Russian formalism

1910s-1920s

• Intrinsic approach:

  • focus on formal analysis of text, no interest in relation between text and external world

  • influenced by linguistics

• View of literature:

  • literature = specific organisation of language - texts can be taken apart like machines → objective scientific approach to art

• Deviation:

  • literature uses language in specific and unusal way that differs from everyday uses of language (“literariness”)

• Defamiliarisation:

  • Effect of deviation

  • reader's deception is changed

  • familiar things appear as unfamiliar because of their presentation through literary language

• Roman Jakobson:

  • Six functions of language in communication

  • referential, phatic, conative, emotive, matalingual, poetic/aesthetic function

  • literature foregrounds poetic/aesthetic function → Literature is about more than transmission of information