The idea of defamiliarization (from V. Propp, Russian formalism) is understandable to me and I enjoyed reading the examples of its application in literature. Also, the role of linguistics in Literary theory and criticism seems central to me as well. However, I agree with the criticism of formalism: they did not consider the social aspect of literature. I beleive that human contrubution to the literature is very important, just like the relationship between text and culture. The article in Wikipedia was very helpful in explaining the concepts.
Metalanguage... seems like a very useful idea, but since the theories and opinions change over time, so does the metalanguage, right? So with every new approach to Literary theory we have to "adjust" to new vocabulary to talk about literary works.
"they did not consider the social aspect of literature by separating the two."
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I understand this... and what's the relation between the "social" and the "human contribution"?
I guess I didn't express myself well. What I meant was: formalism was critisized for being "unpatriotic" for not considering the writer's contribution to the text. They were focusing on form, not the other tactors, like the author, the historical and social aspects.In my opinion art (literary text in particular) is a combination of many factors, which are interrelated and should not be separated during text analisys.
ReplyDeleteI don't think the metalanguage would change with the theories, unless there was some amazing new discovery and a new vocab word had to be added. I think the idea was that the metalanguage should be able to describe "a wide range of phenomena in a given filed, including those yet to be described".
ReplyDeleteI completely disagree with like every third sentence of that article though haha.