Quid Pro Quo

Formalism in the broadest sense refers to a type of criticism that emphasizes the "form" of a text rather than its content. Formalist critics also tend to eschew discussion of any elements deemed external to the text itself (history, politics, biography).

More narrowly, Formalism refers to the critics and theorists working in Russia (actually, the Soviet Union) in the 1910s and 1920s. Major figures include Victor Shklovsky (Theory of Prose), Boris Eichenbaum (Theory of the Formal Method), Vladimir Propp (Morphology of the Folktale), Yuri Tynianov ("On Literary Evolution"), and Roman Jakobson ("Linguistics and Poetics"). Mikhail Bakhtin is often inappropriately lumped in with the Russian Formalists, but he has more in common with historicist and cultural approaches.

Russian Formalists emphasized the "literariness" of artistic texts, which they found in the linguistic and structural features of literature (as opposed to its subject matter). For example, Victor Shklovsky, in his famous essay "Art as Technique," offers his notion of defamiliarization as the defining feature of literary texts. Art takes that which is familiar and "makes it strange," slowing down the act of perception and making the reader see the world in new ways (think, for example, of how Cubist painting changes our perception of everyday objects and forces the viewer to work to reconstruct the image).

The Formalists also introduced the distinction between what they called "syuzhet" and "fabula"--roughly translated as "discourse" and "story"--that is, the distinction between the abstract storyline (fabula) and the virtually infinite number of ways in which that story can be "plotted" (discourse). The Formalists, understandably enough, often emphasized those texts that had complex, sophisticated, and often self-reflexive plots and language, features that flaunt their "literariness" (Tristram Shandy, the Quixote, Nikolai Gogol's skaz narration, etc.).

The Russian Formalists were among the first to bring a scientific approach to literary analysis and influenced other movements such as the Prague Linguistic Circle and Structuralism, and their work has many affinities with New Criticism and the Chicago School of critics. While many have criticized some formalists' unwarranted exclusion of history and context from literary analysis, their sophisticated insights into the workings of narrative have been invaluable to a wide variety of critics and theorists, particularly those working in narrative theory.