ABSTRACT
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. Seventeenth-century English literature includes Shakespeare, Webster, Marvell and Milton; but it also stretches to the essays of Francis Bacon, the sermons of John Donne, Bunyan's spiritual autobiography. The Formalists saw literary language as a set of deviations from a norm, a kind of linguistic violence: literature is a 'special' kind of language, in contrast to the ordinary language we commonly use. The Russian Formalists recognized that norms and deviations shifted around from one social or historical context to another. Perhaps literature is definable not according to whether it is fictional or imaginative, but because it uses language in peculiar ways. It is a kind of writing which, in the words of the Russian critic Roman Jakobson, represents an organized violence committed on ordinary speech.
