Formalism

Formalism, also called Russian Formalism, Russian Russky Formalism, innovative 20th-century Russian school of literary criticism. It began in two groups: OPOYAZ, an acronym for Russian words meaning Society for the Study of Poetic Language, founded in 1916 at St. Petersburg (later Leningrad) and led by Viktor Shklovsky; and the Moscow Linguistic Circle, founded in 1915. Other members of the groups included Osip Brik, Boris Eikhenbaum, Yury Tynianov, and Boris Tomashevsky.

Although the Formalists based their assumptions partly on the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure and partly on Symbolist notions concerning the autonomy of the text and the discontinuity between literary and other uses of language, the Formalists sought to make their critical discourse more objective and scientific than that of Symbolist criticism. Allied at one point to the Russian Futurists and opposed to sociological criticism, the Formalists placed an “emphasis on the medium” by analyzing the way in which literature, especially poetry, was able to alter artistically or “make strange” common language so that the everyday world could be “defamliarized.” They stressed the importance of form and technique over content and looked for the specificity of literature as an autonomous verbal art.

They studied the various functions of “literariness” as ways to separate poetry and fictional narrative from other forms of discourse. Although always anathema to the Marxist critics, Formalism was important in the Soviet Union until 1929, when it was condemned for its lack of political perspective. Later, largely through the work of the structuralist linguist Roman Jakobson, it became influential in the West, notably in Anglo-American New Criticism, which is sometimes called Formalism.

Victor Erlich’s Russian Formalism (1955) is a history; Théorie de la littérature (1965) is a translation by Tzvetan Todorov of important Russian texts. Anthologies in English include L.T. Lemon and M.J. Reis, eds., Russian Formalist Criticism (1965), L. Matejka and K. Pomorska, eds., Readings in Russian Poetics (1971), and Stephen Bann and John Bowlt, eds., Russian Formalism (1973).

The focus in formalism is only on the text and the contents within the text such as grammar, syntax, signs, literary tropes, etc. Formalism also brings attention to structural tendencies within a text or across texts such as genre and categories. Formalism is based on an analysis of a text rather than a discussion on issues more distant to the text.

So Formalism is based on the technical purity of a text. Formalism is divided into two branches Russian Formalism and New Criticism. Formalism also argued that a text is an autonomous entity liberated from the intention of the author.

A text according to Formalism is a thing on its own without the need of external agents. As the name suggests, Formalism is a scientific, technical mode of understanding texts which expects a greater degree of mental intelligence instead of emotional intelligence from the readers.  

Russian Formalism was a school of literary criticism in Russia from 1910 to 1930. Some prominent scholars of Russian Formalism were Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Boris Tomashevsky and Grigory Gukovsky. Russian Formalism brought the idea of scientific analysis of poetry. Russian Formalism alludes to the work of the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOYAZ), 1916 in St. Petersburg by Boris Eichenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky and Yury Tynyanov.