The Theory Of Defamiliarization:from Russian Formalism To The New Criticism

The theory of defamiliarization was first put forward by Victor Skrovskiy, and it is the core of Russian Formalism. The theory of defamiliarization not only plays an irreplaceable role in Russian Formalism literary theory, exerting a great influence on the later modern western literary theories represented by The New Criticism, but also remains quite instructive for the literary critical practice based on various literary theories, especialy those in formalism. Set in the social and historical context of the origination of the theory of defamiliarization and based on the accurate grasp of the original meaning of the theory of defamiliarization, this thesis makes a comaparative study between Russian Formalism and defamiliarization theory integrated with related thoeries and literary practice to analyze the evolution of defamilairization theroy from Russian Formalism to The New Criticism.This thesis consists of four parts, namely, the introduction part and three chapters of arguementation. The research meaning and the main idea of the paper, the research outcomes on defaimiliarization theory at home and abroad as well as the research method and the outline of the thesis are sorted in the introdcution part.The first chapter of arguementation firstly discusses the original definition of defamiliarization according to the background of its generation. Then the analysis mainly analyzes the theroy of defamiliarization from the perspective of aesthetic objects, effects and characteristics with a detailed elaboration of the literariness, perceptibility and transformation as well as blockage of literary texts. After that, the paper uses the two representatives’(Viktor Shklovsky and Boris Eichenbaum) literary critical practice in Russian Formalism as illustrations to explicate defamiliarization theory’s emphasis on the study of the form of language. The second chapter begins with an introduction of the historical context of the birth of The New Criticism and its two innovators T.S. Eliot and L.A.Richards to interpret several key words related to defamiliarization theory in New Criticism, such as "literary peculiarity","the intentional fallacy and affective fallacy" and "the principle of distance and heterogenity". The discussion is also based on the analysis of the generating skills of some complicated terms like ontology, critical method and metaphor to make a three-dimentional survey of defamiliarization theroy in the category of The New Criticism. In the last part of this chapter, the thesis mainly analyzes the critical works by two representatives of The New Criticism like William Empson and Cleanth Brooks to elaborate differernt representations of defamiliarization in The New Criticism and Russian Formalism. Comprared with Russian Formalism, The New Criticism pays more attention to the detailed analysis in the semantic level. On the basis of the discussion in previous two chapters, the third chapter makes a summarizing discussion of the evoution of defamiliarization theory and its inspiring influnence. Considering the analysis in the previous chapters, the thesis expounds the phenomonon that the tendency from formal level to semantic level is perceptible during the evolution of defaimiliarization theory from Russian Formalism to New Criticism from the angle of textual views and critical approaches. Then the paper makes a brief introduction of two important transitional developments of defamiliarization theory after The New Criticism in an attempt to achieve a comprehensive recognition of the whole evolution of defamiliarization. At the end of the thesis, the thesis tries to explore defamiliarization theory’s heuristic siginificance for the development of Chinese literary theories on the basis of the realistic situation of Chinese literary theory and the analysis of the developing process of defamiliarizaton theory.