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ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 99

Semiology: from structuralism to post-structuralism

literary theorist, who published a selection of Formalist writings
in French translation in 1965 (Todorov, 1965).

Shklovsky and Jakobson
The Formalists aspired to understand literature as a system,
just as Saussure had done with language. Literary science,
Jakobson argued, should study not the supposedly empirical
facts of literature, but rather ‘literariness’—whatever it is that
endows literature with its own distinctively systemic proper-
ties. Literariness, the Formalists concluded, was that process by
which literary texts ‘defamiliarise’, or make strange, both
previous literature and also the world itself (Shklovsky, 1965,
p. 12). The artistic text is thus defined neither by its fictionality
nor its inventedness, but by its ‘deformation’ of everyday
language, which Jakobson exaggeratedly described as ‘organ-
ized violence committed on ordinary speech’ (Jakobson cited in
Erlich, 1955, p. 219). The central focus for the Formalists thus
became those formal literary ‘devices’ by means of which such
defamiliarisation is achieved. It should be obvious, however,
that what defamiliarises can itself become familiar, and thereby
cease to be literary, in Formalist terms at least. Literariness is
not, then, essentially a property of the text, nor even of the
particular devices that the text might deploy, but of the literary
system itself, of what later structuralists would term the rela-
tions of intertextuality between texts. The literary text is thus
to the system of texts as parole is to langue, a singular element
within a system of arbitrary conventions, the meaning of which
is explicable neither referentially nor historically, but only
synchronically. In yet another, more explicitly Saussurean,
version of literariness, Jakobson proposed a six-factor model of
the speech event in which the poetic function of language was
defined as attached to the linguistic message itself, as distinct
from the addresser, addressee, context, contact and code, to each
of which is attached a different linguistic function (Jakobson,
1960, pp. 356–7). In short, language fulfils a poetic, or literary,
function to the extent that it becomes self-conscious of itself as
language. Both variants of literariness, it should be noted,

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