FORMALISM... Let's go.
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Ah, sweet Russia. Bahktin, Jakobson, Shklovsky et. al - scholars of the day who advanced this particular, and peculiarly quasi-scientific, way of defining literature and approaching its analysis.
This assignment carried me back to 1917, before the Bolshevik Revolution - I rather feel in retrospect that it should be taught before New Criticism, which was a later American development which I can now better contextualize. In fact, their points of convergance and divergance are interesting to a nearly distracting degree:
Although the two agree on the "special" and "strange" qualities which distinguish literary language from daily (pragmatic) discourse, it's fascinating that the two diverged in regards to its transcendental function. The Russian Formalists seemed determined to prise out any mystical connotations, instead boiling down literature to an assemblage of elements which, as a whole, constitute the greatness of a piece of literature - which create the meaning, essentially. Form creates meaning.
Yet the American NC's examined form as a means to see how their manipulation illuminates "universal truths" - which would, in a sense, restore some of the perhaps sacred value which Russian Formalists sought to undermine. Fascinating, given that one country greeted modernity by rejecting its religiously permeated past, while the other - the "secular" United States - embraced a fetishism of literary language. Meaning and form are inseparable.
At times like these, I rather wish I had a teacher to ask, as few of the books I have read say very much about the cultural contexts which gave birth to these theories. It's a pretty damned important question, frankly - what was going on that made this theory fit the needs of the culture? Formalism and NC still linger in the American Language Arts classroom - is that still valid, or are we shifting towards a new paradigm, with new needs?
Still, props to RF and NC for placing our attention back on the text itself.
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