This slide is useful to anyone who want to study about literature , especially formalism.

1. What is Formalism?
Dr Chandeshwar Yadav

2. What is Formalism?
* Formalism is a 20th century Russian school of literary criticism.
* It analyzes, interprets, or evaluates the literary text not only on the
basis of grammar and syntax but also on the basis of literary devices
such as meter and figures of speech. The formalist approach reduces
the importance of a text’s historical, biographical, and cultural context.

3. History
• It began in two groups: the Moscow Linguistic Circle, led by Roman
Jakobson, was founded in 1915 and the Society for the Study of
Poetic Language ( Opoyaz ) led by Victor Shklowvsky in 1916

4. Characteristics
• They both stressed the importance of form and technique over content.
• Russian Formalism considers literature as a special use of language, and it is
devoted to the analysis of ‘form’ or ‘ howness’ alone.

5. • So, literature is the distortion or violation of day to day language.
• They focused on the formal aspects of literature, rather than its content.
Formalist focus on literary function. It also focus on texture of literary function.
• They were close to text and language than society and traditions.
• It views literature primarily as a specialized mode of language and proposes a
fundamental opposition between literary use of language and the ordinary use of
language.

6. Victor Shklovsky (1893-1984)
• Victor Shklovsky in his essay “Art as Technique” (1916) introduced
the concept of defamiliarization.

7. Defamiliarization
• Defamiliarization means “making it strange.” It is the process of
presenting common thing in uncommon way to destroy the familiar
perception.

8. Jan Mukarovsky ( 1891 – 1975 )
• Jan Mukarovsky in his essay “ Standard Language and Poetic
Language” introduces the concept called Foregrounding.

9. Foregrounding
• Foregrounding is the process of deautomatization.
• The formalist observes the physical structure of text, punctuation
marks and graph. e.e. cummings in his poem
Buffalo Bill ’s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat…

10. Conclusion
• Formalism is a literary criticism that considers form and technique as
its tool to treat the literary text, not its content.
• How something is said is the subject matter of it, It doesn’t consider
what is said.
• In other words, the text, its form and structure for them are
everything, not the tradition, circumstance and society.

11. THANKS !!!