Topic: Formalism Presenter: Hunza Siddiqui

Class: M.PHIL Literature 2k19 Concerned Teacher: Dr. Ghulam Ali Buriro

FORMALISM
Formalism is a literary theory that emerges around 1910 and ended nearly around 1925.

The word formalism comes from the word form means to look at the formal devices or structure of the
text and then analyze the meaning , formal devices would include rhyme, syntax, metaphor and so on.

Formalism began in Russia, there were two major groups one was Moscow Linguistic Society 1915 and
the other was Prague Linguistic Circle or Study of Poetic Language 1916.

Moscow linguistic society Study of poetic language Society

Roman Jakobson Viktor Shklovsky
OsipBrik Boris Eichenbaum
Boris Tomashevsky Yuri Tynyanov

Formalist focuses on the forms without concerning the author’s biography and socio-political context
when the text was written, that mean in examining a text through formalism the social, historical,
cultural and political realities inside the text should be neglected.

Viktor Shklovsky was a founding member of Russian Formalism society of the study of poetic language
1916. His essay Arts as Technique (1917) was one of the central statements of formalist theory.

In his essay he introduces the central concepts of formalism,that is defamiliarization. As our normal
perceptions become habitual, they become automatic and unconscious in everyday speech.

The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and
length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end itself. Art is a way of
experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important. That means literature is basically
ordinary language, literary language that we use in literature is ordinary language but we try to
defamiliarized the ordinary language so that we can get the aesthetic end.

He further says; art’s purpose is not to make us perceive meaning but to create a specific perception of
the object.

Boris Eichenbaum was a member of Russian formalism who tried to systematize formalist principles to
set up a theory.

The theory of the formal method written in 1925, Boris outlines and explains the evolution of the
Russian formalist movement and by that, elucidates its main arguments.

He states that there is no fixed theory or ready-made system which can be described as the formalist’s
theory. The basis of the formalist position is that the object of literary science, as such the study of those
specifics which distinguish it from any other material.

For the formalists, the object of the science of literature is not literature but literariness. Boris says that
for formalist theory and history merge not only in words but also in facts.
The formalist approach has scientific principles, thus it is objective, scientific and allows to study
literature systematically.

Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895–1975) Bakhtin is perhaps best known for his radical philosophy of language,
as well as his theory of the novel, underpinned by concepts such as “dialogism,” “polyphony,” and
“carnival,” themselves resting on the more fundamental concept of “heteroglossia.”

Bakhtin’s major achievements include the formulation of an innovative philosophy of language and
“theory” of the novel. His essay “Discourse in the Novel,” furnishes an integrated statement of both
endeavors. Indeed, this text also offers a radical critique of the history of philosophy and an innovative
explanation of the nature of subjectivity, objectivity and the very process of understanding.

Bakhtin’s view of the novel is dependent upon his broader view of the nature of language as “dialogic”
and as comprised of “heteroglossia.” In Bakhtin’s terms, any given “language” is actually stratified into
several “other languages” (“heteroglossia” might be translated as “other-languagedness”.

Dialogism” refers to the fact that the various languages that stratify any “single” language are in
dialogue with one another; Bakhtin calls this “the primordial dialogism of discourse,” whereby all
discourse has a dialogic orientation.

Bakhtin sees the genres of poetry and the novel as emblematic of two broad ideological tendencies, the
one centralizing and conservative, the other dispersive and radical. The “novel” rejects any concept of a
unified self or world; it acknowledges that “the” world is actually formed as a conversation, an endless
dialogue, through a series of competing and coexisting languages.

Roman Jakobson occupies a seminal place in formalism and structuralism.

In his paper “Linguistics and Poetics” (1958) Jakobson argues that poetics is an integral part of
linguistics. He argues that, whereas most language is concerned with the transmission of ideas, the
poetic function of language focuses on the “message” for its own sake.

Jakobson urges that the poetic function of language must be situated among the other functions of
language, which he schematizes as follows:

ADDRESSER MESSAGE ADDRESSEE

CONTEXT
CONTACT
CODE

In any act of verbal communication, the “addresser” sends a message to the “addressee”; the message
requires a “context” that is verbal or at least capable of being verbalized; a “contact” which is a physical
channel or psychological connection between them; and a “code” that is shared by them. Jakobson
explains that each of these factors determines a different function of language.

Jakobson’s essay “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances” (1956) suggests
that language has a bipolar structure, oscillating between the poles of metaphor and metonymy.

The development of any discourse takes place along two different semantic lines: one is metaphoric,
where one topic leads to another through similarity or substitution. The other is metonymic, where one
topic suggests another via contiguity (closeness in space, time, or psychological association).
The New Criticism

In the Anglo-American world, formalistic tendencies were most clearly enshrined in the New Criticism.
Some of the important features of this critical outlook originated in England during the 1920s in the
work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

“The New Criticism” was coined as early as 1910 in a lecture of that title by Joel Spingarn who influenced
by Croce’s expressionist theory of art, advocated a creative and imaginative criticism which gave
primacy to the aesthetic qualities of literature over historical, psychological, and moral consideration.

l.A.Richards and his student William Empson. In his Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and his Science
and Poetry (1926), Richards attempted to establish a systematic basis for the study of literature. He
distinguished, most fundamentally, the emotive language of poetry from the referential language of
non-literary disciplines.

He aimed to foster the skills and techniques necessary for the close reading of literature. The practice of
close reading, sensitive to the figurative language of literature, as established by Richards later had a
profound impact on the New Critics.

T.S. Eliot was the single most influential figure behind New Criticism. His essay Tradition and the
Individual Talent, written in 1919 was a building block for much Anglo-American criticism. In his essay,
Eliot argues that writers must have ‘the historical sense,’ which can be seen as a sense of tradition.

Tradition to Eliot is the presence of the past. It is not the knowledge of specific events in history, but
rather an encompassing feeling of past literature, which inspires the writer to write originally and with
the spirit of the past in mind. In this way, the writing is not repetitious and handed down from the
immediate predecessors, but is new material merely written in the spirit of the past. Eliot says that
whenever a new work is written it will be compared to the past and that the value of existing works will
be readjusted to accommodate the new work: this is conformity between the old and the new” (Eliot
5). Therefore, a poet should be aware that they will be judged by the standards of the past and
compared to works that are thought to be ‘good.’ In writing a new work, a poet must not conform to
past writing because “to conform would merely be for the new work not really to conform at all; it
would not be new and would therefore not be a work of art” (Eliot 5).

Aside from tradition, the other issue Eliot raises in Tradition and the Individual Talent is the likening of
writing to science and the detachment from emotion that a writer must have while writing in order to
achieve this scientific state. Eliot declares that “the business of the poet is not to find new emotions but
to use the ordinary ones and, in working them into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual
emotions at all” (Eliot 10).

Eliot does not think that poetry should be personal and that most of it should reflect conscious and
deliberate thought. Further Eliot argues that “poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape
from emotion; it is not an expression of personality but an escape from personality” (Eliot 10).Basically
in his writing Eliot emphasised “’science,’ ‘objectivity,’ ‘impersonality,’ and that the poem should be the
object of analysis, not the poet. Eliot also claimed that the poem should contain the ‘essence’ of
tradition based on the great works of the past”.
John Crowe Ransom was a leading figure of the school of literary criticism known as the New Criticism,
which gained its name from his 1941 volume of essays The New Criticism. The New Critical theory, which
dominated American literary thought throughout the middle 20th century, emphasized close reading,
and criticism based on the texts themselves rather than on non-textual bias or non-textual history.

In his seminal 1937 essay, "Criticism,Inc". Ransom laid out his ideal form of literary criticism stating that,
"criticism must become more scientific, or precise and systematic." To this end, he argued that personal
responses to literature, historical scholarship, linguistic scholarship, and what he termed "moral studies"
should not influence literary criticism. He also argued that literary critics should regard a poem as an
aesthetic object.[6]

Many of the ideas that Ransom explained in this essay would become very important in the
development of The New Criticism. "Criticism, Inc." and a number of Ransom's other theoretical essays
set forth some of guiding principles that the New Critics would build upon. Still, Ransom's former
students, specifically Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren, had a greater hand in
developing many of the key concepts (like "close reading") that later came to define the New Criticism.

The Chicago school of critics or the Neo-Aristotelians include professors of the department of
Humanities. Who were engaged in bringing about a radical transformation in attempt to revive
Humanities and make them institutionally more competitive with the science.

Critics include RS Crane , Elder Olson, Richard Mckeon, Norman Maclean and Bernard Weinberg they
produced the central manifesto of the Chicago school, critics and criticism: Ancient and modern(1952).

The Chicago school drew from Aristotle’s poetics a number of characteristics of critical concerns such as
“artistic wholes” importance of locating individual texts within genres. While the new critics focused on
specific poetic use of language such as irony, metaphor etc. the Chicago school followed Aristotle in
emphasizing plot, character and thought.

In general the Neo- Aristotelians offered an alternative formalistic poetics, which acknowledged the
mimetic, didactic and affective functions of literature.