Liberal, Libertario, Libertino

The Russian Formalists were the first to propose the study of literature as a separate academic discipline. Up to then, literature belonged to the realm of philosophy, history and morals. Literary studies rarely focused on the work itself, but in its relationship to history or in its propriety to be read by honest society ladies. The main Formalists themselves, Eichenbaum, Shklovsky and Jacobson, were not literary critics, naturally, but mostly linguists; this was no accident.

What the Formalist Method proposed, first and foremost, was a close study of the linguistic, phonetic, rhythmic structures of the literary works themselves. Considerations such as historic context or the author's psychological outlook were considered to be irrelevant and, worse, distractive and detrimental to a true study of literature.

Some of Formalists' main enemies were the symbolists. According to the Formalists, symbols and metaphors were not main components of literature. Regular, day-to-day human speech is full of symbols and metaphors and that does not mean it is literature. In fact, what the Formalists aim to study is not the literary texts themselves but whatever quality they possess that makes them literature in the first place. They call this "literariness".

While day-to-day communication focus on content (we speak or write to convey a meaning or a message), literature focus on form. According to the Formalists, the literary message, by definition, cannot be easily or instantly understandable - or otherwise literature would be reduced to a newspaper article. Literary style is defined by a certain delayed decoding of the message - whereas the extra time it would take the reader to decode it would be its own literariness. In other words, this delayed decoding, caused by some unfamiliar, aesthetic element of style is what makes the text literary.

Therefore, authors aim (or should aim) at causing this strangeness, which would in turn delay the message and prolong the literary, aesthetic enjoyment of the work. The Formalists define this purposely caused strangeness as "defamiliarization". As certain stylistic forms become dominant and common-place, they no longer cause this defamiliarizing effect on their readers, therefore forcing authors to devise new forms and new styles. According to Formalist theory, literature would then evolve by the exhaustion of old "familiar" styles and by the creation of new ones able to cause defamiliarization on its readers. Don Quijote, for example, aimed at creating a defamiliarizing effect on a whole generation of avid cavalry novel readers.

The concept of defamiliarization was essential to the much posterior theory of reception, by Jauss, which takes into account the horizon of expectations of a generation of readers in order to gauge how texts were initially received, read and canonized.

Another key Formalist concept was the differentiation between story and plot: story being the rough facts the author works with, and plot being what he actually does with them, how he rearranges them in his work. The book Itinerario de Riobaldo is an interesting attempt to extract a story from the delicious yet convoluted plot of Grandes Sertão Veredas, by Guimarães Rosa.

Mikhail Bakhtin, writing much later and much more brilliantly, is sometimes included in the Formalist school, but even though he borrowed some concepts from them (as did Jauss), he took them a lot further than the Formalists ever did and was never constrained by the suffocating limits within which Eichenbaum and the younger Jacobson chose to work (as was not Jauss). Bakhtin is as much a Formalist as Jauss: concepts such as dialogism, carnavalization and heteroglossia cannot, in all justice, be considered Formalist.