Wednesday, April 1, 2015

How does the concept of poetic language appear in Russian Formalism and New Critics, and why is it of limited interest to structuralism?

Russian Formalism and New Criticism are not identical
movements or philosophies (see the Q&A link below for a discussion of their
differences), but they both clearly valued the local variations in language in a given
literary work, particularly in poetry.


The Russian
Formalist Roman Jakobson famously described literature as "organized violence committed
on ordinary speech." Poetry takes everyday language and estranges it, denatures it,
renders it down, recasts it in new forms... whatever metaphor you would like to use
probably fits here. Poetic language is valued completely differently than the
purpose-driven language of prose. Similarly, John Crowe Ransom saw each poem as
possessing both "a paraphrasable core" (a general meaning of the poem that could be
restated in prose) and a unique and local "texture" (a uniqueness that would be lost
if restated in prose). Both critics focused mostly on
poetry.


The structuralists are at the very other end of the
spectrum. They do not look at small, local, unique texture in a given literary work.
Rather, they look at how that small piece has meaning because of its connection to a
large set of literary works. From what I've read by structuralists, there's no
particular love for poetry or even much recognition for specific literary genres just as
there is little interest in thet local. The tragedies and comedies of Greek drama might
be analyzed as parts of one large whole, as might the creation stories from dozens of
distinct and different Native American cultures.

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