the devices and technical elements
introduced by writers in order to make language literary.
• The way something is said is more important than what is
said.

5. Devices
• Examples of literary devices that we do not find
often in practical language are forms of repetition
that one does not find in ordinary language such
as rhyme, a regular meter, or the subdivision in
stanzas that we find in many poems.
• Poetry is not poetry because it employs deep and
universal themes to explore the human
condition, but rather because in the process of
defamiliarizing the language it draws attention to
its own artificiality, to the way it says what it
says. Not ‘what’, but ‘how’ a text means is the
important thing.

6. Defamiliarization
• Victor Shklovsky (1893-1984) introduced the concept of
defamiliarization in “Art as Technique” (1916).
• Defamiliarization means “making it strange.”
• The perceptions of human beings become automized by repetition.
The habitual nature of everyday experience makes perception stale
and automatic. Art returns to us the awareness of things.
• Defamiliarization of that which is or has become familiar -
automatically perceived - is the basic use of literary language. Art
and literature have 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. Instead of merely registering
things in an almost subconscious process of recognition because we
think we know them, we once again look at them.

7. “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 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.”
Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”