Big Concepts from Big Minds
Defamiliarization
Familiar. Familiarize. De-familiarize. Got it?
Basically, this is when a writer makes the familiar seem unfamiliar. For example, in the novel My Struggle by the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, the narrator describes a set of keys "splayed out on the telephone table, like some mythical beast at rest, with its head of leather and myriad metal legs." Who would have thought of keys as a mythical beast?
That's defamiliarization at work for you. Formalists love this because it shows you what form can do (the language telling you about the keys as the mythical beast, for example) to make meaning more, well, meaningful. Are you learning yet?
Story, (alias Fabula)
This is the word for the events that take place in a narrative in chronological order. Here's a story: Three pigs moved out of the mud into houses. A wolf ate two of them. Then he tried to eat the third one, but didn't.
Plot (alias Siuzhet)
Big distinction here! This one is how the events of the fabula/story are told in a narrative. Here's a plot of the above story: One smart pig built a house out of brick because he recognized the danger of using mud or straw like his bros—both sadly devoured by a wolf because of their classic construction flaws. The brick-building pig therefore outsmarted the wolf and survived, and he lived muddily ever after.
See the difference? It's all those things that motivate the chronological events in the story. Not just a lot of huffing and puffing.
So, the story gives us the chronological set of events (houses, huffing, brick fail). The plot sometimes scrambles the sequence of events or the way in which we learn about them because there's an emphasis on how the events get told. In the plot, the first thing we learn is that the lonely brick pig survives to defeat the wolf, even though that's after the demise of his constructionally challenged siblings.
Practical language
This is what we use when we're doing stuff with language with the single goal of communicating something to someone else. If a kid says to his mommy, "I'm hungry," for example, that's practical language. At least it is if he gets his milk and cookies.
Poetic language
When we use language not only to communicate but also to make all sorts of cool sounds and rhythms. If a kid says to his mommy, "Me honey boo-boo chile," that's poetic language. Or the makings of a killer reality TV show. The kid isn't using language to communicate a need (for food, or water). He or she is just enjoying playing with words and sounds. And maybe expressing the poetic urge to connect with the aesthetics of the child beauty pageant world.
Literariness
It's that je ne sais quoi that makes a piece of writing literature. It's the true essence of a literary text. Totally clear, right? Let's put it another way: it's the difference between saying "Gee, which street do I go down?" and "Two roads diverged in a wood and I—I took the one less traveled by." Can you guess which of these two lines has literariness? Yup, the second one's got Robert Frost written all over it.
Form
Yup, pretty important word in Formalism. It refers to the way that something is told or written with specific use of language and stylistic devices.
Another way to think about it is through the old opposition of form vs. content. Well, the Formalists would say that form is way more important than content. In fact, they'd tell you, form is content. Literary critics should be interested in how texts say things; what they're saying is secondary.
Devices
These are all those little strategies that writers use to make us cry, or laugh, or shake our heads in confusion, or be scared silly. Things like repetition, suspense, parallelism, foreshadowing, defamiliarization, metaphor—all those are devices. And the Formalists think that art is a sum of its devices.