What I learned from Chapter 2 - Literary Theory by Hans Bertens #concepts

Chapter 2 is ‘Reading for Form -1 -Formalism and Early Structuralism, 1914- 1960’

The Russians developed the so-called formal method, so they were called formalists. The Russian linguist, Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) moved to New York City before the Second World War, and in the late 1950s and 1960s, his works began to be translated into English.

Formalists were concerned with the form of literature.

Jakobson in 1921 coined the term ‘literariness’ – or that which makes a literary text different from other texts. The secret of ‘literariness’, they concluded, was ‘defamiliarization’.

Defamiliarization in poetry

A number of literary devices are used. For example, forms of repetition, rhyme, a regular meter, stanzas, metaphors, symbols. The last two may be used in non-poetic language, too.

Defamiliarization in novels

An example: Russel Hoban’s Riddley Walker of 1980 “On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs’

Fabula and Syuzhet

Fabula is a concept introduced by Shklovsky in 1921. It is a straightforward account of something, which tells us what actually happened.

It is the ‘bare bones’ account of something.

A manipulation of the fabula creates the Syuzhet, which has the defamiliarizing effect, like devices in poetry.

Vladimir Propp in 1928 says in ‘The Morphology of the Folktale’ that if you looked closely at many Russian folktales and fairy tales, you actually found one underlying story- In other words, numerous syuzhets of one fabula.

Foreground and background

Foregrounding has the effect of drawing the reader’s attention to itself and obscuring all else. It is made possible because of the existence of a background.

Foreground and background – the unfamiliar and the familiar- function together to create poetic effects.