Russian Formalism

Review of "Otra historia del formalismo ruso" by Pau Sanmartín Ortí

by Andrés Pérez-Simón

Review published in "Dissidences: Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism " 4-5 (2008-9).

Sanmartín Ortí, Pau. "Otra historia del formalismo ruso". Madrid: Lengua de trapo, 2008.

О концепции оды у Тынянова: заметки к теме

by Kirill Ospovat

A Formalist Reading of Naseem Khalili's 'Gray Deer'

by Farzaneh Doosti

published in Threshold Quarterly 4&5, Winter and Spring 2008

Abstract

Naseem Khalili belongs to the young generation of writers of Iran; she has recently published... more Abstract

Naseem Khalili belongs to the young generation of writers of Iran; she has recently published her first volume of short stories titled "Ghab-e-Aks". Her narratives deal with the insecure position of the Iranian woman in an unstable society which accelerates towards industrialism while struggling to keep its long-held traditions of the past; in almost all her stories a feminist consciousness cries out and attracts attention.
Her “Gray Deer” is narrated in the form of the speaker’s dialogue with an absent or rather silenced beloved; the gaps and indeterminacies in the story as well as the ‘different’ way of seeing and describing the atmosphere of the story makes grounds for a Russian Formalist reading of the story based on Shklovsky’s ides of ‘Defamiliarization’ and ‘lay bare device’.

Key Words “The Gray Deer”, Shklovsky, Russian Formalism, defamiliarization

What Profit for Us? Remembering the Story of Joseph (review)

by William Tooman

A Formalist Reborn

by Ian Verstegen

Film Philosophy, 3, 1999

The English-speaking distaste for publishing historical documents for their own sake has finally been overcome in the... more The English-speaking distaste for publishing historical documents for their own sake has finally been overcome in the case of Rudolf Arnheim, whose collected early writings, Kritiken und Aufsatze zum Film, has gratefully been translated. Carl Hanser Verlag of Germany is responsible for all of Arnheim's early German-language works, including the original version of the famous Film as Art (Film als Kunst, 1932), the original manuscript of Radio: An Art of Sound (Rundfunk als Hoerkunst, finished in Italy in 1935) that was never published because of Arnheim's exile, and finally the collected essays. Not a book but a judicious selection of works first chosen and brought together by Arnheim and Helmut Diederichs in 1977, Kritiken und Aufsaetze zum Film stands the test of time as the most efficient vehicle for studying Arnheim's early non-monographical output. Now this is available to English-speakers through Brenda Benthien's excellent translation.

Revivifying Empire: Literature, Theory and Empire in Viktor Shklovsky's Civil War Writings

by Anne Dwyer

published in "Slavonica," 2009

Empirical evaluation: Towards an automated index of lexical variety

by Vander Viana

The PDF file contains an uncorrected proof of the chapter:
Viana, V., Giordani, N., & Zyngier, S. (2008). Empirical evaluation: Towards an automated index of lexical variety. In S. Zyngier, M. Bortolussi, A. Chesnokova & J. Auracher (Eds.), Directions in empirical literary studies: In honor of Willie van Peer (pp. 271-282). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

This chapter proposes an objective approach to the formal analysis of literary prose in English in order to... more This chapter proposes an objective approach to the formal analysis of literary prose in English in order to investigate the relation between lexical density and judgments of canonicity. Based on the concepts of literariness proposed by the Russian Formalists and lexical variety, a mathematical index is designed, relating three variables which take the materiality of text into consideration: (a) relative frequency of lexical bundles, (b) lexical bundle type/token ratio, and (c) word type/token ratio. The index is described and illustrated with 46 canonical and non-canonical literary works. Statistical analysis shows no significant relation between lexical richness and decisions of what has been classified as canonical, indicating that these judgments may be influenced by factors other than the text itself.

Lyn Hejinian and Russian Estrangement

by Jacob Edmond

Poetics Today 27.1 (2006): 97–124.

This essay shows how the Language poet Lyn Hejinian came to relate her experiences of Russia and her poetics of the... more This essay shows how the Language poet Lyn Hejinian came to relate her experiences of Russia and her poetics of the ‘‘person’’ to Victor Shklovsky’s concept of estrangement (ostranenie). I argue that in The Guard (1984), Oxota (1991), Leningrad (1991), and in other writings about Russia, Hejinian came to conflate poetic estrangement with the estranging effect of Russia itself and, in so doing, developed her poetics of the person, which linked the material text of poetic estrangement with the social poetics of everyday life. Everyday life in Russia seemed to take on the very qualities that she associated with estrangement: the dissolution of defined objects and essential selfhood and their replacement with the dynamic experience that Hejinian defined as ‘‘personhood.’’ At the same time, Hejinian found in this dynamic personhood a means to oppose essentialist national identities, so that Russian estrangement also became central to her utopian vision of bridging the ColdWar divide between Russia
and the United States.