This chapter surveys twentieth-century literary theory's movement from structuralist accounts of language as a self-contained, differential system (Saussure's langue/parole, signifier/signified) toward theories emphasizing plurality, historicity, and social embeddedness: Russian Formalism's concept of defamiliarization (literature's technique of estranging ordinary perception to renew experience), Jakobson's theory of the dominant and shifting historical function within texts, Bakhtin's dialogism and heteroglossia (language and the self as inherently multi-voiced, socially situated, and dialogic), and later extensions through Lukács/Brecht/Benjamin's debates on realism, alienation-effect, and montage as tools of ideological disruption. The domain is literary criticism and theory, tracing how structuralist linguistics gave rise to formalist, dialogic, and materialist critical methods that each theorize the relationship between literary form, language, perception, and social/historical power.
This chapter surveys twentieth-century literary theory's movement from structuralist accounts of language as a self-contained, differential system (Saussure's langue/parole, signifier/signified) towa…