First, I find quite interesting that most of the readings for this week were written at the beginning of the 20th century. I know during those days many different events took place in the world, but I just reckon that the development of technology, politics, and the construction of new ways of thinking were occurring at the very same time in many places of the world. The environment of those days made that sciences like Linguistics and these theoretical approaches were developed by a intellectuals that were trying not only define their field of study but also they were trying to define what exactly they were. Therefore, for me it is not so clear that Russian Formalists, at least the way how Eichenbaum proposes, do not recognized what the historians of literature had made for them: they gave them a starter point. I remember someone in our last class said that literary movements arise like an answer for the recent literary movement, they disagree with their colleagues ideas and someone, thinking about how to answer to that movement proposes an aesthetic that attacks, contradicts or sometimes continue the past literary aesthetics. In the specific case of literary theory, I think it is pretty much the same.
Second, I see that the big importance of the Russian Formalists, is that they maybe created the first referent of the study of literature as a science, separating it from the artistic field of writing, and the “sentimental” reading. Formalist propose “a distance” (actually, this idea reminds me the “distant effect”, the Verfremdungseffekt, that Brecht will propose forty years later) and analyzed literature as an object “specific and concrete”, and in this way the study of literature converse in something more profound, perhaps more philosophical, that is the “literariness” that Jakobson well defined.
Nevertheless, in Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as technique” (1916), I found the intention of not forgetting that literature could be analyzed an object, but it is still an art. It is fascinating that he points that:
Habitualization devours work, clothes furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. ‘If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are if they had never been’. And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. (16)
The search of the reader/theorist should be to recognize “the sensation on things as they are perceived and not as they are known” (16). The technique of art, according to Shklovsky, is make the objects “unfamiliar”, so they can be truly perceived. Then he quotes how Tolstoy art “defamiliarizes” the objects in some of his works and explain how the descriptions of the places or the objects, trough the Russian writer’s perspective, transforms the perception of the reader. I agree with him. Few months ago I finished Anna Karenina and there are some episodes that are memorable because the objects localized in Anna’s room, or how her husband combs his mustache, or how Levin observes the common country life, or Kitty smiles, described with a simple language by Tolstoi, takes a relevant perception. Sometimes I felt that some grammatical structures, some images were taking a new dimension only because the poetic speech was created for move, touch the reader’s perception.
This concept, also, reminds me how Orhan Pamuk in The naive and the sentimental novelist (2011) mentions that Tolstoy elaborates his writing landscape as a painting: every single detail, every color and movement suddenly approach to the reader, in a kind of “zoom in” that always surprised him as a writer.* Of course, Pamuk it is also a painter and his perspectives always are bond to painting, so could be arguable if this comparative relation it is possible to make. However, I think that both critics/readers, Pamuk and Shklovsky, are recognizing the defamiliarization☝ proposed by Tolstoy. The difference is that Pamuk is thinking about images that defamiliarize the habitual world, while Shklovsky particular interest is how the poetic speech create a Tolstoy’s artistic trademark.
Shklovsky’s approach could be useful when analyze literature. The concept of defamiliarization is helpful to define the poetic speech of a writer and, most important, to recover the sensation of life.
Coda: I noticed that theories read for this week were written by western intellectuals. I wonder if at the beginning of the Twentieth Century some other intellectuals from East, Middle East, Oceania… were trying to developed literary theories. Does anybody knows?
*I could not find the book for quoting Pamuk’s words, sorry.
☝Actually, the Verfremdungseffekt is also known as a “defamiliarization effect”. In this perspective, Brecht probably was looking on the stage what the Formalist first developed on literary studies.
