ABSTRACT
As the phrase ‘formal method’ will have suggested, the Formalists were primarily oriented towards the form of literature. That focus on formal aspects does not mean that they could not imagine a possible moral or social mission for literature. As one
of them, Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984), put it in 1917, literature has the ability to make us see the world anew – to make that which has become familiar, because we have been overexposed to it, strange again. Instead of merely registering things in an almost subconscious process of recognition because we think we know them, we once again look at them: ‘art exists that one may recover the sensation of life …. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known’ (Shklovsky [1917] 1998: 18). The result of this process of defamiliarization is that it enables us once again to see the world in its full splendour or, as the case may be, true awfulness. But although the Formalists were prepared to recognize this as a not unimportant effect of literature, they initially relegated it to the far background. The social function of literature, either as the repository of the best that had been thought and said, or as one of the great revitalizers (with the other arts) of our perception of the world around us, largely left them cold in the first phase of their explorations. What they wanted to know is how literature works, how it achieves its defamiliarizing effects. For the New Critics the formal aspects of literary works were not unimportant because from their perspective meaning was always bound up with form. Still, they were first of all interested in the form in which a poem presented itself because a close scrutiny of its formal aspects would reveal the complex of oppositions and tensions that constituted the poem’s real meaning. But the Formalists were after what they considered bigger game and in order to do so ignored literature’s referential function, the way it reflects the world we live in, and gave it an autonomous status – or gave at least the aesthetic dimension of literature an autonomous status, as Jakobson qualified their position in 1933.
