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2| Literary Criticism

UNIT 2: FORMALISM
Poetry does not inhere in any particular element but depends
upon the set of relationships, the structure, which
we call the poem.
ROBERT PENN WARREN, “Pure and Impure Poetry”

2.0 Intended Learning Outcomes

a. Identify the important terms, personalities and dates relative to the definition and
historical development of Formalist Criticism.
b. Give the distinct features of Formalist theory.
c. Compare and contrast Russian Formalism and New Criticism.
d. Explain the relevance of the theory to one’s literary appreciation.
e. Evaluate a text using Formalism theory.

2.1 Introduction
One way to understand and appreciate better a certain text is through literary criticism.
As what you have learned in the previous unit, there are various theories which can be used
as lenses in revealing the various dimensions of a text. One of which is the Formalism theory,
which will be focused on in this unit.
As mentioned, this unit discourses essential topics under Formalism theory -- its meaning,
main idea, historical background, development, and lead proponents. This also highlights the
guide questions, steps, and approaches on how formalist criticism is being done.
Brace yourself for at the end of this unit you are expected to write your own literary
analysis using formalism theory.
2.2 Topics
2.2.1 What is Formalism?
Formalism is an approach in literature that emphasizes the study of the literary
form and formal elements of the text. It focuses on the literary work itself and not on the
literature’s background, the external conditions, biography of the author or the social and
political conditions presented in the text. Also, it emphasizes explication, or “close
reading,” of “the work itself.” The objective determination as to “how a piece works” can
be found through close focus and analysis, rather than through extraneous and erudite
special knowledge.
Formalism probably has the distinction of having more names than any other recently
developed school of criticism. The model, as defined by American and English critics, has
been called the New Criticism (long after it was no longer new), as well as aesthetic or
textual (because of its primary concerns) or ontological (because of its philosophical
grounding). Then, too, there is Russian formalism, which shares some fundamental
characteristics with its Western cousin, but it is the ideas of the writers known as the New
Critics, referred to here as formalist criticism, that in the 1930s revolutionized the work of
scholars, critics, and teachers in the United States. For decades people learned to read,
analyze, and appreciate literature using this approach, making it one of the most influential
methods of literary analysis that twentieth-century readers encountered.

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2.2.2 Nature of Formalism Theory
The study of literature using formalism is an isolation of literary work from its external
conditions and factors, thus entailing a more systematize lens of defining literary works. The true
objective of formalists was to make change on literary study and make it more scientific. They
attempted a “science” of literature by studying what the real subject of a literary should be.
Artistic techniques and devices became the variable of the formalists’ analysis and were essential
in determining the status of literary study as a science.
2.2.3 Historical Background and Development
Early formalism developed quite independently in America and Russia but it was Russian
formalism, which flourished during the pre- and post-revolutionary period in Russia, that had the
more far-reaching effects.
Formalism rose to prominence in the early twentieth century as a reaction against Romanticist
theories of literature, which centered on the artist and individual creative genius, and instead
placed the text itself back into the spotlight, to show how the text was indebted to forms and other
works that had preceded it. There is no one school of Formalism, and the term groups together a
number of different approaches to literature, many of which seriously diverge from one another.
Formalism, in the broadest sense, 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, and
particularly the formalism of the “New Critics,” including, among others, I.A. Richards, John
Crowe Ransom, C.P. Snow, and T.S. Eliot.
On the European continent, formalism Moscow Linguistic Circle
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 reality, even many of the
theories proposed by critics working within
their respective schools often diverged from Source: https://cornsmashers.wordpress.com/2018/06/02/formalism/
one another.
Moreover, from the earliest meetings of Formalists, they had been focused on what Jakobson
in 1921 started to call ‘literariness’ which makes a literary text different from other genres. They
wanted to find the literary common denominator among the different literary texts. As practical
criticism and the New Criticism focused on the individual meaning of individual texts, while
Formalism wanted to discover general laws which makes literature more specific and closer to
science. According to the Formalists, ‘literariness’ resides in poetry – the initial focus of their interest
– where ordinary language becomes ‘defamiliarized’. It is linguistic defamiliarization that leads to
a perceptual defamiliarization on the part of the reader and thus to a renewed and fresh way of
looking at the world. For defamiliarization, poetry seems to be the “ideal” genre of study since it
employs a great range of linguistic ‘devices’. It uses, for instance, forms of repetition that one does
not find in ordinary language such as rhyme, a regular meter, or the subdivision in stanzas.
Beginning in the late 1970s, Formalism began to fall out of favor in the scholarly community. A

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number of new approaches, which often 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 uses, or from the background of political and social contexts. For a number of
decades following the early 1970s, the word “Formalism” took on a negative, almost pejorative
connotation, 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 Post-structural and Postmodern
criticism has itself begun to dissipate, the value of Formalist method has again come to light, and
some believe that the future of literary criticism will involve a resurgence of Formalist ideas.

2.2.4 Proponents of the Theory

The Russian Formalist critics, Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shklovsky, and I.A Richard are probably the
most popular proponents of formalism.

Roman Jakobson. He was a bridge between Russian formalism

Source:
https://literariness.org/2016/03/17/roman-
jakobsons-contribution-to-russian-formalism/
and structuralism. He was a founder member of the Moscow
Linguistic Circle and his all writings reveal the centrality of
linguistic theory in his thought and especially the influence of
Saussure. He was also an enthusiastic supporter of experimental
poets. Apart from his linguistic research, Jakobson gained
respect for his very precise linguistic analyses of classic works
of literature. Jakobson attempted the daunting task of trying to
define “literariness” in linguistic term. Besides that, Jakobson
developed the concepts of “defamiliarisation” and
“foregrounding” further to characterize whole schools of critical
and literary thought. In the dynamic system of a work of
literature elements are structured in relation to each other as
foreground and background.

Viktor Shklovsky. He was the lead critic of the group.

Shklovsky’s main objective in “Art as Device” is to dispute the
conception of literature and literary criticism common in
Russia at that time. Broadly speaking, literature was
considered, on the one hand, to be a social or political product,
fibula- the whereby it was then interpreted in the tradition of the
actual great critic Belinsky as an integral part of social and
sequence of political history.
events in a On the other hand, literature was considered to be the
narrative.
personal expression of an author’s world vision,
sjuzhet - the expressed by means of images and symbols. In both
artistic cases, literature is not considered as such, but evaluated
presentation, on a broad socio-political or a vague psychologico-
which can Source: https://misfitsarchitecture.com/n-seminar-
impressionistic background. The aim of Shklovsky is the-formalist-image-of-war-viktor-shklovsky-as-a-
jumble the
sequence, therefore to isolate and define something specific to writing-soldier-lst168144-1/
repeat literature or “poetic language”: these, as we saw, are the “devices” which make up the
episodes, or “artfulness” of literature.
include Shklovsky contributed two of their most well-known concepts: Defamiliarization
surprises.
(“estrangement” or “making it strange”) and the plot/story distinction (sjuzhet/fibula).

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“Defamiliarization” is one of the crucial ways in which literary language distinguishes itself
from ordinary, communicative language, and is a feature of how art in general functions,
namely, by presenting things in strange and new ways that allow the reader to see the world
in a different light. Innovation in literary history is, according to Shklovsky, partly a matter of
finding new techniques of defamiliarization. The plot/story distinction, the second aspect of
literary evolution according to Shklovsky, is the distinction between the sequence of events
the text relates (“the story”) from the sequence in which those events are presented in the work
(“the plot”). By emphasizing how the “plot” of any fiction naturally diverges from the
chronological sequence of its “story,” Shklovsky was able to emphasize the importance of
paying an extraordinary amount of attention to the plot—that is, the form—of a text, so as to
understand its meaning. Both of these concepts are attempts to describe the significance of the
form of a literary work in order to define its “literariness.”
Ivor Armstrong Richards. He was an influential literary
critic and rhetorician who is often cited as the founder of an
Anglophone school of Formalist criticism that would
eventually become known as the New Criticism. Richards’
books, especially The Meaning of Meaning, Principles of
Literary Criticism, Practical Criticism, and The Philosophy of
Rhetoric, were seminal documents not only for the
development of New Criticism, but also for the fields of
semiotics, the philosophy of language, and linguistics.
Moreover, Richards was an accomplished teacher, and most
of the eminent New Critics were Richards’ students at one
time or another. Since the New Criticism, at least in English-
Source: speaking countries, is often thought of as the beginning of
https://prabook.com/web/ivor.richards/3736526
modern literary criticism, Richards is one of the founders of
the contemporary study of literature in English.
Although Richards is often labeled as the “Father of the New Criticism”, he would likely
dispute the connection, as the New Criticism was largely the product of his students, who
extended, re-interpreted, and in some cases misinterpreted, Richards’ more general theories
of language. Although Richards was a literary critic, he was trained as a philosopher, and it is
important to note that his own theories of literature were primarily carried out to further a
philosophical theory of language, rather than as a critical theory of literature. Richards is
perhaps most famous for an anecdote he reproduced in Practical Criticism, illustrating his
style of critical reading.
In addition to developing the method of close reading that would become the foundation
of Formalist criticism, Richards was also deeply invested in understanding literary
interpretation from the perspective of psychology and psychoanalysis. He was well-read in
the psychological theory of his day, helping to further the development of psychoanalytic
criticism that would ultimately surpass the New Criticism embraced by most of his students.
While Richards’ theories of poetic interpretation and poetic language have been surpassed, his
initial impulse to ground a theory of interpretation in psychology and textual analysis has
become the paradigm for the development of the curriculum of literary studies.

2.2.5 The Main Idea of the Theory

The Formalist adage that the purpose of literature was “to make the stones stonier” nicely
expresses their notion of literariness. In formalism the text is perceived as “Art” and the

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autonomy of the text is advocated. Formalists focus on the intrinsic nature of the text
excluding external factors such as, the author, the reader, historical context as well as cultural
context of the piece of work. Formalists believe that it is not possible to understand words
without first understanding the relationship that exists between the object, emotion or
experience and the symbol that signifies it. Similarly, it is the relationships that exist between
words that make different interpretations of a sentence possible. They believe that every aspect
of the text is integral and that the text possesses all the meaning necessary for interpretation.
Additionally, different sentences make it possible for a text to be interpreted in different ways.
At this juncture, it is worth noting that formalists were very interested in paying attention to
the poetic attributes of language. They argued that poetic attributes of a language, if well used,
could enable the reader perceive a familiar situation in a completely new way, thereby
enhancing meaning while at the same time making the text more interesting.
Formalism analyses, interprets and evaluates the internal features of the text inclusive
of grammar, syntax and literary devices. The formalist considers that tensions are vital to the
text and are created through irony, paradox and ambiguity. One of the major concerns of
formalism is unity in literature; the coming together of various parts of the text to build up a
whole. For the formalist, in a successful text, format and content cannot be separated because
form also has meaning. In Formalism, the text is analyzed based on the relationship between
the form of the text and the content of the text. “Formalism” is perhaps best known is
Shklovsky’s concept of “defamiliarization.” The routine of ordinary experience, Shklovsky
contended, rendered invisible the uniqueness and particularity of the objects of existence.
Literary language, partly by calling attention to itself as language, estranged the reader from
the familiar and made fresh the experience of daily life.

2.2.6 Reading as a Formalist

The critic who wants to write about literature from a formalist perspective must first
be a close and careful reader who examines all the elements of a text individually and
questions how they come together to create a work of art. Such a reader, who respects the
autonomy of a work, achieves an understanding of it by looking inside it, not outside it or
beyond it.
Instead of examining historical periods, author biographies, or literary styles, for
example, he or she will approach a text with the assumption that it is a self-contained
entity and that he or she is looking for the governing principles that allow the text to reveal
itself.

2.2.7 Guide Questions in Analyzing a Text Using the Theory

Here is a checklist you can use to analyze a text using formalist perspective:
1) How is the work structured or organized? How does it begin? Where does it go next?
How does it end? What is the work’s plot? How is its plot related to its structure?
2) What is the relationship of each part of the work to the work as a whole? How are the
parts related to one another?
3) Who is narrating or telling what happens in the work? How is the narrator, speaker,
or character revealed to the readers? How do we come to know and understand this
figure?
4) Who are the major and minor characters, what do they represent, and how do they
relate to one another?

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5) What are the time and place of the work- its setting? How is the setting related to what
we know of the characters and their actions? To what extent is the setting symbolic?
6) What kind of language does the author use to describe, narrate, explain, or otherwise
create the world of the literary work? More specifically, what images, similes,
metaphors, symbols appear in the work? What is their function? What meanings do
they convey?
2.2.8 Writing a Formalist Analysis
Prewriting
When you approach the actual writing of your analysis, you may find that your
reading log is mostly filled with definitions of words or lists of images. It is now time to
see how those words and images are woven together, even those that do not naturally fit.
You may want to revisit the text, looking for patterns (recurrences that appear with such
regularity that they are eventually anticipated), visual motifs, and repeated words and
phrases; for significant connotations, multiple denotations, allusions, and etymological
ramifications to meaning; for unity, as expressed by the meaningful coherence of all
elements of the work; and for the tension produced by paradox and irony.
Another approach to prewriting is to spend some time freewriting about what you
have read. You can begin with a symbol or a strong image and see where it takes you. If
the text has the unity a formalist looks for, any single observation is likely to lead you to
an understanding of the other aspects of the text to which it is connected.
Drafting and Revising
The Introduction. A common way to begin a formalist analysis is to present a
summary statement about how the various elements of the work come together
to make meaning. Such an opening announces the core of the analysis that the
rest of your paper will explain in more detail. Of course, if you choose this
approach, you will need to write at least a draft of your discussion before working on the
introduction, because you have to know what you are going to say
before you can summarize it. An introduction that follows this pattern will
undoubtedly clarify your topic and intentions for your readers, but it may not
be the most attractive or interesting way to address them. A more colorful alternative is to
begin by directly referencing the text itself.
For example, if you are working with a short story, you can recount a particularly
meaningful incident from it, or if you are writing about a poem, you can quote a few lines,
followed by an explanatory comment of why the excerpt is important to understanding
the work as a whole.

The Body. The main part of your paper will be devoted to showing how the
various elements of the text work together to create meaning. You will want to
touch on the form, diction, and unity, citing examples of how they operate together and
reinforce one another to develop a theme—a meaning that has some
universal human significance. Your job is to describe what you find in the work,
then to assess its effect on the whole. Where you find conflicts, or aspects of the
work that do not seem to lead to the same ends, you must work to resolve the
tension they create.

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If a repeated image is dominant in a story, or a repeated phrase particularly insistent, you
may want to give it first place in your discussion. That is, you can choose to begin with the most
significant element in the work, letting it subsume the other aspects that formalists consider
important. On the other hand, you may decide to treat form, diction, and unity as equally
significant, giving roughly the same amount of consideration to each. You will also want to give
a good bit of attention to any instances of paradox and irony, explaining how their presence in the
work creates tension and how their resolution provides satisfaction.
This is a good opportunity to draw examples from the text or to quote significant passages.
As in all critical essays, references to the work that illustrate your discussion will both strengthen
and clarify what you are saying. Keep in mind that it is more effective to organize your discussion
around the literary elements you have examined rather than follow the sequence of events in a
narrative or the stanzaic progression of a poem. For the writer who tries to move sequentially
through the text as the author has constructed it, making analytical comments along the way, the
temptation to forsake analysis and simply summarize the work is hard to resist.
The Conclusion. The end of your paper is an appropriate place to state (or reiterate) the
connection between form and content. Up to this point, you have been describing how the text
operates in particular ways and explaining the meaning that emerges from those ways. Now you
have the opportunity to make some generalizations about the overall relationship of form and
content. You can decide whether you have explored a text that has its own laws of being and
operates successfully within them, or whether it is a work in which the formal elements, not easily
reconciled, are eventually harmonized to make meaning.

Now, are you ready to write your own literary analysis using Formalism theory?
Below is sample literary analysis you can use as a guide.

Richard Cory 2.2.9 Model Literary Analysis

By EDWIN ARL IN GTON ROBIN SON
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
the poem is important because it contributes to the thematic and structural potency of the poem and
resolves the ironic tension that the poem also creates.
Robinson’s “Richard Cory”:
A Formalistic Interpretation
FRANK PEREZ
For readers who are inclined to extract
didactic moral lessons from poetry, the central
theme of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s short
poem “Richard Cory” may appear to be that
wealth, charm, and popularity, at least for the
people in the poem, do not necessarily equate to
personal happiness and fulfillment. However, a
close reading of the poem suggests that the real
theme of the poem is that appearances can
sometimes be misleading. In the poem, the
townspeople admire Richard Cory and “wish
that we were in his place.” But this adulation is
misguided, for in the last line, we learn that
Richard Cory commits suicide. That this
climactic bit of information comes at the end of

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The poem consists of four heroic (or elegiac) quatrains and is written in iambic pentameter. In
the first stanza, the townspeople describe Richard Cory and state that they “looked at him” when he
went downtown. The description continues in the second stanza but takes on an air of admiration: “But
still he fluttered pulses when he said, ‘Good-morning,’ and he glittered when he walked.” This
admiration is directly stated in the third stanza: “In fine, we thought that he was everything/To make
us wish that we were in his place.” The positive descriptions and the emulation of Richard Cory suddenly
stop in the fourth stanza as the poem shifts instead to a description of the daily misery of the
townspeople. The last two lines of the poem deal with Richard Cory’s suicide. The abrupt ending of the
poem (indeed, the brevity of the poem itself) serves to effectively convey the sense of shock and
“unfinished business” that normally accompanies news of a suicide or sudden death.
The chief irony of the poem is that the speaker(s)—in this case, the ambiguously plural “We
people on the pavement”—are quite taken with a man who is miserable to the point of suicide. This
situation is paradoxical and can be explained only in terms of the tension that the last line of the poem
creates. This tension is twofold. First, there is the tension between the outward description of Richard
Cory as given by the townspeople and the inner description of Richard Cory as indicated by the fact that
he kills himself. Second, there is a conditional tension between Richard Cory and the state of the
townspeople. Not only does the startling revelation of Richard Cory’s suicide in the last line create this
tension, but it also simultaneously forces an interpretation of the poem that resolves the tension.
The first of the aforementioned tensions is most clearly illustrated in the poem’s diction,
particularly in the title and in the words used to describe Richard Cory in the first ten lines. His name
may suggest “rich man” or may even be an allusion to Richard the Lionhearted (Richard Coeur de Lion).
The townspeople’s description of Richard Cory is filled with words laced with regal connotations: “He
was a gentleman from sole to crown,” “imperially slim,” “he was rich—yes, richer than a king.” In
addition, Richard Cory is described as charming: “He was a gentleman,” “he fluttered pulses when he
said, ‘Good morning,’ and he glittered when he walked,” he was “admirably schooled in every grace.”
Such sycophantic adoration reaches a zenith in lines 11–12: “In fine, we thought that he was
everything/To make us wish that we were in his place.” Yet, despite his popularity, Richard Cory is in
reality a suffering figure. But this dark side of Richard Cory is lost on the townspeople, who appear to
be enraptured with the outward trappings of wealth and success. This dichotomy between the outward
appearance of success and the reality of inner turmoil is not fully realized until we learn of Richard
Cory’s death in the last line of the poem.
The fact that the townspeople do not realize this dichotomous tension between Richard Cory’s
outward and inner states is evidenced in the second tension of the poem—the tension between Richard
Cory and the state of the townspeople. In stark contrast to the description of Richard Cory’s apparent
life of ease, the townspeople are depicted as miserable, hardworking sorts: “So on we worked, and
waited for the light, and went without the meat, and cursed the bread.” That sentence comes immediately
after the line “To make us wish that we were in his place,” thereby suggesting these people were driven
by material urges to emulate Richard Cory.
There is no indication in the poem that the townspeople realize the error of their positive
assumptions about Richard Cory. In addition, there is no internal evidence within the poem to indicate
that the people cease their material striving after Richard Cory’s death; the most any close reader can say
on this matter is that he or she simply does not know what the townspeople’s reaction is to Richard
Cory’s death. To infer anything else would be to read into the poem something that is not there—a critical
no-no in the interpretive analysis of poetry. Also, the poem gives absolutely no evidence whatsoever for
the cause of Richard Cory’s suicide.
Hence, it would be a mistake to interpret the poem as a moral lesson warning against the
dangers of materialism. Rather, the safest interpretation is that appearances can sometimes be
misleading.

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ASSESSMENT
Name: _________________________________________ Program, Year & Section: ______________
Professor: _______________________________________Date of Submission: __________________

I. Objective Type
(This will be administered via Google form on Friday, March 19, 2021 @ 9:00AM)
II. Subjective Type
A. COMPREHENSION CHECK
1. What makes Formalism distinct from other literary theories? Give at least five (5)
features of Formalism theory. (10 points)
2. Using a Venn Diagram, compare and contrast Russian Formalism from New
Criticism. (10 points)
3. How do Formalist lens help you in understanding and appreciating literary piece?
(5 points)
B. APPLICATION: Using the Formalist lens, write a literary analysis on the poem, “Three
Friends” by Yoruba. Please be guided by the model literary analysis in p. 14.
(Take note: This count towards your Term Requirements)

Three Friends
by: YORUBA
FRAN CRITERIA:
I had three friends, • Application of the theory - 20
One asked me to sleep on the mat, • Organization and Coherence - 10
One asked me to sleep on the ground; • Grammar & Convention - 10
One asked me to sleep on his breast • Originality - 10
I decided to sleep on his breast TOTAL 50
I saw myself carried on a river
I saw the King of the river and the King of the sun,
There in that country I saw palm trees.
So weighed down with fruit.
That the trees bent under the fruit,
And the fruit killed it.

HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR OUTPUTS for PART II?

1. Encode your answers in a legal-size paper (specification: font: Arial 12, double-space)
2. After proofreading your paper, save it in PDF file. File name of the document must follow this format:
ENG 20 UNIT 2 OUTPUTS (your surname e.g. DELA CRUZ).
3. Email your final outputs @ manilyn.serpajuan@ssu.edu.ph
4. Deadline: Monday, March 22, 2021 @ 5:00PM

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2.3 References

Dobie, A.B. (2012). Theory into Practice: An Introduction to Literary Criticism (Third Edition). Cengage
___Learning
Poetry Foundation. (2021). Richard Cory by Edwin Arlington Robinson.
___https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44982/richard-cory
Sutrismi. (18 March 2013). A Summary of Formalism. https://sutrismi.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/a-
___summary-of-formalism/
Word Press.com. (n.d.). Formalism. https://cornsmashers.wordpress.com/2018/06/02/formalism/

2.4 Acknowledgment
The images, tables, figures and information contained in this module were taken from the
references cited above.

C. M. D. Hamo-ay