Formalist Linguistics

 

The Russian Formalists tried to explain how aesthetic effects were produced by literary devices, and how literary writing differed from nonliterary. Literature, as they saw it, was an autonomous product, and should be studied by appropriate methods, preferably scientific. The literary was not distinguished from the non-literary by subject matter, poetic inspiration, philosophic vision, or sensory quality of the poetic image, but by its verbal art. Tropes, particularly metaphor, were the key, as they shifted objects to a new sphere of perception, making the familiar strange, novel and exciting. Of course Aristotle had accepted unusual words as necessary to poetic diction, and the Romantics saw novelty and freshness as one of the hallmarks of true poetry. Surrealists made poems as a renascence of wonder, an act of renewal. But Jakobson deepened the interest. "The distinctive feature of poetry lies in the fact that a word is perceived as a word and not merely a proxy for the denoted object or an outburst of emotion, that words and their arrangement, their meaning, their outward and inward form acquire weight and value of their own".

Now if rhythm, euphony and startling word order should converge on a word so as to throw into relief its complex texture, its density of meanings and associations, that was nothing unusual. Few conscientious writers would disagree. Words, and the meanings and emotions they carry, are the material assembled into a poem by the usual devices of this art form. Exactly in the same manner, a painter takes the outside world as his raw materials rather than the given "content" which he must faithfully reproduce. But Jakobson and Zirmunsky equated this "material" with the verbal. That was the crucial difference. Words for them drew their meaning from their arrangements within the poem, not their outside referents, an attitude analogous to Saussure's closed system of arbitrary signs.

From Russia, Saussure's ideas spread to Prague, where Roman Jakobson arrived 1919, publicizing theory and Russian futurist poetry. But Prague already had a proto-Structuralist objectivism, deriving from J.H. Herbart's writings, and this aesthetic included social values. Under Jan Mukarovsky, who took the Herbartian chair in 1938, the aesthetic object (artwork as sign) was regarded as the signified of its material signifier (artwork as thing). Art could be complex or difficult even, but its essence did not lie in deviation and distortion. What should be studied was aktualisace — 'foregrounding' as it came to be translated: the manner in certain elements or features came to be emphasized or brought to the fore from the background of more normal usage. Notably these included tone, metaphor, ambiguity, patterning and parallelism in poetry, and diction, character, plot and theme in prose works.

Jakobson, the harbinger of futurism, advocated a more self-contained, Saussurean view, and continued to classify artistic styles by formal qualities, much after the manner of Heinrich Wolffin, but employing a terminology more drawn from figures of speech, especially metaphor (ascribing a property of one thing to something else) and metonymy (using the property of something to stand for its whole). Studying aphasia and child speech development while exiled in Sweden in 1941, Jakobson found that metaphor and metonymy were indeed fundamentally different. He therefore recast Saussure's basic structures in two terms — a vertical axis where phonemes can be replaced, and the lateral where they are combined in words. Metonymy, he announced, refers to the combination of linguistic units on the horizontal or syntagmatic axis. Metaphor operates by selection and therefore belongs to the vertical or paradigmatic axis. Poetic, i.e. predominantly literary language, projects the paradigmatic axis onto the syntagmatic. On this simplistic notion, quickly taken up from its 1958 Pittsburgh launch, Jakobson conceptualized literature as essentially a play on words. Reference — to society, life, thought, history, society, anything outside language — was irrelevant, if not a distraction.

Linguists in Czechoslovakia and Poland did not agree. Literature should include nonliterary elements, and not be reduced to its verbal substratum. Gradually, in both countries, as psychoanalysis permeated European thought in the thirties, Formalism began to incorporate both psychological and structuralist ideas. In Poland, where aesthetic purity was not so insisted on, the influence of Husserl also began to make itself felt, a situation not unlike that of Paris thirty years later.

The critical theory of the Prague School is rich, diverse, and not easy to evaluate. Many of its approaches have become commonplaces, even among traditionalists. But one criticism which is often levelled at the school, and at the Russian Formalists, is the lack of testing, authentication.

A fuller account can be found on TextEtc.

 

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Formalist Linguistics

 

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