Tags
This is a picture of Viktor Shklovsky, one of the main voices behind a way of thinking about literature that today is known as Russian Formalism.
Russian Formalism emerged in the opening decades of the twentieth century as a reaction to the mystification of literature found in the influential pan-European arts movement of Symbolism. Whereas Symbolism thought of literature as a means to apprehend a universal truth – a truth that could only be revealed by looking sideways at the world in order to glimpse the (platonic) Ideal form that gave birth to all -, Russian Formalism thought of literature on an altogether more prosaic, scientific basis – that is, as a kind of machine that could be adequately analyzed by concentrating on language and the employ of formal literary device.
For this reason, it is right to say that Russian Formalism was concerned more with the notion of literariness – what makes a text “literary” – than with the concept of literature itself. Indeed, this was the concern of Viktor Shklovsky’s critical work. In his well-read essay “Art as Technique” (which is also known as “Art as Device”), Shklovsky argues that literariness is simply the product of a particular use of language – it is our language of the everyday defamiliarized. That is to say, literariness is the result of working language so that it “makes strange” or interrupts our habituated or automatic perception of the word. By interrupting our automatic perception of the word in this way, the reader is forced to make extra effort in determining the meaning of the text and in so doing, Shklovsky argues, our wonder of the world is re-enlivened. He puts it like this:
“Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war … Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” (“Art as Technique”)
So, the writer’s job is to recover “the sensation of life” – that is, to render the world unusual or unfamiliar to the extent that the reader experiences the world anew. To return to his own example, it is to make the reader experience the artfulness of the stone rather than simply regard the stone as object. If one could sum up defamiliarization in a single sentence then, it might look something like this – defamiliarization is a technique by which the author can re-enliven the naturally inquisitive and literally awesome gaze of the child in the reader.
Perhaps the most important implication of thinking of the literary in this way is that literature itself can never again settle down. Clearly, those literary devices which once unsettled the reader will at some point become naturalized, just as the repetition of an inspiring metaphor means that it will eventually become a worn cliché. If literariness is a product of “making strange” then literature will always have to search out new ways of defamiliarizing the reading experience. Understood like this, literary history becomes the domain of discontinuities and interruptions rather than the smooth “progression” that some of the more conservative critics would advocate.
On World Literature 
Thank you sir, I’m really benefited from your answer. My another point is: before the concept of Russian Formalism how people perceived things in literature that this concept could have to emerge by formalists?
Im going to experiment with Defamiliarization and illustration for my bachelor. Thanks for this article 😊
Excellent. Good luck with your studies!
Being a student of literature, I found this article very useful.It has stunning points about formalism which clears the whole theory of in an easy way,And also much understandable for the Students of Literature….
Dear Waleed, I’m glad you found the post helpful. All the best for your studies!
Pingback: Shoulders Down, Shoulders Back | One Blue Sail
The article is brief but covers all important points. I want to write on this in Urdu. I hope you will cooperate with me – will you?
Dear Sajjad, I’d be more than happy for you to translate this small post into Urdu. I hope people find it useful!
Pingback: Does Art Remove Boundaries? – The Ruff Draft
Great article…I am writing a piece of fiction for University that will attempt to explore the idea of defamiliarisation.
Enjoyed this…
Many thanks for your comment. I’m glad you enjoyed it. Best of luck with your university work!
No doubt the article covers all the important points about formalism and defamiliarization. Could you please explain the quote “Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war … Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.”?
Hi Muhammad. Speaking broadly, the point here is that if we live our lives by habit – that is, by following the same routines – we live by not thinking, and because of that we miss the vitality (or the wonderment) of the world. Literature, art, and music (indeed, all the Arts) offer possible ways for us to reconnect to this vitality of the world. Put another way, for Shklovsky literature allows us to once again “re-experience” the essential quality of something like a stone (rather than think of it as just another stone). Understood like this, literature gives its readers a lens by which they become like children to the extent that it makes us consider again the wonder(s) of the world (in exactly the same way that a young child is fascinated by everything they encounter in the world).