Russian Formalism was a school of literary thought that emerged in Russia in the 1910s. Members of this movement attempted to study literary language and literature according to scientific methods, and Peter Brooks states that they focused on "drawing attention to the material and the means of its making, by showing how a given work is composed"[ 1]. According to Krystyna Pomorska, Russian formalists “explored several areas in an entirely new way…[and] undertook…an analysis of prose encompassing all its structural components”[2]. One of the structural aspects of literature subjected to formalist analysis was the manner in which narrative events are presented. Pomorska states that "they showed the subject (plot) and the fabula (storyline) as related but not at all identical factors." In this essay, I will highlight the differences between these two terms, using examples from contemporary and classical literature. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essayOne of the main goals of the Russian formalist movement was to systematically distinguish what was art and what was not. The influential Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky described the Russian formalist view of art by saying: "In a narrow sense we will call a work artistic if it was created by special devices whose purpose is to ensure that these Artifacts are interpreted artistically as much as possible. as possible”[3]. Indeed, the formalist “art piece,” as far as literature is concerned, is the subject. The fabula, on the other hand, is what the Russian formalist thinker Vladimir Propp calls a “periodical devoted to narrative art” [4] . The fabula, or story, is simply a chronological period of events, which can be manipulated and rearranged to form a topic (plot). Shklovsky emphasized this by stating that “in fact, the script is nothing more than material for the formation of the plot”[5]. Metaphorically, the fabula serves as raw material, and the subject serves as the structure that this raw material serves to construct. This fit with the formalist emphasis on mechanical construction and how art is created, why it was created, or what it was. However, Russian formalists argued that for this material to be transformed into an art form, artistic devices had to be used. As Lee T. Lemon points out, the Russian Formalists aimed “to discuss the literary character of literature, to discuss what differentiates literature from other types of discourse.” This quickly led the formalists to distinguish between story and plot”[6]. In effect, they aimed to isolate literary art from other art forms and non-artistic forms. The subject of a literary work was considered to be what made it literature. It was, as Brooks describes it, “the dynamic shaping force of narrative discourse”[7]. When distinguishing between what was and what was not art, the opposite of art according to the Russian formalists was real life. Artistic perception was considered totally different from normal perception. The aforementioned artistic devices served to distort normal perception into something unknown, abstract and subsequently artistic. Regarding the Russian formalist thinker Tomashevsky, Lee T. Lemon argues that "the central distinction that Tomashevsky makes is that between story and plot...his primary concern is with plot because that is where theartistic talent; history is a background against which elements of the plot are studied”[8]. This “background” is a set of events that occur in nature and in the order that they would occur in reality. Victor Elrich summarizes the point of view of the Russian formalist Jan Mukarovsky by saying that "literature signifies in a sense all the factors with which it comes into contact, for example the author, his environment, his audience, without ever becoming the indicator of none of them.” 9]. In other words, even though the subject uses the fabula as a basis, he transforms it through artistic devices, becoming much more than a simple imitation of the real world. Through this distortion of perception, Russian formalists believed that defamiliarization was achieved, which they considered a crucial element of literature. They argued that this allowed us to grasp the full potential of language and literary devices. Brooks says of the formalist notions of fabula and subject: "We must... recognize that the apparent priority of the fabula over the subject is of the nature of a mimetic illusion... the fabula is a mental construction which the reader derives from the subject, which is all he could ever imagine. knows directly”[10]. This reinforces the distinction between art and real life, as the fabula resonates in the audience's experience of time and perception. However, it also highlights the relationship between the two, as the audience uses their knowledge of real-life perception to make sense of the defamiliarized literary work. In its best known form, the difference between the formalist ideas of the terms fabula and subject have their roots in their relationship to the order of events in a literary work. The fabula, or story, is essentially a chronological order of events as they would have happened in the real world. Subject, or plot, on the other hand, refers to the order of events as they appear in a piece of literature. For example, the use of flashbacks and flash forwards as a narrative device would mean that the order of events in the subject is different from the order of events in the fabula. The beginning, middle, and end as depicted in the subject may not correspond chronologically to the beginning, middle, and end. Shklovsky describes the effect of this artistic device on literature by stating that “In order to prevent action…the artist resorts not to witches and magic potions but to a simple transposition of its parts. »[11] An example of artistic transportation. Parts of a fabula can be seen in Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, which essentially tells the story of one man's life in reverse chronological order. This is done from the point of view of a secondary consciousness of the main character, who lives everything in reverse without any control over the man's actions. As a result of this narrative style, events as they would have happened in real life (the fabula) are largely distorted and intentionally easy to misunderstand. For example, the main character of the novel, who was actually a Holocaust doctor, is seen as a bringer of life and a healer of the sick, because the tortures and murders he inflicts are told in reverse. Here, the formalist distinction between fabula and subject seems well founded, to the extent that recourse to the artistic device of transposing events leaves us with a literary work totally different in both style and meaning. The notion that the subject matter is the true art form, rather than the fabula, is also supported in that Time's Arrow effectively disjoints itself from the reality we know to displace the simplest ideasof cause and effect. For example, acts of wounding become acts of healing, and death becomes life or rebirth. Another artistic device that separates the fabula from the subject is narration from an unusual or unreliable perspective. For example, a child narrator, a lying narrator, or a person suffering from mental illness. Much like transporting events, this type of narrative device allows people to see the real word through a lens of defamiliarization, through the eyes of another person rather than through the artistic order of time. An example of this device used can be seen in The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. The audience's perception of the fabula is effectively hindered because it is seen through the eyes of a depressed and pessimistic teenager. Holden Caulfield's view of the world and people is filled with harsh criticism and negativity. He views people as impostors and harshly judges almost everyone and everything he comes into contact with. Here, the Russian formalist separation of fabula and subject shows its strengths as a theory, in that the use of an unreliable and non-standard narrator effectively distances the novel from reality. What it becomes is an artistic and literary representation of adolescent angst and isolation from the other. The reality of the events in the fabula is more likely to differ from the events depicted in the plot based on the fact that Holden turns out to be a confessed liar. He lies to various people he meets, including claiming to have a brain tumor, and even says of himself: "I am the most terrible liar you have ever seen in your life." It's horrible. Therefore, it can be assumed that his lies are likely to carry over into his story. [13] Another example of non-standard storytelling transforming a fabula into an artistic subject can be seen in the novel White Fang by Jack London. London, although narrating from the third person point of view, does so in such a way that the wolfdogs are often the center of attention and the narration is through their eyes. This causes the reader to completely defamiliarize themselves from the finite subject, as the human world and human actions are both shown from the largely alien and outsider perspective of a different species.[14]The non-linear timeline and non-standard narration are often used as an artistic device in novels, but in poetry, the fabula is also often transformed into art through linguistic devices such as alliteration, assonance, imagery and rhythm. Bijay Kumar Das argues that, within the framework of Russian formalism, “poetic language disrupts ordinary language just as plot disrupts story. Ordinary language is the logical and sequential order of words, just as history is a logical order of patterns”[15]. In other words, just as the fabula of a novel consists of events in their actual nature and chronological order, the fabula of a poem consists of everyday language describing an event, object, or situation. As in a novel, this fabula serves as material for the artistic subject, which is constructed using poetic language devices. The artistic devices of poetry can be seen as effectively realizing the Russian formalist notion of defamiliarizing the audience from real life through language rather than through the presentation of events. For example, in Sylvia Plath's poem Daddy, artistic language devices, particularly the use of metaphors and similes, transform the simple description of her relationship with her father into something unusual, darker and more more powerful. The narrator compares her father to a Nazi through images, 1968).