How do formalism and structuralism differ?

Russian Formalism focused on the devices that make a text 'literary'; structuralism generalized this into a search for the underlying systems and codes, modelled on linguistics, that make meaning possible across many texts.

What is defamiliarization?

It is Shklovsky's idea that art works by making habitual things appear strange, prolonging perception so that we notice what routine experience has made invisible.

Formalism and Structuralism

Formalism and structuralism are approaches that locate literary meaning in the formal devices and systematic structures of texts rather than in authorial biography or historical context.

Definition

A family of literary-critical approaches that analyze texts as autonomous systems of formal devices and structural relations, drawing on linguistics for their models and vocabulary.

Scope

This area covers the early-twentieth-century Russian Formalists, the Prague Linguistic Circle, and the structuralist poetics that grew out of Saussurean linguistics. It treats their shared conviction that literature is a rule-governed system, their accounts of literariness, defamiliarization, and the functions of language, and the methods (narratology, literary semiotics) that systematized the study of how texts produce meaning. It describes these schools and their concepts rather than endorsing any one method.

Sub-topics

Core questions

What distinguishes literary language from ordinary language?
Can the study of literature be made systematic, on the model of linguistics?
How do formal devices, rather than content or context, produce literary effects?
What underlying structures are shared across many narratives or texts?

Key theories

Defamiliarization (ostranenie): The Russian Formalist claim that art renews perception by making the familiar strange, so that 'literariness' lies in devices that slow down and foreground perception rather than in subject matter.
The structural model of the sign: Saussure's account of language as a system of differential signs (signifier/signified) provided the template for structuralist analysis, treating literary meaning as an effect of relations within a system rather than of reference to the world.
The poetic function of language: Jakobson's model of communication in which the 'poetic function' projects the principle of equivalence from selection onto combination, identifying the linguistic basis of poetic patterning such as parallelism and rhythm.

History

Russian Formalism emerged around 1915-1916 with the Moscow Linguistic Circle and the Petersburg OPOYAZ, was suppressed in the Soviet Union by the late 1920s, and its insights were carried into the Prague Linguistic Circle. From the 1950s, structuralism extended Saussure's linguistics into anthropology and literary study, reaching an international audience through Jakobson, Barthes, Todorov, and Culler's Structuralist Poetics (1975).

Debates

Autonomy of the literary text: Whether treating literature as a self-contained formal system illuminates its workings or wrongly brackets history, ideology, and the author, a charge later pressed by Marxist and poststructuralist critics.

Key figures

Viktor Shklovsky
Roman Jakobson
Ferdinand de Saussure
Jonathan Culler
Tzvetan Todorov

Seminal works

saussure1916
jakobson1960
culler1975

Frequently asked questions

How do formalism and structuralism differ?: Russian Formalism focused on the devices that make a text 'literary'; structuralism generalized this into a search for the underlying systems and codes, modelled on linguistics, that make meaning possible across many texts.
What is defamiliarization?: It is Shklovsky's idea that art works by making habitual things appear strange, prolonging perception so that we notice what routine experience has made invisible.