Formalism

    Shlovsky is a Russian Formalist who argues for roughening language, or accentuating in it what is fundamentally strange. He notes that "the over-automatization of an object, permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort" but sees this as a short hand logic which simplifies consciousness because "habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war." Like Kant and Hegel, he is uninterested in the subject matter itself, but rather the construction of it, configuring art as "a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object." In a way somewhat similar to Pope, he advises to avoid identification with parts and describes Tolstoy as avoiding "the accepted names of its parts and instead names corresponding parts of other objects" when describing something. He also echoes Heidegger in describing language as creating its own reality, noting that "in life people are guided by words, not by deeds. It's not so much that they love the possibility of doing or not doing something as it is the possibility of speaking with words, agreed on among themselves, about various topics." He also prefigures Bakhtin in his acknowledgement that "ordinary speech and literary language have thereby changed places," but he sees this as fundamental because of its roughening of perception rather than its dialogic potentialities. 

   Bakhtin is a subversive writer who comes out of the age of revolution and he is keenly aware of himself as such. He is interested in the laughter that tears up all social orders, and the carnival world that promotes it. For Bakhtin, state and carnival are fundamentally at odds, and the carnival is a merger of realistic and utopian ideal. However, he doesn't see carnival or folk humor as essentially nihilistic. "Folk humor denies, but it revives and renews at the same time." Carnival works mostly through parody, even self-parody, and it is a fundamentally social construction: 'carnival laughter is the laughter of all the people.' Rather than state which consecrates symbols and fixes socioeconomic positions, carnival is concerned with 'the passing of one form into the other, in the ever incompleted character of being.'  Therefore, carnival is not the gloomy grotesque, but a different kind - a hearkening back to a golden age of laughter and being, of joy and change. As a literary style, its primary characteristic is 'heteroglot, multi-voiced, multi-styled, and often multi-languaged elements' and a mishmash that is organized by 'social diversity of speech types and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions.' In "Discourse and the Novel," Bakhtin distinguishes the novel from poetry by saying that 'alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of language carry on their uninterrupted work.' (Bakhtin 1085) The novel is a place 'where no language could claim to be an authentic, incontestable face' (Bakhtin 1086) which marks it as 'dialogically-agitated and tension filled environment of alien words.' (Bakhtin 1088) Poetry, on the other hand, is 'obliged to exhaust itself in its own single hermetic context' (Bakhtin 1087) and so is an aristocratic construction because'all rhetorical forms, monologic in their compositional structure, are oriented toward the listener and his answer.' (Bakhtin 1089) I would argue that poetry presents just as many linguistic potentials as a novel, even if it is less of a free form medium - the movement is just tiny rather than sweeping, but that tininess highlights language in a way that many novels cannot, and empties words of their etymologies in its specificity. That being said, Bakhtin's ideas that "all words and forms are populated by intention" (Bakhtin 1101) and that language is over populated with the intentions of others' (Bakhtin 1101) have been incredibly important in the last century, and. for every condition and time period of life, an idiosyncratic speaker exists. 

Works Cited - 

Shlovsky, Victor . "Art as a Technique ." Vahida's Official Website . N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.vahidnab.com/defam.htm>.

Bakhtin, Mikhail . "Rabelais and his World ." Google Books . Indiana University Press , 1984. Web. <http://books.google.com/books?id=SkswFyhqRIMC&lpg=PP1&dq=bakhtin%20rabelais%20and%20his%20world&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false>.

 Bakhtin. Discourse of the Novel." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.