Mehdi Ghassemi

Seminar one:

Formalism and New Criticism

Literary criticism has always aimed at evaluating, analyzing, and more importantly exploring meaning in

literary texts. Approaches, however, have been different throughout epochs and many critical theories

have been propagated by intellectuals to approach a literary text. Before the emergence of the Russian

Formalism and the American New Criticism, for instance, literary criticism was mainly concerned with

external facts about a literary text. Doing a critical reading of literature meant, for instance, studying

sociological, political, and/or historical facts about the time that the literary text was articulated. Also,

major attention used to be paid to biographical information about the author. Two critical movements,

however, altered this mode namely Formalism in Russia and New Criticism in the United States. These

intellectual trends shifted the attention of the literary critic to the text itself and declared the autonomy

of the text meaning that all the elements which are needed to be analyzed are to be found only in the

text and nowhere else. Such facts like historical, sociological, political, biographical and the like came to

be irrelevant. The two movements are both similar and different concerning their origins and objectives

each of which is to be explained.

A Russian school of criticism, Formalism, appeared in the beginning decades of the twentieth

century whose origin is to be traced in linguistics. Formalists are mainly concerned with the elements

that make a literary text literary. In other words, they explore the language of literature, for instance

poetry, and they attempt to identify the qualities that make it different from ordinary practical language

or informational texts. Language, as mentioned before, is a key concept for Formalist critics and the

reason for that is most probably that almost all of the founders of Formalism were linguists most

prominent of whom is Roman Jakobson. He introduced the concept of “organic violence” by which he
identifies a quality in poetry, for instance, that contorts the ordinary language of everyday life and

makes it more complex and condensed.

Another key concept for the Russian Formalists is defamiliarization which is also one of the

constituents of a literary text. It is in fact a sort of unusual presentation of a routine or ordinary fact or

incident through an uncanny perspective which evokes in the reader a kind of awareness and

realization, usually unprecedented, which usually results in a deeper and more effective understanding

of the incident. A very good example, as mentioned by Rivkin and Ryan, is the depiction of the notion of

property from the point of view of a horse by Tolstoy.

A similar critical movement, the New Criticism, emerged in the USA contemporary to the

Russian Formalism which can be said to have rooted in a new aesthetic trend that valued art and artistic

production not as a means of depicting political or historical perspectives but as an autonomous artistic

being having value to exist and to be analyzed for its own sake. Both of the movements have in common

the objective of analyzing the literary text only with no attention to external facts. However, what they

differ in is the nature of their outlook toward studying art, and in this case literature. Formalists view

artistic articulations and texts as rational objects to be analyzed linguistically by a non-value system of

analysis and they try to find the elements that make, for instance, poetry poetry and how it differs from

other texts namely a newspaper.

New Critics, on the other hand, is of antiscientific nature and carries an aesthetic atmosphere

with non-rational dimension to a literary text. Unlike Formalists, who usually study all sorts and genres

of literature, New critics usually concentrate on poetry and the condensed, complex poetic style. They

approach this tortuous combination of words with “close reading” which is an attempt to analyze the

literary text on a word-by-word basis and to identify tropes such as paradox, irony, and metaphor. The
task, however, does not end at this, rather, they try to relate these tropes to universal truths or as they

term them: “concrete universals”.

Several terms were introduced by the New Critics some of which have already been explained.

According to other terms like “intentional fallacy”, meaning is only to be found in the verbal production

of the author in the text and not in the intention that the author might or might not claim about the

text. Another fallacy is the “affective fallacy” according to which the sensational, emotional, and

subjective reactions which are evoked into the mind of the reader by reading the literary text are of no

relevance to the meaning in the text and are not to be attributed to the verbal design of it.

Generally, the New Critics ascribe two dimensions to language: denotative and connotative, the

former deals with the informative aspect of language which is usually seen in newspapers, scientific

texts, and informational writings in general and it works in a one-word-one-meaning basis in which each

word can only refer to one meaning for the sake of clear understanding with the intention of avoiding

misunderstanding and ambiguity. The latter, on the other hand, is to be found solely in poetic language

and deals with multi-meaning aspects of words. Here, a word like sea can be taken, in a symbolic

dimension, as life, infinity, or purity, as well as the literal meaning of the word.

A good example of New Critical/Formalistic reading can be the analysis of Elizabeth Bishop’s “At

the Fishhouses”. The poem, in the opening lines, seems to be a description of an old man who is

weaving a net in a fishhouse. The place itself is also looked at closely and many words are allocated to its

description. What seems to be interesting in the first part of the poem is the alliteration and assonance

used by the poet in conveying a certain mood regarding the old man and the fishhouse. The consonant

‘s’ and the vowel ‘o’ are heard repetitively in words like “The air smells so strong of codfish” or “All is

silver: the heavy surface of the sea, /swelling slowly as if considering spilling over”. The significance of

such alternation and repetition of sound patterns is in fact what matters. The speaker creates a slow and
weary mood by making use of the vowels and conveys a silent atmosphere by the ‘s’ sound which can

also intend to create a lonely atmosphere regarding the state of the old man.

From line twenty-two and on we see phrases like “beautiful herring scales”, creamy iridescent

coats of mail”, “sparse bright sprinkles of grass”. What the poet does here is demonstrating such

ordinary things as herring scales and grass as beautiful and probably extraordinary in order to create a

defamiliarizing effect on the reader. Other instances of defamiliarization can be the description of the

capstan with “melancholy stains” and the seal which is interested in music.

There are also references to religion and religious themes toward the end of the poem. As

suggested by Ryan, the poem aims at giving us a new look toward religion. The description of the lonely

old man in the beginning of the poem and the shrugging seal when reacted to the speaker’s religious

hymn evoke a sense of uselessness. There is also a reference to Christmas trees, which, again, according

to Ryan, can signify that religion and all religious themes are man-made to justify, or rather, soothe the

coward man’s lonely state in life.

The poem is a philosophic meditation on the state of religion in the life of the modern man. It

starts with a the incident of the old man netting at a fish house and ends with universal realizations

regarding the notion of religion and religious traditions. The repeated sound patterns, choice of words,

and defamiliarizing techniques which are used throughout the poem help create the required mood for

the poem. What is important on the part of the critic is to identify such techniques and to demonstrate

how they relate to the central idea of the poem.