Page 36 - Critical and Cultural Theory

THE SIGN
realism. This is borne out by developments in the fields of formal-
ist and structuralist criticism.
Formalism was primarily concerned with literariness: that is,
with isolating the specific devices that make a particular work a
literary work. Texts are autonomous and material entities: they
should not be regarded as embodiments of abstract ideas or reflec-
tions of a social environment. In divorcing literature from politics,
Formalism entered into conflict with Marxist theories according to
which all ideological products result from social and economic
relations and texts can be read as reflections of a cultural reality.
Yet, the separation between literature and politics proposed by
Formalism is not always total. Roman Jakobson (1896-1982), for
example, argues that though autonomous, literature interrelates
with other parts of the social structure, and Mikhail Bakhtin
(1895-1975) argues that literary language has a crucially social
dimension. This is demonstrated by polyphonic texts that chal-
lenge dominant ideologies by articulating diverse discourses and
thus resisting the notion of a unified viewpoint. Formalism's
central assumption is that literary texts are not mirrors held up to
nature but rather organizations of signs. The effectiveness of a
text stems from its ability to foreground or lay bare the devices by
which it is constituted - i.e. to advertize its constructed status -
and to make reality strange through the strategy of defamiliariza-
tion. These ideas are formulated by Viktor Shklovsky in 'Art as
Technique' (1917), a text often regarded as the manifesto of
Russian Formalism. Shklovsky argues that poetry does not use
images (as is often assumed) for the purpose of expressing
economically and thus clarifying life's complexities but rather as a
means of unsettling habitual and automatic perceptions. 'The tech-
nique of art', Shklovsky states, 'is to make objects "unfamiliar",
to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of
perception" (Shklovsky 1988: 20). As a semiotic structure, the
literary text truly works only insofar as it is capable of frustrating
conventional expectations.
If literature is meant to have defamiliarizing effects, what
exactly are we meant to be defamiliarized from? In order to
answer this question, several Formalist critics sought to identify
the basic ingredients and codes of particular textual forms. Espe-
cially influential, in this respect, was Vladimir Propp's Morphology
of the Folk Tale (1928). Propp maintains that the traditional tale,

19