Poeticality - a privilege of literature?

Resumo

Russian formalists, French structuralists and recent Anglo-American literary critics assert that literature is a special kind of discourse. Their assumptions are that literature can be distinguished from other kinds of discourses by its 'literariness'. For the formalists, there is an opposition between poetic and non-poetic language, and literary or poetic language is autonomous. These are the main points of their argument, according to Pratt (1977): language functions in literature differently from the way it does elsewhere; relations between the literary and non-literary functions of language are one of opposition; 3. this oppostion is fully manifested in the observable properties of literary and non-literary language.