One of the most influential literary critical movements of the twentieth century. Speaking very generally, Russian Formalism as a critical movement was interested in identifying the specific quality of language use that separated the literary text from the non-literary text. Their approach was scientific inasmuch as they thought it was possible to establish what it is precisely that distinguishes ordinary usages of language from the poetic. Unlike the later post-structuralism, the Russian Formalists treated poetry as an autonomous form of discourse that was distinct from all other forms of discourse. They referred to this difference in qualitative terms as literaturnost (literariness) and sought to quantify (i.e. formalize) it by means of their theory of ostranenie (estrangement), which simply put is the process of making the already familiar seem unfamiliar or strange, thereby awakening in us a heightened state of perception. Russian Formalism is a generic term that covers the work of at least two major groups of researchers based in Russia in the early part of the twentieth century. The first group, based in St Petersburg, was known by the acronym Opoyaz (Obschevesto po izucheniyu poeticheskogo yazyka (Society for the Study of Poetic Language)). Formed in 1916 by a small gathering of students and professors working in language studies, it was chaired by the poet Osip Brik. The original membership included Shklovsky, Viktor, Boris Eichenbaum, and Jakobson, Roman. The group folded in 1923, not the least because many of its core members fled into exile to escape either the First World War or the Russian Revolution or both. The remnants of this group merged with the second of Russian Formalismâs constitutive groups, namely the Moscow Linguistic Circle founded by an Opoyaz exile Roman Jakobson. Established for the purpose of investigating the poetic function of language, its membership included such figures as Victor Shklovsky and Yuri Tynyanov, who would both play a major part in advancing the theoretical development of Russian Formalism. The group sought to connect poetics and linguistics so as to show that you could not properly understand one in the absence of the other. Further Reading: T. Bennett Formalism and Marxism (1979). V. Erlich Russian Formalism: History---Doctrine (1955). F. Jameson The Prison-House of Language (1972).