Literary Criticism-

Formalism

By: Anthony Alfino, Alessio Luciani, Matthew

Petrielli
Definition
Formalism is also known as the
'New Criticism'. It is a critical
approach which examines a
literary text or art work through its
aesthetic composition such as
form, language, technique and
style.

In general, formalists are focused

on the facts of a text, because they
want to study the text, not what
others say about it..
Formalism video
History
● Formalism, was the dominant mode of academic literary study
in the United States and United Kingdom from the end of the
Second World War through the 1970s.

● Formalism had critics, including, I.A. Richards, John Crowe

Ransom, C.P. Snow, and T.S. Eliot and in Europe formalism
emerged primarily out of the Slavic intellectual circles of Prague
and Moscow, and particularly out of the work of Roman
Jakobson, Boris Eichenbaum, and Viktor Shklovsky.

● Although the theories of Russian Formalism and New Criticism

are similar in a number of respects, the two schools largely
developed in isolation from one another, and should not be
conflated or considered identical.
● In Russia it began in two groups: OPOYAZ, an acronym for
Russian words meaning Society for the Study of Poetic
Language, founded in 1916 at St. Petersburgand led by Viktor
Shklovsky.

● The other group being the Moscow Linguistic Circle, founded in

1915. Members of the groups included Osip Brik, Boris
Eikhenbaum, Yury Tynianov, and Boris Tomashevsky.

● They studied the various functions of “literariness” as ways to

separate poetry and fictional narrative from other forms of
discourse. Although always anathema to the Marxist critics,
Formalism was important in the Soviet Union until 1929, when it
was condemned for its lack of political perspective.
● In the late 1970s, Formalism began to fall out of favor in the scholarly
community. Many new approaches, which emphasized the political
importance of literary texts, began to dominate the field.

● Theorists became suspicious of the idea that a literary work could be

separated from its origins, or from the background of political and
social contexts.

● The decades following the early 1970s, the word "Formalism" took on
a negative feeling, denoting works of literary criticism that were so
absorbed in meticulous reading as to have no larger cultural
relevance.

● In recent years, as the wave of Poststructural and Postmodern

criticism has begun to disappear, the value of Formalist methods has
again come to light, and some believe that the future of literary
criticism will involve a resurgence of Formalist ideas.
Modern Connections
● Formalist was a literary theory that dominated American literary
criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century.

● Due to social, political and economic factors formalist is slowing

going away.

● Many critics believe that formalism will make a return as it is the best
way to look at literacy in the 21st century
Authors and books
● I.A. Richards' books “Principles of Literary Criticism and Practical
Criticism” (1924)

● William Empson's book “Seven Types of Ambiguity” (1930)

● T.S. Eliot's essays "Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)" and
"Hamlet and His Problems (1920)"

● John Crowe Ransom's essay "The Ontological Critic"

● Allen Tate's essay "Miss Emily and the Bibliographer (1940)"

I.A Richards

English critic, poet, and teacher who was highly

influential in developing a new way of reading poetry that
led to the New Criticism and that also influenced some
forms of reader-response criticism.

Richards was educated at Magdalene College,

Cambridge, and was a lecturer in English and moral
sciences there from 1922 to 1929. In that period he wrote
three of his most influential books: The Meaning of
Meaning (1923; with C.K. Ogden), a pioneer work on
semantics; and Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and
Practical Criticism (1929), companion volumes that he
used to develop his critical method.
William Empson
William Empson, in full Sir William Empson, (born
September 27, 1906, Hawdon, Yorkshire, England—died
April 15, 1984, London), English critic and poet known for
his immense influence on 20th-century literary criticism
and for his rational, metaphysical poetry.

Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930; rev. ed. 1953), one of the

most influential critical works of the first half of the 20th
century, was essentially a close examination of poetic
texts. Empson’s special contribution in this work was his
suggestion that uncertainty or the overlap of meanings in
the use of a word could be an enrichment of poetry
rather than a fault, and his book abounds with examples.
The book helped lay the foundation for the influential
critical school known as the New Criticism, although
Empson never allied himself with the New Critics’
attempts to disregard authorial intention.
T.S. Eliot
T.S. Eliot, in full Thomas Stearns Eliot, (born
September 26, 1888, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.—died
January 4, 1965, London, England),
American-English poet, playwright, literary critic,
and editor, a leader of the Modernist movement in
poetry in such works as The Waste Land (1922) and
Four Quartets (1943).

The publication of Four Quartets led to his

recognition as the greatest living English poet and
man of letters, and in 1948 he was awarded both
the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for
Literature.
John Crowe Ransom
John Crowe Ransom, (born April 30, 1888, Pulaski, Tenn.,
U.S.—died July 4, 1974, Gambier, Ohio), American poet
and critic, leading theorist of the Southern literary
renaissance that began after World War I. Ransom’s The
New Criticism (1941) provided the name of the influential
mid-20th-century school of criticism.
Allen Tate
Allen Tate, in full John Orley Allen Tate, (born November
19, 1899, Winchester, Kentucky, U.S.—died February 9,
1979, Nashville, Tennessee), American poet, teacher,
novelist, and a leading exponent of the New Criticism. In
both his criticism and his poetry, he emphasized the
writer’s need for a tradition to adhere to; he found his
tradition in the culture of the conservative, agrarian South
and, later, in Roman Catholicism, to which he converted
in 1950.
Examples
Viktor Shklovsky
Viktor Shklovsky was born on January 24, 1893, St. Petersburg, Russia and died on December 8, 1984,
Moscow, Russian literary critic and novelist. He was a major voice of Formalism, a critical school that
had great influence in Russian literature in the 1920s.

Educated at the University of St. Petersburg, Shklovsky helped found OPOYAZ.He was also
connected with the Serapion Brothers, a collection of writers that began meeting in Petrograd (St.
Petersburg) in 1921. Both groups felt that literature’s importance lay primarily not in its social
content but rather in its independent creation of language. In O teori prozy (1925; “On the Theory of
Prose”) and Metod pisatelskogo masterstva (1928; “The Technique of the Writer’s Craft”), Shklovsky
argued that literature is a collection of stylistic and formal devices that force the reader to view the
world afresh by presenting old ideas or mundane experiences in new, unusual ways. His concept of
ostranenie, or “making it strange,” was his chief contribution to Russian Formalist theory.

He returned permanently to the Soviet Union in the year 1923 after moving to Berlin, at which time
the Soviet authorities dissolved OPOYAZ, obliging Shklovsky to join other state-sanctioned literary
organs. With his essay “Monument to a Scholarly Error” (1930), he finally bowed to the Stalinist
authorities’ displeasure with Formalism. Thereafter, he tried to adapt the theory of the accepted
doctrine of Socialist Realism. He continued to write voluminously, publishing historical novels, film
criticism, and highly praised studies of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Vladimir Mayakovsky.
Viktor Shklovsky
English Literature
I.A Richards
I.A. Richards, (Ivor Armstrong Richards), (born Feb. 26, 1893, Sandbach, Cheshire, Eng.—died Sept. 7, 1979,
Cambridge, Cambridgeshire), English critic, poet, and teacher who was highly influential in developing a
new way of reading poetry that led to the New Criticism and that also influenced some forms of
reader-response criticism.

Richards was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and was a lecturer in English and moral
sciences there from 1922 to 1929. In that period he wrote three of his most influential books: The
Meaning of Meaning (1923; with C.K. Ogden), a pioneer work on semantics; and Principles of Literary
Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929), companion volumes that he used to develop his critical
method.

During the 1930s, Richards spent much of his time developing Basic English, a system originated by
Ogden that employed only 850 words; Richards believed a universally intelligible language would help
to bring about international understanding. In 1942 he published a version of Plato’s Republic in Basic
English. He became professor of English at Harvard University in 1939, working mainly in primary
education, and emeritus professor there in 1963.

A student of psychology and philosophy along with literary forms, Richards concluded that poetry
performs a therapeutic function by coordinating a variety of human impulses into an aesthetic whole,
helping both the writer and the reader maintain their psychological well-being. He valued a “poetry of
inclusion” that was able to contain the widest variety of warring tensions and oppositions.
I.A Richards in three
minutes
Review
Works Cited
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“Formalism in Modern Art - Development and Ideas.” The Art Story,

www.theartstory.org/definition/formalism/history-and-concepts/.

“Formalism.” Formalism - New World Encyclopedia, www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Formalism.