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What is Russian Formalism, And Why is it important?


Russian Formalism was a school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. Viktor Shklovsky is one of the prominent figures associated with Russian Formalism. It includes the work of several highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars, such as:


  1. Viktor Shklovsky,

  2. Yuri Tynianov,

  3. Vladimir Propp,

  4. Boris Eichenbaum,

  5. Roman Jakobson,

  6. Boris Tomashevsky,

  7. Grigory Gukovsky

They revolutionized literary criticism between 1914 and the 1930s.' They establish the specificity and autonomy of poetic Language and literature. Russian Formalism significantly influenced thinkers like Mikhail Bakhtin and Juri Lotman and structuralism. A distinctive feature of Russian Formalism is its emphasis on the functional role of literary devices and its original conception of literary history. Russian Formalists advocated a "scientific" method of:

  1. Studying poetic Language,

  2. Excluding traditional psychological

  3. Cultural-historical approaches.

New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary Theory. It dominated American literary criticism in the first half of the 20th century. The concept of "Defamiliarization" was proposed by Viktor Shklovsky in his Art as Technique. It refers to the literary device whereby Language is used so that ordinary and familiar objects are made to look different.



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