Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :"Art as Technique"
If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconscious automatic…[Art] exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make an object "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.
We're all probably familiar with being defamiliarized from things we're familiar with. Totes clear, right? Basically, says Vik, when we look at the same thing over and over, we stop really seeing it. It becomes so familiar that we pretty much stop noticing it, unless something sort of forces us to look at it through fresh eyes. What art does, is that it makes familiar objects unfamiliar.
For example. Let's say we drink coffee every morning. We need it to be awake. We prefer the hipster independent coffee shop on the corner. But one day we have a visitor from out of town who doesn't know about coffee (so maybe they're from out of planet) and they say: "What's that sludge you're drinking? Is it sewage water? It looks like sewage water, maybe with sand floating in it. I didn't know hipsters drank sand."
We look down into our personalized ceramic mug as if we're seeing coffee for the first time. And we think seriously about changing our morning beverage habits (but then we get sleepy and we don't).
That martian's comment about the coffee is kind of like what good writers do. They defamiliarize the familiar. They make us see things in a fresh way. And this is important because this is what art is all about. It doesn't matter what a writer is describing. What matters is how that author describes it, and how successful she or he is in making it new for us, no matter whether we want to keep drinking it after.
Shklovsky is defining one of the key concepts of Formalism here: defamiliarization. This concept is super important—so make sure you get really familiar with it before you start defamiliarizing. Because this wasn't just important for the Formalists: it became a really big concept in literary criticism generally. In fact, it's influential to this day.
We now take it for granted that a really good writer is someone who makes us look at things with new eyes. Someone, in other words, who "defamiliarizes" things. So think about that next time you drink your morning sludge.
Quote :"Sterne's Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary"
The idea of plot is too often confused with the description of events—with what I propose provisionally to call the story. The story is, in fact, only material for plot formulation. The plot of Eugene Onegin, is, therefore, not the romance of the hero with Tatyana, but the fashioning of the subject of this story as produced by the introduction of interrupting digressions.
Story is a completely different thing from plot. How so? Let's take an example. Here's a story: A guy breaks into a house, kills an old couple, and escapes. A detective investigates. A series of clues lead him to the killer, and the detective arrests him. Tah-dah!
Here's a plot of this story: A detective is handcuffing a dude and leading him to a police car. At the police station, the detective interrogates the dude. Through the interrogation, we get flashbacks to this really grisly break-in where a couple was murdered. All the while we're not sure if the dude being interrogated is the killer or not. Slowly, we see what clues led the detective to this dude. And, oh my! we realize the dude is the killer. Oh, the suspense.
See how in the plot above, the events of the story are all scrambled? The plot begins with the end of the story: with the killer being arrested. Then we go back and see what happened. The story just shows us the events as they happened in time (dude breaks into house, kills couple, is tracked down and arrested).
That's what Shklovsky's getting at when he talks about the difference between "story" and "plot." He uses the novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin (by the Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin, who most Russians think of as pretty much equal to God) as an example. It's a novel about this Russian dandy living in St. Petersburg and his relationship with Tatyana. The story is very simple, but the plot of the novel is complicated, thanks mainly to a whole bunch of digressions, letters from one protagonist to the other, unrelated philosophical ponderings by the narrator, and plays with language of all sorts.
Shklovsky is elaborating something totally earth-shattering here (seriously, we're not exaggerating). He was the first literary critic to make the explicit distinction between "plot" and "story." Nowadays, we take it for granted that these two things are different. But it took good ole Vik to make us see that.
Quote :"The Relationship between Devices of Plot Construction and General Devices of Style"
[A] work of art is perceived against a background of and by association with other works of art. The form of a work of art is determined by its relationship with other preexisting forms… All works of art, and not only parodies, are created either as a parallel or an antithesis to some model. The new form makes its appearance not in order to express a new content, but rather, to replace an old form that has already outlived its artistic usefulness.
Here we go obsessing about form and content again. But this time is different, because it's also talking about individual literary texts in relation to other literary works. Don't get us wrong—what defines a literary work isn't its historical background. Or its philosophical outlook. Or the author's biography. What defines a literary work is how it's similar to or different from literary works that came before it, and that does have something to do with looking outside the text.
And you know how forms change? Like, Dickens wrote differently from Hemingway who wrote differently from Woolf, not just because they were different folks but because literary styles were different in the times when they each lived. Well, all those crazy changes don't have anything to do with new content. Changes in form are about expressing old content in a new, fresh way. Yeah, that's right. The content is always (well, usually) the same.
How many literary texts or works do we have about star-crossed lovers? Like, loads. Romeo and Juliet. Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Lancelot and Guinevere in all those King Arthur legends. Buffy and Angel in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (ok maybe that last one's not "literature" exactly, but you get the point).
See, the story of star-crossed lovers is an old story. But through the ages it's been told in new ways. In other words, it's the form that changes, not the content.
Shklovsky, that superstar Formalist, is saying that the only thing that matters about a literary work (aside from all that language stuff, obvi) is its relationship to other literary works. The literary critics who came before Shklovsky and his pals weren't looking at the relationship between texts in this systematic way.
As much as the Formalists get flak for not paying attention to historical context, they were the first to emphasize the importance of looking at how form and types of language used in storytelling changed over time. Take that, all ye who doubt!