Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :"The Theory of the 'Formal Method'" Quote 1
My chief purpose here is to show how the formal method, by gradually evolving and broadening its field of research, spread beyond the usual "methodological" limits and became a special science of literature, a specific ordering of facts. Within the limits of this science, the most diverse methods may develop, if only because we focus on the empirical study of the material. Such study was, essentially, the aim of the Formalists from the very beginning.
In a nutshell, Eikhenbaum's saying that the Formalists are elevating the study of literature to a science. Yes, you heard right. Science. You thought literature had nothing to do with science? Think again.
In other words, we will investigate a poem or a novel just like a biologist investigates some icky bacteria in a petri dish. We'll ask: What's this stuff made of? How does it work? Why does it work that way? Just as there are certain conclusions that a biologist can deduce by studying his petri-dish bacteria, so there are certain conclusions that we literary scientists can deduce by studying a poem or a novel.
What's important about Eikhenbaum's statement here is that it's showing how seriously the Formalists took themselves as scientists. These literary theorists really thought of themselves as the equivalent of those dudes in white lab coats with stuff bubbling away in test tubes. All they need is some thicker glasses and singe marks on their shirts.
Quote :"The Theory of the 'Formal Method'" Quote 2
[T]he Formalists did not look, as literary students usually had, towards history, culture, sociology, psychology, or aesthetics, etc., but toward linguistics, a science bordering on poetics and sharing material with it, but approaching it from a different perspective and with different problems. Linguistics, for its part, was also interested in the formal method in that what was discovered by comparing poetic and practical language could be studied as a purely linguistic problem, as part of the general phenomena of language. The relationship between linguistics and the formal method was somewhat analogous to that relation of mutual use and delimitation that exists, for example, between physics and chemistry.
We Formalists don't like sociology, history, psychology, and all those other social science-y disciplines (sound familiar?). In case you haven't noticed already, we think they're all rubbish. The one field we do have the stomach for is linguistics. And that's because linguists, like us Formalists, focus on language—some linguists even are Formalists! Crazy, right?
Also—and here's another familiar tune—linguistics is a real science. So Formalism and linguistics have a lot in common: they're interested in the same thing, which is language. And they're both very "scientific."
Eikhenbaum is laying out the very important relationship between Formalism and linguistics here. The Formalists approached literature from a linguistic point of view, looking at things like syntax, meaning, and sound. And linguists are all about language too, of course, as a system of communication and meaning, whether that meaning was poetic or not. See the overlap?
The Formalists' emphasis on linguistics was a brand spanking new thing at the time. Nowadays it seems obvious to us that when we study a work of literature, we look at its linguistic aspects. How's this writer putting together his or her sentences? What's she or he doing with sound? Why does this sound pretty but not make very much sense?
But literary critics before the Formalists weren't asking those questions. They were more interested in the historical references of a text, or its philosophical outlook, or its politics. The Formalists insisted on looking within the text, at the language, to understand it. Forget about what's going on outside it. And they drew inspiration from the field of linguistics to do this, thanks in part to the brilliant ideas of Mr. Eikhenbaum.
And the phrase "I like Eikh" was born.
Quote :"The Theory of the 'Formal Method'" Quote 3
The notion of form here acquires new meaning; it is no longer an envelope, but a complete thing, something concrete, dynamic, self-contained, and without a correlative of any kind. Here we made a decisive break with the Symbolist principle that some sort of content is to shine through the form.
The literary critics who came before the Formalists (for example, some guys called the "Symbolists"), privileged content over form. These guys believed that the "form" of a poem, or a novel, is just like an envelope. According to them, what's important isn't the envelope, but what's inside it: the "content," or meaning underneath the words used to enclose it.
You know how when we get a card in the mail, we open the envelope, pull out the card, and then throw the envelope in the trash? Well, according to Eikhenbaum, the Symbolists take the same attitude towards form. They throw "form" in the trash: they just don't pay any attention to it.
We Formalists, on the other hand, take a completely different attitude. For us, form isn't less important than content—it's the most important thing. In fact, it's everything. For us, there is no "card" inside the envelope. The "card" is the envelope. Kind of like a postcard. In other words, form is content. What matters isn't what a poem is saying, it's how it's saying it. It's how a writer says things, not what they're saying, that really counts.
So this is another big idea that's come down to us from the Formalists: form = content! Got that? If we're not paying attention to how a writer is saying things, then we are totally missing the point of literary criticism, according to the Formalists.
It matters whether a writer chooses to write in first-person or third-person. It matters if a poet capitalizes the first letter of every line in a poem or doesn't. It matters if a writer uses really long sentences or really short sentences. It matters if a novel is broken up into four chapters or forty. It matters if the word "matters" is italicized five times in a row. Matters!
The Formalists were the first theorists to insist on the importance of paying attention to form. And a testament to their influence is the fact that, today, we do actually pay a lot of attention to form when we study literary works. And we wouldn't be doing that if the Formalists hadn't woken us up to it.