Literariness

Literariness is the organisation of language which through special linguistic and formal properties distinguishes literary texts from non-literary texts (Baldick 2008). The defining features of a literary work do not reside in extraliterary conditions such as history or sociocultural phenomena under which a literary text might have been created but in the form of the language that is used. Thus, literariness is defined as being the feature that makes a given work a literary work. It distinguishes a literary work from ordinary texts by using certain artistic devices such as metre, rhyme, and other patterns of sound and repetition. The term ‘literariness’ was first introduced by the Russian Formalist Roman Jacobson in 1921. He declared in his work Modern Russian Poetry that ‘the object of literary science is not literature but literariness, i.e. what makes a given work a literary work’ (Das 2005, p. 78). Russian formalism preceded the Russian Revolution as it originated in the second decade of the 20th century and flourished in the 1920s. It had its origin in two centres: the Moscow Linguistics Circle and the St. Petersburg based group OPOJAZ (the Society for the Study of Poetic Language) (Makaryk 2000, p. 53). The focus of their attention was on the analysis of the features that make up literary texts in opposition to the former traditional study of literature which focussed on studying literature in conjunction with other disciplines such as history, biography, sociology and psychology (Makaryk 2000, p. 53). It insisted that literary scholars should solely be concerned with the component parts of a literary text and should exclude all intuition or imagination. It emphasised that the focus resides on the literary creation itself rather than the author/reader or any other extrinsic systems (Erlich 1973, p. 628). To Russian Formalists, and especially to Victor Shklovsky, literariness, or the distinction between literary and non-literary texts, is accomplished through ‘defamiliarization’ (Ekegren 1999, p. 44).