Russian Formalism Research Articles

Contributions of World Literatures in Portuguese to the Academic Field

As one considers the concept of comparative world literature, one may ponder on how widening the perspective from an all-English area of studies to other languages promotes different worldviews and descriptions of the status quo. In this article, we take into consideration the perspective of literature written in Portuguese, be it European, Brazilian, African of even Asian, in order to demonstrate how rich such other points of view are for the discipline. We also engage the concept of defamiliarization (ostranenie), proposed by Russian Formalist, Viktor Shklovsky, as a central tool to consider cosmopolitanism and the dialogue between different literatures.

System and Parody: Notes Towards a Description of Two Aspects of the Theory of Translation of Russian Formalism

System and Parody: Notes Towards a Description of Two Aspects of the Theory of Translation of Russian Formalism

Deconstructing Digital Rhetoric to Face Geopolitical Challenges: A Social Media Narrative Analysis Framework

Skyrocketing technological advancement along with changes in environment dynamics allowed people, states and governments to influence each other’s diplomacy, security and international relations, using words and images, strings of events, to construct narratives. The rhetoric of power and conflict is distributed in chameleonic volatile environments, targeting members of the society to challenge security status and power balance, while new media instruments feed people`s thirst for information to challenge their beliefs into tailoring attitudes and behaviours. Defined by many as a “portrayal of events surrounding change” (Dunford and Jones, 2000) or as “central feature of modern influencing across borders (Wagnsson and Lundström, 2023) in a continuous “battle”, (Van Noort, 2017), strategic narratives bear multiple meanings, generated by the versatility of the digital dissemination channels. Understanding these meanings enlighten many directions, like international relations, diplomacy and politics, resulting in risk-free engagement, vulnerability- awareness and controlled decision-making policies, just by using narrative analysis as the appropriate instrument. However, the classical analytical models do not provide enough lenses to grasp all the components generating meaning in a digitally disseminated content and many features are thus ignored, mutilating paramount intelligence otherwise needed to complete the picture. That is why, this paper advances a model framework for a digital narrative analysis that looks at components of the textual narrative backed by the features of the environment, the characteristics of the audience and the dynamics of the dissemination, coupled with more recent social media metrics. To this end, we reviewed literature on Russian formalism (Propp, 1928), (Tomashevsky, 1965) structuralist narratology (Todorov 1969, Genette 1988, Bal 1977), poststructuralism (Chatman,1978) and postclassical narratology (Herman, Fludernik, 1999) to the most recent digitally related approaches (Georgakopoulou, 2020), (Bal, 2021) and then advanced our analysis framework that adds specific traits which social media environments enhance. We thus intend to contribute to the large body of literature with an analytical model, to render a mould of the strategic narratives in the security, defence, politics and international relations.. This paper is part of a larger study, the framework will be piloted in further research, where data will be gathered to validate the model.

Features of Nigerian English in “Everything Good Will Come” by Sefi Atta

This article is directed to study "Features of Nigerian English" in Everything Will Come by Sefi Atta. The English known as Nigerian English (NE) is a variety of English that stands between Pidgin (a grammatically simplified form of a language with elements taken from local languages, used for communication between people not sharing a common language) and the world's standard English. The English used in West Africa reveals varying degrees of vernacular influences at the morphological, syntactic and semantic levels; as well as at the phonological level of spoken and written English. And that may be the reason why in many novels written by Nigerians, we notice some vernacular languages and some forms of deviation in the above-mentioned aspects which all together can be termed as "Nigerian English". The study uses a descriptive research design and the theories adopted are New Criticism and Russian Formalism.

Speech Melody Research as the Interdisciplinary Foundation of the Petrograd Institute of the Living Word

The assumption of similarity between artistic speech melody and music was deeply rooted in Russian Symbolism and based on the culturally established analogy between poetry/lyrical prosody and music. This connection was the basis for a wide range of performative practices focused on performed word such as the experiments of director Vsevolod Meyerhold and composer Mikhail Gnesin in Petrograd theater studios in 1900–1910s, and the collective declamation of Vasilii Serezhnikov and Vsevolod Vsevolodskii-Gerngross. However, after the October revolution, this analogy not only inspired new artistic paths, but also new approaches in humanities. This article explores the correlation between a practice-based strategy and advanced theory that characterized the structure and curricula of the Petrograd Institute of the Living Word (Institut zhivogo slova; 1918–1924). Its specific institutional features affected the development of disciplines in the fields of linguistics, poetics, and literary studies. The earlier period of its work (1918–1921) was defined by the search for common ground, which could unite representatives of different disciplines. The study of the melody of speech, which this article is focused on, became one of the key joint research projects of the Institute’s team. It is the perspective of the Institute of the Living Word’s research projects and performance-related art practices that is used for analysis of the Russian Formalist approaches in the 1910s–20s, specifically articles and books of philologist Boris Eikhenbaum on the melody and composition of verse intonation.

ИСКУССТВОВЕДЧЕСКОЕ САМООПРЕДЕЛЕНИЕ РУССКИХ ФИЛОЛОГОВ-ФОРМАЛИСТОВ

The article considers the limits of self-definition of Russian formalist philologists as art researchers. It is demonstrated that formalism was in a state of double crisis: the crisis of ambitions of symbolism and the crisis of positivist art criticism. The crisis of symbolism forced the formalists to look for a new positivist code to substantiate their work, while the crisis of positivism itself required the use of particular aesthetic narratives. The era of general aesthetics came, which evolved from a project in the vein of B. Croce into a shared self-definition of art as probing the gap between the possible and the actual. Formalism, with its pathos of the reality of the word, could not entirely renounce the domain of the possible, which was conceptualized as the core aesthetic sphere, including the production of personal reactions to what was happening. Only the contextualization of formalism within the linguistic turn, drawing on the ideas of Bakhtin and Gadamer, allows us to realize the input of the movement not only to the methods of certain humanities, but also to the specification of art in the 20th century.

The Images of Rain and Spring in Ibn-Zaydoon’s and Wordsworth’s Poetry: A Comparative Stylistic Study of Selected Poems

This study examines the representation of rain and spring images in poetry, basically in Ibn-Zaydoon's and Wordsworth’s selected poems. This study relies on the analytical and theoretical aspects of Parallelism theory of the American School of Comparative Literature. It focuses on studying “the idea of similarities in humanity’s social and historical evolution, which means harmony in the process of literary development” (Enani, 2005, p. 42). The study is also based on the analytical approaches of Russian Formalism that focuses on studying “Similes, metaphors, structures, ironies, rhymes, and symbols” (Bressler, 2011, p. 49). The significance of the study is to introduce a comparative study between two poets whose languages, religions, and traditions are different. Ibn-Zaydoon and Wordsworth represent nature as the perfect place for pleasure, peace, and tranquility. These two poets glorify spring and rain specifically and their psychological influences on humankind.

Eurasianist approach to the concepts of Russian Formalism in selected works of N. S. Trubetzkoy and P. N. Savitsky

Eurasianist approach to the concepts of Russian Formalism in selected works of N. S. Trubetzkoy and P. N. Savitsky

In Search of the Poetic Function. American ‘Language Poetry’ Revisits Russian Formalism

In Search of the Poetic Function. American ‘Language Poetry’ Revisits Russian Formalism

Thanatosean Episteme in Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur

The shift in the critical perspective splits an episteme in two. A line of demarcation identical to the paradigm shift separates the new epistemes in a way that the critical insight should differ drastically on both sides of the line. Michel Foucault sorts these historical epistemes as Renaissance and Classical epistemes, then he included the Modern episteme as a latter historical era, and the line of distinction between one episteme and another is the critical insight that the involved mentality adopts. When it comes to the source of the influence of human behavior, the change in perspective in the consideration of the source of the influence is clarified in the comparison between the pre-Freudian versus the post-Freudian understandings of human beings. It means that with the consideration of two major depressions, the pre-Freudian thought believed that the driving forces of human beings are external. Whereas the post-Freudian understanding reconsidered the influence on human behavior as ramifications of the sub-consciousness that eventually affect the consciousness of human beings. This paper intends to examine Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur (2005) in terms of the Russian Formalist’s defamiliarization aspects. The deployment of such techniques implicates the advancement of the dystopian irregularities on the stage over the regularly implied didactic methodologies. The use of the Foucauldian epistemes distinguishes the deployed defamiliarizing aspects as identified with a difference from the de Sassurean sign analogy. The paper concludes with the defamiliarized elements as the focal points of the plays that adopt Thanatos as their methodology.

Notes From the Underground, or why were Russian Formalism and Structuralism Resisted by Soviet Non-Marxist Intellectuals?

Este artigo analisa o que denomino de “resistência soviética à crítica”. Baseado em três breves estudos de caso, discuto como essa resistência não se limitou ao Ocidente e à intrínseca exaustão da confiança na linguagem para assegurar o acesso à verdade. Argumento que a resistência específica ao Formalismo Russo e ao Estruturalismo, um dos ramos mais expressivos do qual surgiu justamente fora da tradição marxista, teve sua própria lógica e uma dinâmica sutil na União Soviética, uma sociedade em que a inovação teórica poderia revelar e, por vezes, de fato revelava cumplicidades inesperadas com a corrente ideológica dominante.

Translingualism: A Poetics of Language Mixing and Estrangement

Abstract This essay attempts to think through what a “translingual” poetics might be like for contemporary poetry. Its first section discusses the term translingual as it is used in some areas of applied linguistics. The second section constructs an imaginary scenario where a poem employs more than one language and examines the relations between them. The third section asks whether the term translingual poetry might be used to refer not just to language-mixing but rather to a special way of handling even a single language. The fourth section tries to think of “translingual poetry” as one where the poet assumes the linguistic strategies of the language learner. The essay also revisits the argument by the Russian Formalist critics that the language of poetry resembles a foreign language.

Анна и Захар, или Герой нашего времени

The article analyzes the proposed by the famous literary critic Anna Zhuchkova’s creative evolution research methodology of the artistic style of Zakhar Prilepin. The presented assessment of the writer’s literary work, based on a thorough knowledge of the texts, has an objective chronological form, which allows us to determine the role and significance of Z. Prilepin’s prose more accurately in the literary process of the early 21st century. It is clarified that the analysis of Z. Prilepin’s prose is based on the methodology of biographical research proposed by I.N. Rozanov, Russian formalists (G.O. Vinokur) and rethought in the works of Yu.M. Lotman. A. Zhuchkova updated the genre of “biography of the writer”, the concept of “writer’s reputation” in the dynamics of the historical and literary process of the first decades of the XXI century in Russia. Relevant for postmodern discourse is the analysis of the genesis and dynamics of the concept of “sincerity” in the Russian historical and literary process from Apollon Grigoriev to the theorists of the Commonwealth “The Pass” and Vladimir Pomerantsev’s textbook article “On the sincerity of literature” (1953), the emergence and evolution of “New Sincerity” in Russian literature from D.A. Prigov to D. Vodennikov, problems of restoration of classical romantic discourse, remythologization of the ideals of the “romantics of the revolution”, transformation of the “trench truth” genre in the texts of “new realism” by Z. Prilepin, A. Karasev, D. Gutsko, O. Ermakov, etc.

Monstrous Beauty: The Alternative Aesthetic of Difference in Emil Ferris' My Favorite Thing Is Monsters

ABSTRACT: In this article, I analyze Emil Ferris' unique visual and textual narratives in her graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by using Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie (enstrangement/defamiliarization) as well as humanistic theories of monstrosity to show how Ferris reframes concepts of monstrosity and alterity/difference to prompt her readers to reevaluate their biases. I argue that Ferris' unique aesthetic "enstranges" the past to create monstrous beauty—provoking her readers to embrace the weird and undefined, to reexamine the familiar, and to reevaluate what we consider monstrous and beautiful. Ferris employs various literary and artistic devices to enstrange. Firstly, she enstranges her own artistic form, punctuating her narrative with horror comic covers, reproductions of artwork from the Art Institute of Chicago, and experimenting with different text and comic styles. Secondly, she "enstranges" her protagonist by adopting the character's preferred self-image in her depictions rather than how others see her. The ultimate effects of these strategies of enstrangement are to force her readers to grapple with an alternative aesthetic of difference that reframes the historical memory of the Holocaust and the experience of coming of age as a queer woman in the 1960s in Chicago by using influences from gothic and horror genres that allow us to grasp the emotional impact of structural misogyny, antisemitism, homophobia, and general fear of difference.

‘Gogol’s uneasy truth:’ The end of the journey

The article is written in memory of Yury Mann and follows the life and work of the prominent scholar, whose books not only constitute a landmark phenomenon of Russian literary studies but also offer a new perspective on a number of episodes in the history of literature. Mann’s scholarly career was shaped in the years after WWII. In his book of memoirs, written towards the end of his life, Mann attempts an analysis of his philological pursuits and how, trying to keep up with contemporary trends, he would still occasionally find himself to be an outsider. The article sets out to explain how Mann’s personal and scholarly journey eventually resulted in his remarkable achievements.The author pays special attention to a lesser-known sphere of Mann’s interests: his analytical studies of modern literature (among fellow philologists, he is mostly known as an expert on Gogol and Russian romanticism), his thoughts on conventionality in art, and compelling evidence that Mann’s works follow traditions of Russian formalism.

Poetics of Defamiliarisation in Craig Raine’s Selected Poems

Defamiliarisation is one of the techniques that has been studied by literary criticism; especially the Russian formalist one. It is the technique of alienating or making estrangement. This study attempts at investigating the three devices of defamiliarisation (deviation, foregrounding, and antithesis) in Craig Raine’s selected poems: “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home” “An Attempt at Jealousy” and “Heaven on Earth”. The selected poems represent Raine’s best poems and the prominent example exemplifying the use of defamiliarisation in his poetry. The study aims at uncovering the poetic and aesthetic function of the technique of defamiliarisation in Raine’s poems. The significance of this study lies in its focusing on the role of defamiliarisation in communicating themes of the three poems. It applies Jan Mukařovský’s formalist theory, Roman Jakobson’s theory of poetics and Roger Fowler's theory of literary discourse. It concludes that three techniques of defamiliarisation perform their poetic and aesthetic functions through their metrical structures, which are constructed over the structures of the linguistic expressions of the poetic lines.

BİR ÖNCELEME İNCELEMESİ: SAMUEL BECKETT'IN "PING" ADLI KISA HİKÂYESİ

This study investigates the foregrounded patterns inosculated to form Nobel Prize-winning author, critic, and playwright Samuel Beckett’s short story “Ping” and aims to reveal his purpose of using these patterns. One of the remarkable contributions of Russian Formalism and Prag School Structuralism to stylistics is the concept of foregrounding by which writers bring a particular textual pattern (a phoneme, word, phrase, clause, etc.) to the fore by making it salient or deviant from what surrounds it to draw readers' attention to it and to make it both memorable and interpretable. Beckett, like many authors, takes two basic ways to foreground certain elements: foregrounding-through-deviation and foregrounding-through-parallelism/repetition. Besides its confinement to a single paragraph, from the beginning, the story stands out with the omission of punctuation marks, except for the full stop, sentences with no verb or with only non-finite verbs (the present and past participles), and the conversion of some adjectives into verbs. These deviant patterns enable Beckett to present a free-flowing form of (limited or impaired) consciousness and emphasize that the character is in his/her very last moment and s/he cannot move. By doing so, he invites readers to immerse themselves unreservedly in what the character feels or perceives. To reflect an instance of awareness or perception in an extreme situation where the character is on the brink of existence or non-existence and is struggling to find some meaning, Beckett also adopts other foregrounded patterns such as the repetition of a limited number of words and phrases with some alterations, employment of certain nouns in different positions in the sentences, and sentences that begin with particular words or phrases but end differently. Apart from those, Beckett offers another example of foregrounding at the end of the English version. Thus, he makes the readers aware of the fictionality of the story.d patterns such as the repetition of a limited number of words and phrases with some alterations, employment of certain nouns in different positions in the sentences, and sentences that begin with particular words or phrases but end differently. Apart from those, Beckett offers another example of foregrounding at the end of the English version. Thus, he makes the readers aware of the fictionality of the story.

The Formalist Cinematographic Theory: a Refined Thinking of the Expressionist Film Conception?

Abstract According to many researchers, Russian formalists do not want to recognize the influence of German expressionism on their work. This statement leads to a distinction between both theories in many fields, such as the field of cinema. In this sense, it is common to read nuanced definitions of expressionism and formalism. The present article tends to verify the truthfulness of these definitions and to show that formalism could be an extension of expressionism through an analysis of two reference works: Expressionism and Film (Expressionismus und Film) (1926) by Rudolf Kurtz et The Poetics of Cinema (Поэтика кино) (1927).

Russian Formalism as Journalistic Scholarship; or, When Criticism Recognized Itself as a Genre

Abstract This article argues that Viktor Shklovsky and his allies’ theory cannot be duly appreciated and understood without accounting for their engagement in journalism. The latter was both practiced and theorized by Shklovsky’s group of the Russian Formalists, which stood out as a then rare combination of rigorous theory and extreme performativity. Accordingly, there was disagreement among the Formalists of Shklovsky’s group. On one hand, they did not want the kind of criticism that is published in periodicals and holds sway over contemporary writers to be naïve banter—the Formalists would rather criticism recognize the literariness of literature and hew to the patterns and laws they discovered. On the other hand, the Formalists applied these literary patterns to their own writing, creative or not, which is why Shklovsky wrote that he was both a fish zoologist and a fish. Hence the Formalists’ desire to make their scholarship and criticism performative. The conflict between rigor and performativity could be resolved only in a periodical, and while the Formalists, as this article explains, had a problem with issuing one fully of their own, Shklovsky’s literary magazine Petersburg was a short-lived exception. This magazine is as little studied as it is largely important—for both the history and theory of Russian Formalism, as well as journalism per se, which in 1920s Russia was recognized as a new modus vivendi of literature in the Formalists’ theory of factography (literatura fakta). The leading genre of factography was the feuilleton, and it is from this genre’s standpoint that the article analyzes Shklovsky’s Petersburg, and, in the second part, compares it with another literary magazine—the famous The Library for Reading, run by Osip Senkovsky, one of the prominent feuilletonists of the nineteenth century. The comparison of Shklovsky with Senkovsky as editors of these magazines makes it possible to appreciate both not as vivid exceptions but the very rule—a particular canon with its unique approach to culture that became relevant with the advent of fragmentation in our civilization and remains so to this day.

Yuri Tynianov, Jan Mukařovský and Nikolai Marr in Juri Lotman’s Concept of History of Humanities

Abstract This article focuses on Juri Lotman’s views of the origins of Tartu-Moscow structuralism. He reconstructed the genesis of the Tartu-Moscow School using the Hegelian model (thesis – antithesis – synthesis). In Lotman’s concepts of the 1960s and 1970s, the role of the “thesis” was always played by the Petrograd Association of Russian Formalists (OPOIaZ). Lotman selected different movements as the “antithesis”. In the 1960s, the productive antithesis to OPOIaZ was, for Lotman, the “semantic paleontology” of Nikolai Marr and his followers (such as Olga Freidenberg). In the 1970s, Lotman assigned this role to the functionalist structuralism of the Prague School (with a special focus on the work of Jan Mukařovský), but he never abandoned his sympathy for the work of Freidenberg.