Fifteen Years of Russian Formalism

Russian formalists offered a theory of literary function and critical interpretation, as well as a theory of arts purpose. They make emphasize form and structure in literature over content and the fact that social conditions may be said to produce literary works.

The ultimate purpose of literary art is estrangement, or making strange

These goals tended to conflict with the governmental aims of socialist realism, and in 1930, the Formalists were officially suppressed. Art as Technique is Shklovsky central statement and one of the primary documents of Russian Formalism. The imagist approach (thinking in images) to literary art is highlighted in New Criticism.

ART AS TECHNIQUE
Art is thinking in images Without imagery there is no art, and in particular no poetry. Potebnya and his disciples feel that the purpose of imagery is to help channel various objects and activities into groups and to clarify the unknown by means of the known. We must be more familiar with the image than with what it clarifies. Images have changed little in the history of imagistic art. They flow on without changing. The images a given poet used and which you thought his own were taken almost unchanged from another poet. Poets are much more concerned with arranging images than with creating them. Images are given to poets. The ability to remember images is more important than the ability to create them. Poetic imagery is a means of creating the strongest possible impression. Poetic imagery is but one of the devices of poetic language. Prose imagery is a means of abstraction. Spencer supports the principle of economy of creative effort. A satisfactory style is precisely that style which delivers the greatest amount of thought in the fewest words. These ideas about the economy of economy of energy, as well as about the law and aim of creativity are perhaps true in their application to practical language. Poetic language tolerated the admission of hard-to-pronounce conglomerations of similar sounds.

We see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Such habituation explains the principles by which, in ordinary speech, we leave phrases unfinished and words half expressed. The object perceived in the manner of prose perception fades and does not leave even a first impression. Even the essence of what it was is forgotten. The overautomatization of an object permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort. 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 no important. Tolstoy makes the familiar seem strange by not naming the familiar object. He uses the technique of defamiliarization constantly. An image is not a permanent referent. Its purpose is to create a special perception of the object. The purpose of parallelism, like the general purpose of imagery, is to transfer the usual perception of an object into the sphere of a new perception. That is, to make a unique semantic modification. In studying poetic speech, we find material obviously created to remove the automatism of perception. The authors purpose is to create a vision which results from the deautomatized perception. According to Aristotle, poetic language must appear strange and wonderful; and, in fact, it is often actually foreign. The language of poetry is, then, a difficult, roughened, impeded language. Poetic speech is formed speech. Prose is ordinary speech, economical, easy, and proper. The rhythm of prose is an important automatizing element; the rhythm of poetry is not. There is order in art. Poetic rhythm is similarly disordered rhythm

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