Fifteen years of Russian Formalism

Con Davies, and Schleifer present a chapter in their book: Contemporary Literary Criticism. Literary and Cultural Studies in which Russian Formalism is the main focus. One of its main pioneers is Viktor Shklovsky. He, along with other formalists offered during the 1920s and up to 1930 a theory of literary function and critical interpretation that emphasized form and structure over content. They disregarded social conditions and their impact on the production of literary works. Additionally, Russian formalists presented a theory of arts purpose whose ultimate goal was that of estrangement, or making strange. Art as Technique is Shklovskys main statement through which he attacks aesthetic theories about the essence of art. According to Potebnya, another formalist, art is thinking in images and, as he stated, there would be neither art nor poetry without imagery. Potebnya and his disciples supported the idea that images helped the reader channel objects and activities into groups so as to facilitate comprehension and to clarify the unknown by means of the known. Therefore, as the image clarifies meaning, the reader should be more familiar with the image than what it clarifies because the image is meaning itself. Even though there was a belief that images tended to change constantly through time, such beliefs were progressively left aside because it was found that imagistic art changed very little in history. Instead, poets tended to use the already existing images according to what they wanted to achieve in each poem. Poets, then, were more concerned with arranging images rather than with creating them. The importance of poetic imagery was to create the strongest possible impression that, according to Spencer, should be achieved by means of

economizing the creative effort. He emphasized that a satisfactory style is the one that delivers the greatest amount of thought in the fewest words. Poetic language, in this view, admitted hard-to-pronounce conglomerations of similar sounds. The main purpose of this, of art as technique, was to make perception less habitual than usual, and to make objects unfamiliar because once the reader increases and prolongs the perceptive effort, there are more

possibilities that s/he will fix meanings through the use of images. Con Davies and Schleifer take Tolstoy as a primary example to present the use of the previously mentioned technique. Tolstoy, then, makes the familiar seem strange by not naming the familiar object. He constantly uses defamiliarization in his literary works; additionally he uses parallelism in order to transfer the usual perception of an object into a new sphere of perception. The main purpose of presenting material such as Tolstoys works is to delete the automatism of perception to create a new vision of the object presented; or rather, create a new vision in order to defamiliarize perception and prolong it. This view had been apparently shared by Aristotle who supported the idea that language must appear strange and wonderful, particularly in poetry which, according to formalists, is a difficult, roughened and impeded language. Finally, a distinction between poetry and prose in terms of rhythm is made. When it comes to prose, its rhythm is automatizing for it is constant and the readers get used to it rapidly. With poetry, this does not happen because its rhythm is irregular and it varies from poem to poem. Even though there have been attempts to systematize the irregularities of poetry to find a certain

order, such systematization has not taken place. According to Con Davies and Schleifer a systematization of poetry will never work due to the fact that it will disorder the rhythm force it into a constant pattern and turn it into a convention. If such conventions are achieved, then it would become a total ineffective device to roughen poetic language, and it would become an automatizing element as well as in prose. In such case, there would practically be no difference between the two genres in terms of information processing. Alexis Maizo