Formalist Criticism

Formalism, especially as practiced by the Russians, was a predecessor to Structuralism and New Criticism in that it focused primarily on the features of the text itself.

The goal was to find objectively discernible features that made a work of literature Literature.

For the GRE Literature exam, associate the following terms and people with Formalism:

-defamiliarization; devices
-Viktor Shklovsky

For more information, I recommend Culler's Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction.