Russian Formalism

Art literature is not the representation of reality. Stories are told

following ideologies and structural decisions of writers.
What is language? It is a social phenomenon, it is communications, a
tool, but it also has structure, forms, grammar, strategies (metaphor,
list, paradox, irony, repetition, stream of consciousness)
Literature it is not one or the other, it is both, form and content. There
is content, and a message told trough the content, but also through
the form.
Russian Formalism is a type of literary analysis which originated in
Moscow and Petrograd in 1920, and in reaction against the emphasis
in Russian criticism on the content and social significance of
literature. At first its opponents applied the term formalism because
of its stress on the formal patterns of sounds and words instead of the
subject matter of literature.
Its main representative was Roman Jacobson. When this mode of
criticism was suppressed by the Soviets in the early 1930s and the
formalist thinkers moved to Czchecoslovakia, where it was continued
especially by members of the Prague Linguistic Circle.
Formalism views literature as a special class of language, and rests
on the assumption that there is a fundamental opposition between
literary or poetical language and ordinary language. Formalism views
the primary function of ordinary language as communicating a
message to the world existing outside of language. In contrast, it
views literary language as self-focused: its function is not to make
extrinsic references, but to draw attention to its own formal features
that is, to interrelationships among the linguistic signs themselves.
As Roman Jacobson wrote: The object of study in literary science is
not literature but literariness, that is, what makes a given work a
literary work.

The literariness of a work consists in the maximum of foregrounding

of the utterance, that is, of the act of expression. To foreground is to
bring something into the highest prominence, to make it dominant in
ones perception.
The Dominant: The most important element (the form, the topic, any
element). In novels we can see a thematic dominant. In a short story
we can see the format dominant.
To be a structuralist does not mean to be narrow minded. It means to
know what the options are and to know the form of the text.
Defamiliarization: You paint the wall with other color and this renews
the perception of the whole room and of the elements present in the
room. Whenever a feature is defamiliarized, that feature is
foregrounded, because it calls my attention.
The primary aim of literature in foregrounding its medium is to
estrange or defamiliarize (ostranenie), that is, by disrupting the
ordinary modes of linguistic discourse, literature makes strange the
world of everyday perception and renews the readers lost capacity
for refresh sensation. The foregrounded properties, or artistic devices,
which estrange poetic language, are often described as deviations
from the processes of ordinary language. Such deviations consist,
primary, of patterns in the sound and syntax of poetic language-that
is, of meter, repetitions, balance, and contrast in speech sounds,
rhythm, rhyme, stanza forms-and also of recurrences of key words or
images. Innovation in technique is a new value.
Distinction between story and plot: an author is said to transform a
story into a plot by the use of various devices to violate sequence and
to deform and defamiliarize the story elements. The effect is to draw
attention to the narrative medium and devices themselves, and to
make patent the fictionally of its subject matter.

Conclusion: The formalist approach is useful in that it draws attention

to technique. But it is also possible to find moral or political uses for
formalist ideas. Instead of merely asking what artistic effects are
gained by the use of devices such as defamiliarization, we can ask
what ideological effects are produced by such devices.

"Jack Sprat" (or "Jack Spratt") is an English language nursery rhyme. The most common
modern version of the rhyme is:
Jack Sprat could eat no fat.
His wife could eat no lean.
And so between them both, you see,
They licked the platter clean.[1]
The name Jack Sprat was used of people of small stature in the sixteenth century.[1] This rhyme
was an English proverb from at least the mid-seventeenth century.[1] It appeared in John Clarke's
collection of sayings in 1639