The right to seek asylum is an integral part of the international protection of refugees. Yet this right is continuously undermined by state-made obstacles such as externalization practices. In the last two years, Denmark and the UK adopted new asylum policies. These policies are emblematic of externalization. Following the historic 2015 Refugee Crisis, states have increased their efforts to limit the numbers of asylum seekers arriving on their territories. Some, like Denmark and the UK adopted extreme efforts to control migration. Drawing from Bacchi’s Policy as Discourse (2000) framework, this study demonstrates that problematizations of asylum seekers and refugees are inherent in the legitimization of restrictive policy changes in Denmark and the UK. It further argues that legitimization of the necessity of restrictive policy changes reinforces the negative perceptions towards asylum seekers, and refugees.

In the course of this thesis, decisive problematizations, in the Foucauldian sense, around Viktor Šklovskij’s early Russian Formalism shall be the object of re-problematizations. More precisely, a careful look will be taken at re-problematizations around theoretical aspects regarding Šklovskij’s paradigmatic reductionist model, primarily as it is introduced in his article Art as device (1917), described most notably by Aage Hansen-Löve and Wolf Schmid in Der Russische Formalismus (1978) and Slavische Erzähltheorie (2010), Elemente der Narratologie (2014) as well as Grundthemen der Literaturwissenschaft: Erzählen (2018) respectively. The thesis will distinguish four main problematizations divided into two parts, taking the Marxist-Leninist debate on Formalism stirred by People’s Commissar Trotsky and the Nietzschean Dionysian-Apollonian dichotomy characteristic of Russian Modernism as its starting points, encompassing the problematizations as a whole. The initial part of the thesis will address re-problematizations around Šklovskij’s formalist polemics with and misinterpretation of Alexandr Potebnja’s Humboldtian theories, as they appear chiefly in the monograph Thought and Language (1862), in order to illustrate how Šklovskij’s frames a continuum with Potebnja descending from the teachings of Wilhelm von Humboldt. The re-problematizations shall be underpinned by Victor Erlich in Russian Formalism. History – Doctrine (1980), Jacqueline Fontaine in La « innere Form » : de Potebnja aux formalistes (2006) and Serge Tchougounnikov in The formal method in Germany and Russia: the beginnings of European psycholinguistics (2018). The second part of the thesis will foreground the (French) (post)structuralist discourse which, according to this thesis, shapes the formation of problematizations around Šklovskij’s immanent reductionism against the backdrop of Boris Tomaševskij’s interpretation of Formalism in Teorija literatury. Poetika (1925) and also the ideological exchange of the 1920s, assuming this backdrop as part of a definitive understanding and materialist critique of Šklovskij’s reductionist terminology, the homogeneity of its outcome, and what Wolf Schmid calls its anti-substantialism particularly in regards to the binary concept fabula and sjužet. The re-problematizations evolve around what is taken as a materialist solution to these problematizations, which annulls the Aristotelian significance of sjužet as energeia by replacing it with ergon. The discussion will take its point of departure in Göran Sonesson’s article Semiotics of art, life, and thought: Three scenarios for (post)modernity (2011) and search the basis for Sonesson’s argument in Roland Barthes’ article Ecrivains et écrivants (1960). By highlighting Šklovskij’s early Formalism as a mode of experiencing Art on its own terms, this thesis aims to revive its aesthetic principle and the question whether it can enlighten modern literary science.