:x Literariness
x Jan Mukarovsky: Literariness consists in the maximum of foregrounding of the utterance,” that is the foregrounding of (the act of expression, the act of speech itself) To foreground is to bring into .high prominence
x By backgrounding the referential aspect of language, poetry makes the words themselves palpable as phonic sounds.
x By foreground its linguistic medium, the primary aim of literature, as Victor Shklovsky famously put it, is to estrange or defamiliarize or make strange
x makes strange: invites the reader to explore new forms of perceptions and sensations, and new ways of relating to language.
x Shklovsky spoke of poetry as a dance of articulatory organs
x Jakobson: in poetry "the communicative function is reduced to a
minimum.


:x Form vs. Content
x Formalism also rejected the traditional dichotomy of form vs. content
x Wellek and Warren : cuts a work of art into two halves: a crude content and a superimposed, .purely external form
x To formalist poetry is : an integrated type of discourse, qualitatively different from prose, with a .hierarchy of elements and internal laws of its own


:x Plot vs. Story
:plot/story is a Formalist concept that distinguishes between
(1Story : The events the work relates (form
2Plot : the sequence in which those events are presented in the work
x form is what makes something art to begin with


:x The Morphology of the Folktale
x theory of fiction : Vladimir Propp
x He called the events Functions and their numbers were limited to 31
x He developed a theory of character and established 7 broad character types, which he thought could be applied to other narratives.



:x Legacy of Russian Formalism
x Yefimov:The contribution of our literary scholarship lies in the fact that it has focused sharply on the basic problems of literary criticism and literary study, first of all on the specificity of its object, that it modified our conception of the literary work and broke it down into its component parts, that it opened up new areas of inquiry, vastly enriched our knowledge of literary technology, raised the standards of our literary research and of our theorizing about literature effected, in a sense, a Europeanization of our literary scholarship…. Poetics became an object of scientific .analysis, a concrete problem of literary scholarship
x All contemporary schools of criticism owe a debt to Russian Formalism
x Russian formalism gave rise to the Prague school of structuralism and the literary wing of French structuralism