Knowra Russian Formalism Russian Formalism Russian Formalism was an early twentieth-century movement that studied how literary devices and language make a text distinctively literary. It shifted attention from an author’s biography or a work’s social context to the work’s verbal construction.
Literariness : The qualities that make a text function as literature rather than ordinary communication. Formalists sought features of language that distinguish literary works from everyday speech.
OPOYAZ : The Society for the Study of Poetic Language, a St. Petersburg group central to Russian Formalism. Its members developed many of the movement’s early theories and methods.
Yuri Tynianov : A Russian literary scholar and writer who studied literary evolution and the changing functions of devices. His account of literary systems made formalist history more dynamic.
Biographical Criticism : A mode of literary interpretation that uses an author’s life to explain a work’s meaning or origins. Formalists resisted treating an author’s biography as the key to a work’s artistic structure.
Narratology : The systematic study of narrative structure, techniques, and modes of storytelling. Formalist distinctions between story and presentation became foundations for narrative theory.
Defamiliarization : A technique that makes familiar things seem strange, renewing perception through unusual presentation. Viktor Shklovsky treated this effect as a central purpose of literary devices.
Moscow Linguistic Circle : A scholarly group founded in 1915 to study linguistics, poetics, and folklore. Its work connected formalist literary analysis with emerging structural linguistics.
Boris Eikhenbaum : A Russian literary scholar associated with OPOYAZ and the historical study of literary form. He clarified formalist methods and defended them amid disputes over the movement.
Marxist Literary Criticism : Literary criticism that relates texts to class relations, material conditions, and ideology. Marxist critics challenged formalism for separating literary form from social and historical forces.
Close Reading : A method of interpreting texts through detailed attention to their language, structure, and patterns. Formalist analysis helped establish close attention to textual devices as a critical practice.
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