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 their goal was “to call attention to the material and the means of its making, by showing how a given work is put together”[ 1]. According to Krystyna Pomorska, the Russian formalists “explored several areas in a completely new way…[and] undertook…an analysis of prose that included all its structural components”[2]. One of the structural aspects of literature that fall under formalist analysis has been the way narrative events are presented. Pomorska states that “they showed sujet (plot) and fabula (plot) as related but by no means identical factors.” In this essay I will illustrate the differences between these two terms, using examples from both contemporary and classical literature. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay One of the key goals of the Russian formalist movement was to systematically distinguish between what was art and what was not. The influential Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky outlined the Russian formalist view of art by saying that “Strictly speaking we will call a work artistic if it was created with special devices whose purpose is to make these artifacts be interpreted as artistically as as possible”[3]. The sujet, in fact, is the formalist 'artistic piece' with respect to literature. The fabula, on the other hand, is what the Russian formalist thinker Vladimir Propp called a “periodical dedicated to narrative art” [4] . The fabula, or story, is simply a chronological time frame of events, which can be manipulated and rearranged to form a sujet (plot). Shklovsky underlined this by arguing that “In reality, the plot is nothing more than material for the formation of the plot”[5]. Metaphorically, the fabula serves as the raw material and the sujet serves as the structure that that raw material is used to construct. This fit with the formalist focus on mechanical construction and how art is created versus why it was created or what it was. However, Russian formalists argued that in order for this material to be converted into an art form, artistic devices had to be used. As Lee T. Lemon points out, Russian formalists aimed to “discuss the literariness of literature, to discuss what makes literature different from other types of discourse. This quickly led formalists to distinguish between story and plot”[6]. Indeed, they aimed to isolate literary art both from other art forms and from non-artistic ones. The subject of a literary work was believed to be what made it literature. It was, as Brooks describes, “the dynamic force that shapes narrative discourse”[7]. When distinguishing between what was and was not art, the opposite of art according to the Russian formalists was real life. Artistic perception was considered completely different from normal perception. The aforementioned artistic devices served to distort normal perception into something unfamiliar, abstract and subsequently artistic. Regarding the Russian formalist thinker Tomashevsky, Lee T. Lemon argues that “The central distinction Tomashevski makes is that between story and plot…his primary concern is plot because that is where artistry lies; history is the background against which the elements of the plot are studied”[8]. This “background” is a set of events that occur in the nature and order in which they occurthey would verify in reality. Victor Elrich summarizes the view of the Russian formalist Jan Mukarovsky by saying that "Literature signifies in a certain sense all the factors with which it comes into contact, for example the author, his environment, his audience, without ever becoming a representative of any of them"[9]. In other words, while using the fabula as a basis, the subject transforms it through artistic expedients, becoming much more than a simple imitation of the real world. Through this distortion of perception, Russian formalists believed they achieved defamiliarization, which they considered a crucial part 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 sujet “We must… recognize that the apparent priority of fabula over sujet is in the nature of a mimetic illusion… fabula is a mental construction that the reader derives from sujet, which is all he has never done. knows directly”[10]. This supports 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 de-familiarized piece of literature. In its best-known form, the difference between the formalist ideas of the terms fabula and sujet has its roots in its relationship to the order of events in a literary work. The fabula, or tale, is essentially a chronological order of events as they would have happened in the real world. Sujet, or plot, on the other hand, refers to the order of events as they appear within a piece of literature. For example, the use of flash backs 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 sujet may not be chronologically related to the beginning, middle and end. Shklovsky describes the effect of this artistic device on literature by claiming that "To prevent the action... the artist does not resort to witches and magic potions but to a simple transposition of its parts."[11] An example of artistic transport . parts of a fabula can be observed 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 perspective of a secondary consciousness of the main character, who experiences everything in reverse with no control over the man's actions. Because of this narrative style, events as they would have happened in real life (the fabula) are largely distorted and deliberately easy to misunderstand. For example, the main character of the novel, who was actually a Holocaust doctor, is perceived as a bringer of life and healer of the sick, since the tortures and murders inflicted by him are told in reverse. Here the formalist distinction between fabula and sujet seems well founded, since the use of the artistic device of transposition of events leaves us with an entirely different piece of literature in both style and meaning. The idea that the subject is the true art form, rather than fabula, is also supported as Time's Arrow effectively disengages from the reality we know to replace the simpler ideas of cause and effect. For example, acts of wounding become acts of healing, and death becomes life or rebirth.[12] Another artistic device that separates the fabula from the sujet is narration from an unusual or unreliable perspective. For example, a child narrator, an untruthful narrator, or a mentally ill person. Like the transportation of events, this kind of narrative deviceit allows people to see the real word through a de-familiarization lens, through the eyes of another person rather than the artistic ordering of time. An example of this device in use can be seen in J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. The audience's perception of the fabula is actually hindered as it is seen through the eyes of a depressed and pessimistic teenager. Holden Caulfield's view of the world and people is characterized by harsh criticism and negativity. He sees people as fakes and harshly judges almost everyone and everything he comes into contact with. Here, the Russian formalist separation between fabula and sujet shows its strengths as a theory as the use of an unreliable and non-standard narrator effectively displaces the novel from reality. What it becomes is an artistic literary depiction of teenage angst and the isolation of the other. It is more likely that the reality of the events of the fabula differs from the events described in the plot based on the fact that Holden proves himself to be a self-confessed liar. He lies to various characters he meets, even pretending to have a brain tumor, and even says about himself”: “I am the most terrible liar you have ever seen in your life. It's terrible. Therefore, it is safe to assume that his lies are likely to carry over into his narrative. [13] Another example of non-standard storytelling that turns a fabula into an artistic subject can be seen in the novel White Fang by Jack London. London, while narrating from a third-person perspective, does so in such a way that the wolfhounds are often the main focus and the narration occurs through their eyes. This causes the reader to become completely defamiliarized from the finite subject as the human world and human actions are both shown from the largely alien and foreign perspective of a different species.[14] Nonlinear chronology and nonstandard narrative are often used as artistic devices in novels, but in poetry fabula is often transformed into art through linguistic devices such as alliteration, assonance, imagery, and rhythm. Bijay Kumar Das argues that, according to Russian formalism, “poetic language disrupts ordinary language just as plot disrupts history. Ordinary language is the logical and sequential order of words just as the story is a logical order of motifs”[15]. In other words, just as the fabula of a novel is made up of events in their real-life nature and in their chronological order, the fabula of a poem is made up of everyday language that describes an event, an object, or a situation. As in the case of a novel, this fabula serves as material for the artistic subject, which is constructed using poetic linguistic devices. The artistic devices of the poem can be seen to effectively realize the Russian formalist notion of distancing the audience from real life through language rather than through the presentation of events. For example, in Sylvia Plath's poem Daddy, the devices of artistic language, particularly the use of metaphors and similes, transform the simple description of her relationship with her father into something unfamiliar, darker, and overall more powerful. The narrator compares his father to a Nazi through images such as a "swastika" and his father's "Aryan eye". She also compares herself to a Jewess, forming a powerful metaphor for the Holocaust. These hyperbolic images show his relationship with his father less for what it actually was, and more for how his mind may have processed it. Of course, it was unlikely to be comparable to the Holocaust, but it seemed that way to her. The audience, therefore, is estranged from the subject of the poem, due to the estrangement of a relationship, 1968).