Russian formalism Art as technique by Victor Shklovsky is considered as a manifesto of Russian Formalism.

Here, Shklovsky expounds his theory that the principle function of art is to push the boundaries of language in order to reawaken our sensation of life and that art achieves this by its techniques and conventions rather than some mystical abilities of the poet. He says that habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife and the fear of war. Art exists so that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart things as they are percieved and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself. Art is the way of experiencing the artfulness of the object: the object is not important. True art works by defamiliarization. Tolstoy wrote a story from the point of view of a horse. This technique enables Tolstoy to describe human life in a way which makes us percieve it in a new unexpected light. But all techniques have an expiery date art is in a state of constant renewal. New conventions replace the old ones when they are spent. One should study old forms as one studies a frog the physiologist doesn't want to learn how to croak. Connected to the concept of defamiliarisation is the concept of foregrounding or laying bare the devices and conventions of literature. Defamiliarisation is to the content what laying bare is to the form of literary work. An example of laying bare is described in Shklovsky's essay Sterne's Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary Sterne used multiple beginnings, blank pages, chapters taken out of the order, commentary on behalf of the narrator: Sterne was a radical revolutionary as far as form is concered. It was typical of him to lay bare the device. The aesthetic form is presented without any motivation whatsoever, simply as is. Sterne shows that which other novels try to hide. That's why it is the most typical novel in the world literature. Shklovsky says that the forms of art are explained by the artistic laws that govern them and not by comparison with actual life. Roman Jakobson argued that 19th century realism is just another artistic movement. Even realism is just a matter of technique and convention. Shklovsky differentiated story(fabula) from plot(sjuet) and explored various types of plot construction in the novel. Propp analyied Russian folktales with respect to their formrather than content. At the bottom of all these tales was one basic narrative pattern. Propp and later on narratology aimed at describing the universal structures underlying the many various types of narratives. They wanted a science of literature. Jakobson wrote about the concept of literariness, introduced it in a 1921 essay. Literariness is that which makes a given work a literary work. He makes a remark that historians of literature had a need to take in everything they could everyday life, psychology, politics and they got nothing especially not a science of literature. Thus, the aim of literary study is not to study individual works but the general laws of literature, to isolate what makes literature literature.

To Taine, literature was document. To formalists it was art. And if it was an art, then it also had a medium, and that was language. A difference between the new critics and Russian formalists was that many of the Russian formalists were linguists. Prior to formalist movements the study of literature was concerned with everything about literature except language, from the historical context of literary work to the biography of its author. Roman Jakobson opened up the live and sensitive juncture between one of the most exact sciences of men and the creative world.

Victor Shklovsky Art as Technique Habituation is ideally realized in algebra, where things are expressed as symbols. By this algebraic method of thought we apprehend objects only as shapes with imprecise extensions; we recognize them only by their main characteristics. Ultimately, the essence of objects is forgotten. The process of algebrization, the over automatization of an object permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort. Either objects are assigned only one proper feature a number, for examole, or they function as though by formula and do not even appear in cognition. He gives an example of habitual and unconscious movements when cleaning and not remembering whether he had dusted it or not. If someone had been watching him, then the fact could be established. If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been. Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are percieved and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception. The process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and therefore must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of the object : the object is not important. Tolstoj makes the familiar seem strange by not naming the familiar object. He describes an object as as if he were seeing it for the first time. In Shame he defamiliarizes the idea of flogging in this way: to strip people who have broken the law (). Later on he remarks () why not prick the shoulders with needles (). We can see that the familiar act of flogging is made unfamiliar both by the description of it and by the proposal to change its form without changing its nature. The next example is the narrator of Kholstomer, where the narrator is a horse, and it's the horse's point of view that makes the content of the story seem unfamiliar. In this example, the horse regards the institution of the private property. I understood well what they said about whipping and Christianity. But then I was absolutely in the dark. What's the meaning of his own, his colt.() There are people who call others their own, yet never see them. And the whole relationship between them is that the so called owners treat the others unjustly () The actions of men, at least those with whom I have had dealings, are guided by words ours by deeds. Even at the end of the story Tolstoy continues to use this technique even though the motivation for it is gone ( the horse is dead). In War and Peace uses the same technique in describing battles as if battles were sth new, he uses the same method in describing the drawing room and the theater. The middle of the stage consisted of flat boardsthey were all singning something.But the men and women on stage, who represented lovers, started to bow, smiling and raising their hands The people with something like daggers in their hands, started to wave their arms. Then still more people came running out and began to drag away the maiden who had been wearing a white dress but now wore one of sky blue.

Tolstoy showed his ability to see things out of their normal context. Tolstoy described dogmas and rituals he attacked as if they were unfamiliar. Some considered it a blasphemy to present as strange and monstrous what they accepted as sacred. Shklovsky feels defamiliarization is found almost everywhere form is foundAn image is not a permanent referent for those mutable complexities of life which are revealed through it, its purpose is not to make us percieve meaning, but to create a special perception of the object it creates a vision of the object instead of serving as a means of knowing it In his article on plot construction he wrote about defamiliarization in psychological parallelism. The purpose of parallelism, like general purpose of imagery is to transfer the usual perception of an object into the sphere of new perception that is to make a unique semantic modification. In studying poetic speech in its phonetic and lexical structure as well as in the way words are distributed and its thought structures compounded from the words, we find everywhere the artistic trademark we find material which is obviously created to remove automatism or perception. The author's purpose is to create the vision which results from that deautomatized perception. Since perception should be slowed down, as the result of this lingering the object is percieved not in its extension in space, but in its continuity. That is why poetic language gives satisfaction. Shklovsky mentions how poetic language should appear strange and wonderful (Aristotle). Often it is foreign language. The common archaisms of of poetic language, the intricacy of the dolce stil nuovo, the obscure style of the language of Arnaut Daniel with the roughened form which makes pronounciation difficult these are used in much the same way. Leo Jakubinsky demonstrated the principle of phonetic roughening of poetic language in the case of repetition of identical sounds. The language of poetry is then a roughened, impeded language. He gives examples of Pushkin used the popular language which seemed trivial then and was unexpectedly difficult for his contemporaries who were writing in the elegant style of Derzhavin. He used the popular language to prolong attention ( his contemporaries used Russian words in there usually French speech. He mentions different novelties in the usage of languages and dialects. In the light of these developments we can define poetry as attenuated, tortuous speech. Poetic speech is formed speech. Prose is ordinary speech economical, easy, proper, the goddess of prose is a goddess of the accurate, facile type, of the direct expression of a child. He mentions the problem of rythm since many people have the idea of the economy of artistic energy as something which exists in and even distinguishes poetic language. Spencer says that if the syllables are rythmically arranged the mind may economize its energies by anticipating the attention required for each syllable. Shklovsky thinks that that the rythm of prose is an important automatiing element, while the rythm of poetry is not. Poetic rythm is disorderd rythm. Its systematization will not work the problem is that it is disordering that cannot be predicted. If it became a convention, it would be ineffective as a procedure for the roughening of language.