Formalism and Early Structuralism, 1914–1960

Literary Theory

Formalism and Early Structuralism, 1914–1960

Arranged by :

Fitria (1500026011)

Fani Alfionita Sari (1500026018)

Fatma Fadhilah (1500026037)

Mutiara Pratama Putri (1500026038)

Shella Antoro Putri (1500026040)

Ani Masruroh (1500026044)

Sonya Audia (1500026050)

English Literature Department

Faculty of Literature, Culture, and Communication

Ahmad Dahlan University

2016

Preface

In spite of the enormous influence of Eliot, Leavis, and the New Critics, our current perspectives on the study of literature perhaps more to continental Europe than to England and the United States. The continental European tradition of literary studies that is responsible for this begins in Russia, in the second decade of the twentieth century, in Moscow and St Petersburg. It finds a new home in Prague in the late 1920s, when the political climate in the Soviet Union has become too repressive, and travels to France (by way of New York City) after the Second World War, where it comes into full bloom in the 1960s and begins to draw widespread international attention. It is in France, too, that it provokes a countermovement that achieved its full force in the 1970s and 1980s and that is still the dominant presence in literary, cultural, and in studies. Like its Anglo-American counterpart, this originally  Russian  approach  to  literature  initially concentrated  on  poetry.

The English, later Anglo-American, line of development and the Russian one had nothing whatsoever to do with  each  other.  The  Russians  who  developed  the  so called formal method, which gave  them  the name Formalists, were totally unaware of what happened in England, while the English and the Americans were completely ignorant of the debates that took  place  in Russia.

Russian  linguist  Roman  Jakobson (1896–1982) moved to New York City, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, and when his fellow Formalists began to be translated into English in the late 1950s and 1960s, that the English-speaking  world  began  to  take  notice  of their  wholly different approach to literary art. But even then the response was slow, no doubt because the Formalist approach was so foreign to what Eliot, Leavis,  the New Critics, and  their ubiquitous heirs saw as the mission of literature and of writing about literature. Significantly,  the  Formalist  perspective  had  to  be  picked  up, assimilated, and further developed by the French before it really made an impact on English and American literary thought. In 1941 became one at the New School of Social Research in New York and after the war to be called  the  structuralist method, or structuralism.

What  is  relevant here  is not historical  comprehensiveness  but  a  certain  way of looking  at literature that would  much later have great  impact in the English-speaking world.

Early Formalism

As the phrase “formal method” will have suggested, the formalists were primarily oriented towards the form of literature, that focus on formal aspects does not mean that they could not imagines a possible moral or social mission for literature.

Victor Skhlovsky (1893-1984), literature has the ability to make us see the worlds anew – to make that which has become familiar, because we have been overexposed to it, strange again.

The social function of literature either as the repository of the best that had been thought and said, or as one of the grat revitalizers (with the other art)

Formalist were prepared to recognized this as important effect of literature, formalism wanted to discover general laws – the more general are better. What they wanted to know is how literature works, how it achieves its defamliarizing affects. Fot the new critics the formal aspects of literary works were not unimportant because from that perspective meaning was always bound up with form.

Still, they were first of all interested in the form in which a poem presented itself because a close scrutiny of its formal aspects worlds reveal the complex of oppositions and tensions that constitute the poem’s real meaning. But, the formalists were after what they considered bigger game and in order to do so ignored literature’s referential function, the way it reflects the world we live in, iand give it an autonomous status, or gave at least the aesthetic dimension of literature an autonomous status.

Formalist are focused on literariness that which makes a literary text different from, say, a piece in the economist or time. In the other words, although they always work with individual texts, what they are interested in is what all literary texts, have in common, in a literary common denominator. They concentrated like true scientist on general rules.

The secret of “literariness”, the formalists decided was that in poetry - the intial focus of their interest – ordinary language becomes “defamiliarized” while an article in Time is satisfied to use fairly ordinary language, poetry subjects language to a process of defamiliarization. It is this linguistics defamiliarization that then leads to a perceptual defamiliarization on the part of the reader , to a renewed and fresh way of looking at the world. Forms of repetition that one does not find in ordinary language such as rhyme, regular matter as the subdivision in stanzas taht we find in many poems. Poetry also uses “devices” that one may come across in non poetic language (although with the same intensity, like metaphors and symbol) in so doing, it often also exploits the potential for ambiguity that language always has.

For the formalist, poetry is not poetry because it employs time – honoured and profound themes to explore the human condition, but rather because in the process of determiliarizing the language draws attention to its own articallity to the way it says what it has to say. Now, the idea of determiliarizing works well enough in the case of poetry and the difficult, willfully innovative and defamiliraizing modernist poetry of their own period perfectly confirmed the validity of defamiliarization as the ultimate criterion in establishing “literariness”(with handsight we can seen how much the formalist idea of literature, too, was influenced by contemporary poetic practice”) 

Fabula and Syuzhet

Understanding the difference between Fabula and Syuzhet

The difference between the concept of “story” (fabula) and “groove” (syuzhet) got a very important place in the Russian formalist narrative theory. Fabula is defined as a description of the sequence of events or more pecisely as a depiction of the chain of in chronological order and casual relationships. Fabula concept is used as opposed to the concept of syuzhet usually translated as “plot” or “narrative structurea”. According to the formlist, “groove” (syuzhet) is a semantic way of presenting the material in a particular text, while the “story” (fabula) is just the material for the formation of the plot. Fabula is a raw material that awaits management hands of the writer. The term fabula (story) and syuzhet or plot (grooves) in the modern literature have a variety of contention understanding between the one and the other, more used mainly on the analysis of novels, stories and so on. Fabula is the whole motif in a logical nexus, causal-temporal, whereas syuzhet is overall the same motives that, but in order and relationship artistically as linked in the work of the (Sutrisno, 1983:93)

Fabula and syuzhet is the most famous formalist concept. Stories and storytelling, story and plot, is regarded as a key concept in distinguishing literature. Fabula is coarse material, events are arranged chronologically, therfore also called konstituten fabula plot. Syuzhet organize events into the overall narrative structure (Ratna, 2004:86)

Folktales

It had struck Propp (1895–1970) that if you looked closer at many Russian folktales and fairytales you actually found one and the same underlying story. In Folktale he tries to show how a hundred different tales are in fact variations upon – in other words, syuzhets of – what seemed to be one and the same underlying fabula. In a simple, chronologically told fairytale without flashbacks and other narrative tricks the syuzhet rather closely follows the fabula.

We might say that various syuzhet-elements correspond to one fabula-element (if we take the liberty of seeing all the fairytales in terms of one single fabula). Theoretically this can also work the other way around, with one and the same syuzhet element representing more than one fabula-element.

Propp distinguishes a limited number of actors (or, in his term, ‘dramatis personae’) – hero, villain, seeker (often the hero), helper, false hero, princess – and thirty-one functions that always appear in the same sequence. In this imaginary case we must be dealing with two functions – one leading to disaster and one leading to a happy ending – that are represented by one and the same act.

All thirtyone of them do not necessarily make an appearance in every single fairytale. Propp’s fairytales get along very well with only a selection, even if the final functions – the punishment of the villain and the wedding that symbolizes the happy ending – are always the same. It is also possible for a fairytale to interrupt itself and start a new, embedded, sequence (and another one) or to put one sequence after another. The individual qualities of the characters, however, are always irrelevant. At Propp’s level of abstraction only their acts – which derive from the functions – really count. The villain and the helper are unimportant except for what they do and what they do always has the same function in the various tales. This approach in terms of actors – embodied by interchangeable characters – and functions allows Propp to collapse a hundred different syuzhets into the skeleton of one single fabula.

At Propp’s level of abstraction, however, we ignore the actual characters and concentrate on their function within the story. With the method he uses for his tales, Propp might have proposed one single fabula for all detective stories. He might have proposed a basic fabula with three acts or functions: that of murdering, that of getting murdered, and that of exposing the killer. If we look at Propp’s tales from this abstract vantage point we see similarities between them that otherwise would have escaped our notice. By presenting things in this way, Propp makes us see his folktales as systems in which the functions that he identifies have a specific place.

A decade after Propp – saw the literary work, and in particular the poetic text they were preoccupied with, as a system of checks and balances, with the checks and balances obviously interrelated. In Propp’s book the interrelatedness of the various elements of a text gets more emphasis because his clearly defined functions are part of an equally clearly defined chain (there is, after all, only one underlying fabula). The ‘helper’ is always there to offer help, and not to the ‘villain’, even if what he or she actually does may vary widely from tale to tale. Each of Propp’s folktales, then, contains an underlying structure of which the unsuspecting reader will usually not be aware. But if folktales contain such a structure, then maybe other narratives, too, can be made to reveal an underlying structure. That idea would, in an admittedly more sophisticated form, conquer literary academia more than thirty years later.

Formalism revisited

Early formalism went wrong because there is assumption that literariness is the product of the inherent qualities of the devices which the qualities and the resulting literariness could be identified, pointed at. The only rule that can be formulated is that Defimiliarization works by way of contrast, of difference.

The formalists decided that familiarization is responsible for the relative blindness of the environment, including language, be at work within literature itself. Familiarization work at two levels: the single literary work and literary as a whole.

The formalists started to look for processes of Defimiliarization within literary works themselves, the ability to Defimiliarize our perception is not a quality that certain techniques inherently possess, it is all a matter of how a certain technique function within a given literary work, and that function can change from text to text. So defimiliarization is the way and the extent to which it differs from its environment.

The formalists gave the interesting explanation about literary change, all know that literature has change over time. But why? From the formalists explanation, there is the conclusion that it happens because “Defamiliarization”. for example genre, genre of the literary will change since new elements and new techniques are by definition unfamiliar to the reader they automatically function as Defamiliarizing devices.

The driving mechanism of literary history is ingenious and interesting. Literature is not wholly autonomous: it is not completely divorce from the world it exists in. The mechanism of Defimiliarization cannot say anything about the nature of devices that will be deployed.  The individual author plays a significant role in making selection from the array of devices that are available or, even better, in creating wholly new one.

Prague Structuralism

            A literary text is a structure in which all the elements are interrelated and interdependent. Literary texts are oriented towards themelves.

1.      The formalists tended to focus on the defamiliarizing elements within literary art-either those elements that distinguished literary texts from non-literature or those that served the process of defimiliarization within those text themselves. Formalist function: has to do with the way textual elements achieve effects of defamiliarization because of their difference from their environment. Classification of the formalists:

·         Literature referred primarily to itself , but it could also be taken as referring to the outside world , although the reverential element would of course always have to be subservient to its orientation on the literary code.

·         Defamiliarization  which would not seem to affect its immediate textual environment.

·         Defamiliarization points to a constrastive,but static.

2.      For the structuralist ,the text as a whole not just the literary text, has a function too. A text’s function is determined by its orientation, it’s called “speech act”. Text function as a coherent whole, kept together by it’s dominant with always interrelated and interdependent.

Example :  ‘Damn!’ Expressing disappointment,anger,surprisenand so on. ‘Hey, You!’, is oriented towards the person that is (addressee).  Everything we say or write the message is oriented towards its sender.

·         The structuralists is which orientation accompanying function is dominant. This concept of the dominant allowed them a fiew of literary texts that was good deal more flexibel.Structuralists called the ‘poetic function’ (a text would cease to be literature if its dominant orientation shifted from the text  itself-its form- to the outside world).

·         The structuralists replaced defamiliarization by foregrounding. Poetic language give effect ‘foregrounding of the utterance’. Foregrounding has the effect that it ’automatizes’ neighbouring textual elements.

·         Foregrounding emphasizes the dynamism of that relationship. Just like the idea of a ‘dominant’.foregrounding implies a perspective that sees a text as astructure of interrelated elements.

Foregrounding , with its structuralist orientation ,has in contemporary literary critism effectly replaced defamiliarization.

The Axis of Combination

In the late 1950s Roman Jakobson formulated what is probably the ultimate attempt to define the aesthetic function in poetry, that is the ‘literariness’ of poetry. I will briefly discuss Jakobson’s definition because it is one of the prime examples of the formal, ‘scientific’, approach to literature that marks continental European thinking about literature from the 1910s until the 1970s. Jakobson said, ‘projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination’ (Jakobson [1960] 1988: 39). This is not an inviting formula, as uninviting, in fact, as the title of the 1960 article – ‘Linguistics and Poetics’ – in which he presented this thesis to the English-speaking world. However, it is less impenetrable than it might seem to be. Jakobson’s definition departs from the simple fact that all words can be classified and categorized. Every time we use language what we say or write is a combination of words selected from a large number of classes and categories. Take for instance a bare bones sentence like ‘Ma feels cold.’ In this sentence we might have used ‘Pa’ or ‘Sis’ or ‘Bud’ or ‘John’ (and so on) instead of ‘Ma’ and we might have used ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘hot’ (and so on) instead of ‘cold’ without disrupting the sentence’s grammar. The alternatives that I have mentioned are grammatically equivalent to ‘Ma’ or ‘cold’. ‘Butter feels cold’ would definitely be odd, and so would ‘Bud feels butter.’ The selection process that starts up whenever we are on the point of speaking or writing is governed by invisible rules that make us select words from large classes of grammatically equivalent words: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on. However, we also constantly make selections in the field of meaning. Here we are on less abstract ground than in the previous example and the starting-point is what we actually want to say. Usually there will be more than one way of saying what is virtually the same thing. The most obvious case is that of a word for which there is a perfect synonym. We will have to choose between two equivalents. Or we can choose from a group of words that are closely related with regard to meaning, for instance: man, guy, fellow, bloke, gent, and so on. Which word we will actually choose may depend on the degree of colloquiality (or dignity) that we want to project or on how precise we want to be: a gent is not only male, but a specific kind of male. In any case, we make a selection from a number of words that have much in common and may even be roughly identical: they are approximately or even wholly equivalent in meaning.