What is formalism?

This slide is useful to anyone who want to study about literature , especially formalism.

1. What is Formalism? Dr Chandeshwar Yadav

2.   What is Formalism ? * F ormalism is a 20 th century Russian school of literary criticism. * It analyzes, interprets, or evaluates the literary text not only on the basis of grammar and syntax but also on the basis of literary devices such as meter and figures of speech . The formalist approach reduces the importance of a text’s historical, biographical, and cultural context.

3. History It began in two groups: the Moscow Linguistic Circle, led by Roman Jakobson , was founded in 1915 and the Society for the Study of Poetic Language ( Opoyaz ) led by Victor Shklowvsky in 1916

4. Characteristics They both stressed the importance of form and technique over content. Russian Formalism considers literature as a special use of language, and it is devoted to the analysis of ‘form’ or ‘ howness’ alone.

5. So, literature is the distortion or violation of day to day language. They focused on the formal aspects of literature, rather than its content. Formalist focus on literary function. It also focus on texture of literary function. They were close to text and language than society and traditions . It views literature primarily as a specialized mode of language and proposes a fundamental opposition between literary use of language and the ordinary use of language.

6. Victor Shklovsky (1893-1984) Victor Shklovsky in his essay “Art as Technique” (1916 ) introduced the concept of defamiliarization.

7. Defamiliarization Defamiliarization means “making it strange .” It is the process of presenting common thing in uncommon way to destroy the familiar perception.

8. Jan Mukarovsky ( 1891 – 1975 ) Jan Mukarovsky in his essay “ Standard Language and Poetic Language” introduces the concept called Foregrounding .

9. Foregrounding Foregrounding is the process of deautomatization. The formalist observes the physical structure of text, punctuation marks and graph . e .e. cummings in his poem Buffalo Bill ’s defunct                who used to                ride a watersmooth-silver                                                                   stallion and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat…

10. Conclusion   F ormalism is a literary criticism that considers form and technique as its tool to treat the literary text, not its content. How something is said is the subject matter of it, It doesn’t consider what is said. In other words, the text, its form and structure for them are everything, not the tradition, circumstance and society.

11. THANKS !!!