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.
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