Literary Criticism

Class #5

•Russian Formalism

History• 1915 The Moscow Linguistic Circl

e founded

• 1916 The Petrograd “Society for the Study of Poetic Language” (Opojaz) founded

History• 1929-1930 censured by Stalin for “undue preoccu

pation with ‘mere’ form, bourgeois ‘escapism,’ and like offenses.” (Note, the term "formalist" was initially applied pejoratively.)

• 1930s The Prague Linguistic Circle (René Wellek, Roman Jakobson)

• 1960s Influenced Anglo-American New Criticism and French Structuralism.

Boris Eichenbaum

• 1886-1959

• “The Formal Method,” 1926

(1) The desire for a science or ‘poetics’ of literature

• “The so-called ‘formal method’ grew out of a struggle for a science of literature that would be both independent and factual . . .” (Norton 1062).

(2) “Literariness” as primary object of study

• “Literariness”: what makes a given work a literary work; what distinguishes literary study from other disciplines, such as psychology, politics, and philosophy. (Eichenbaum 7)

(2) “Literariness” as primary object of study (continued)

• The Formalists read literary texts in order to discover their “literariness”—to highlight the devices and technical elements introduced by writers in order to make language literary. (Selden 38)

(3) The autonomy of form

• Roman Jakobson (1896-1982)• Distinguished between “poetic” language and “pra

ctical” language– Practical language: Language resources (sounds, morph

ological segment, and so forth) are merely a means of communication.

– Poetic language: language resources have automatic value. ((Eichenbaum 7-8).

• Identified literature as a verbal art; focused on the description of certain “dominant” linguistic forms.

(4) Form aims to defamiliarize.

• Victor Shklovsky (1893-1984)

• “Art as Technique” (1916)

• Defamiliarization: or “make it strange”. “Art is conceived as a way of breaking down automatism in perception” ((Eichenbaum 10).

(5) The palpableness of form

• Focuses on “motivation,” or the functional role of literary devices.

• Tends to highlight “art which is not fully motivated or which deliberately tears away motivation,” namely, laying bare its device, such as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. It’s a moment of the narrative self -reflexiveness (Eichenbaum 11-12).

Baring the device: Example 1

• Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy• “Sterne mocks the artificial formula of the picares

que novel which tries to trace the picaro’s life ‘from birth to death’. He highlights this convention by exaggeration: we start with the precise moment of Tristram’s conception—his father’s interrupted ejaculation!” (Selden 38)

• “Sterne parodies the novel’s usual sequential pattern of chapters and preliminaries by transposing chapters, leaving one blank (to be filled in by the reader), and placing dedication and preface in the middle of the book.” (Selden 38)

Baring the device: Example 2 (1) • Jorge Luis Borges’ “Averroes’ Search” • “Borges recounts the story of Averroes, the Arab philosoph

er living in Spain in the second half of the twelfth century. . . . Borges poses the question of why Averroes, who had dedicated his life to understanding the work of Aristotle, had so badly misunderstood the concept of tragedy treated by the Greek philosopher. To answer this question, Borges . . . employs the faculty of historical imagination in order to think himself back into Averroes's particular time period and cultural context.” (Jon Stewart, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/philosophy_and_literature/v019/19.2stewart.html )

• The process of writing the story is meant to parallel the events in the story itself; Borges' attempt to understand Averroës is as futile as Averroës' attempt to understand plays. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averroes's_Search )

Baring the device: Example 2 (2) • Jorge Luis Borges’ “Averroes’ Search” • A moment of the narrative self –reflexivene

ss: at the end the story the narrator states, "I felt that the work was mocking me. I felt that Averroes, wanting to imagine what a drama is without ever having suspected what a theater is, was no more absurd than I, wanting to imagine Averroes yet with no other sources than a few fragments from Renan, Lane, and Asin Palacios.” (155)

(6) Plot (sjuzet) vs. Story (fabula)

• Story: chronological events; marked by real-life motivations

• Plot: the artistic arrangement of events. An artist often “holds back the action of a novel . . . by transposing the order of the parts” (Eichenbaum 12).

(7) the "dialogic" nature of Formalism itself

• In his defense of the primacy of form, Shklovsky explained that "a new form appears not in order to express a new content, but in order to replace an old form, which has already lost its artistic value."

• (Norton 1040) and http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/russian_formalism.html

(8) Literary Evolution

• Literary history = an evolutionary accretion of innovative devices (Norton 1060)

• Eikhenbaum concluded that "when we have a theory that explains everything, a ready-made theory explaining all past and future events and therefore needing neither evolution nor anything like it--then we must recognize that the formal method has come to an end" (Norton 1087).

Preferences:• Inventiveness

• Aesthetic sophistication

• A search for new modes of expression

(Erlich 1101)

Group Activity

• Identify the “literariness” of the following poems. (Do so by observing how the poet “make it strange” for you.)

我不知道風是在哪一個方向吹

徐志摩

我不知道風

是在那一個方向吹—

我是在夢中，

在夢的輕波裏依洄。

我不知道風

是在那一個方向吹—

我是在夢中，

她的溫存，我的迷醉。

我不知道風

是在那一個方向吹—

我是在夢中，

甜美是夢裡的光輝。

我不知道風

是在那一個方向吹—

我是在夢中，

她的負心，我的傷悲。

我不知道風

是在那一個方向吹—

我是在夢中，

在夢的悲哀裏心碎。

我不知道風

是在那一個方向吹—

我是在夢中，

黯淡是夢裡的光輝。

車站留言 陳克華 阿美阿草 我先搭 11:37的南下了 我並不恨你 如果颱風明天到達 來電： (00)7127ㄓ 998ψ

父留。孩子記得我 先生下再說 錢，不要等我了 我家不在台北， Echo： ECHO

欠你的 工作已找著 很久很久以後，本質 和現象衝突 得很厲害 祝快回家 三隻母雞和甘藍菜 都好你最真誠的愛匆此 再還你。 ( 孟樊 〈當代新詩理論〉 頁二五七 )

七尺布

蘇紹連

•

母親只買回了七尺布，我論的很，

為什麼不敢自己去買。我說：

「媽，七尺是不夠的，要八尺才

夠做。」母親說：「以前做七尺

都夠，難道你長高了嗎？」我一

句話也不回答，使母親自覺矮了

下去。

•

母親仍按照舊尺碼在布上畫了一

個我，然後用剪刀慢慢地剪，我

慢慢地哭，啊

！把我剪破，把我

剪開，再用針線縫我，補

我，︰︰︰使我成人。

(

創世紀詩選頁三五

七)

風景(

其二)

林亨泰

防風林 的

外邊

還有

防風林

的

外邊

還有

防風林

的

外邊

還有

然而海

以及波的羅列

然而海

以及波的羅列

(

創世紀詩選頁二六)

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home Craig Raine

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings—

and some are treasured for their markings—

they cause the eyes to melt

or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but

sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight

and rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookish

like engraving under tissue paper.

Rain is where the earth is television.

It has the property of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock insice –

a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film

to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist

or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,

that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it

to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet, they wake it up

deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer

openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.

The lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt

and everyone’s pain has a different smell.

At night, when all the colours die,

they hide in pairs

and read about themselves—

in colour, with their eyelids shut. (Sheldon 42-43)

Food for Thought

• 1. The Formalists believe that literary study is exclusively about form and technique. Give reasons to support or refute this position.

• 2. Compare and contrast Russian Formalism with Structuralism.

Critique

Various individuals and groups advocating or at least incorporating a Marxist perspective on literature, including members of the "sociological school" as well as the Bakhtin school in the 1920s, attacked the Formalists for neglecting the social and ideological discourses impinging upon the structure and function of the poetic work.

• http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/russian_formalism.html

References:• Erlich, Victor. “Russian Formalism.” The New Princeton E

ncyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Eds. Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. 1101-1102.

• Leitch, Vincent B, ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2001.

• McCauley, Karen A. http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/russian_formalism.html

• Selden, Raman. Practicing Theory and Reading Literature. Longman, 1989.