formalism

—formalist, n., adj. —formalistic, adj. —formalistically, adv.

/fawr"meuh liz'euhm/, n.

1. strict adherence to, or observance of, prescribed or traditional forms, as in music, poetry, and art.

2. Relig. strong attachment to external forms and observances.

3. Ethics. a doctrine that acts are in themselves right or wrong regardless of consequences.

4. Logic, Math. a doctrine, which evolved from a proposal of David Hilbert, that mathematics, including the logic used in proofs, can be based on the formal manipulation of symbols without regard to their meaning.

[1830-40; FORMAL¹ + -ISM]

* * *

or Russian Formalism

Russian school of literary criticism that flourished from 1914 to 1928.

Making use of the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, Formalists were concerned with what technical devices make a literary text literary, apart from its psychological, sociological, biographical, and historical elements. Though influenced by the Symbolist movement, they sought to make their analyses more objective and scientific than those of the Symbolists. The movement was condemned by the Soviet authorities in 1929 for its lack of political perspective. Later it became influential in the West, notably in New Criticism and structuralism.

* * *

▪ literary criticism

also called  Russian Formalism , Russian  Russky Formalism 

      innovative 20th-century Russian school of literary criticism. It began in two groups: OPOYAZ, an acronym for Russian words meaning Society for the Study of Poetic Language, founded in 1916 at St. Petersburg (later Leningrad) and led by Viktor Shklovsky (Shklovsky, Viktor Borisovich); and the Moscow Linguistic Circle, founded in 1915. Other members of the groups included Osip Brik, Boris Eikhenbaum, Yury Tynianov, and Boris Tomashevsky.

      Although the Formalists based their assumptions partly on the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure and partly on Symbolist (Symbolist movement) notions concerning the autonomy of the text and the discontinuity between literary and other uses of language, the Formalists sought to make their critical discourse more objective and scientific than that of Symbolist criticism. Allied at one point to the Russian Futurists and opposed to sociological criticism, the Formalists placed an “emphasis on the medium” by analyzing the way in which literature, especially poetry, was able to alter artistically or “make strange” common language so that the everyday world could be “defamliarized.” They stressed the importance of form and technique over content and looked for the specificity of literature as an autonomous verbal art. They studied the various functions of “literariness” as ways to separate poetry and fictional narrative from other forms of discourse. Although always anathema to the Marxist critics, Formalism was important in the Soviet Union until 1929, when it was condemned for its lack of political perspective. Later, largely through the work of the structuralist linguist Roman Jakobson (Jakobson, Roman), it became influential in the West, notably in Anglo-American New Criticism, which is sometimes called Formalism.

      Victor Erlich's Russian Formalism (1955) is a history; Théorie de la littérature (1965) is a translation by Tzvetan Todorov of important Russian texts. Anthologies in English include L.T. Lemon and M.J. Reis, eds., Russian Formalist Criticism (1965), L. Matejka and K. Pomorska, eds., Readings in Russian Poetics (1971), and Stephen Bann and John Bowlt, eds., Russian Formalism (1973).

* * *