FORMALISM/

NEW CRITICISM
 Major Arguments/Positions
• A work of literature is autonomous
New Critics treat a work of literature as if it were a
self-contained, self-referential object.
• Focus on elements of the text (character, setting,
imagery, conflict, plot, rhythm and rhyme)
• Consider that texts contain ambiguity,
paradox, ironies, oppositions which lead to
various interpretation.
 Historical Background & Assumptions
• New Criticism arose in opposition to
biographical or vaguely impressionistic
approaches
• It sought to establish literary studies as an
objective discipline
• Texts possess meaning in and of themselves;
therefore, analyses should emphasize intrinsic
features rather than extrinsic ones.
 Extrinsic Intrinsic
Extrinsic Intrinsic
• Context • The words in the
• The era of text
composition • The structural
• The author organization/intern
• The reader’s al
emotional pattern/interrelation
response ship
Major Figures of New Criticism
• I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot,
• Cleanth Brooks, David Daiches,
• William Empson, Murray Krieger,
• John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate,
• F. R. Leavis, Robert Penn Warren,
• W. K. Wimsatt, R. P. Blackmur,
• Rene Wellek, Ausin Warren, and Ivor
Winters.
 Key Terms
• Intentional Fallacy
• Affective Fallacy
• Heresy of Paraphrase
• Close reading
 Key Terms
• Intentional Fallacy - equating the meaning of a poem
with the author's intentions.
• Affective Fallacy - confusing the meaning of a text
with how it makes the reader feel. A reader's
emotional response to a text generally does not
produce a reliable interpretation.
• Heresy of Paraphrase - assuming that an
interpretation of a literary work could consist of a
detailed summary or paraphrase.
• Close reading - "a close and
detailed analysis of the text
itself to arrive at an
interpretation without referring
to historical, authorial, or
cultural concerns".
 Strength
⚬Deserve great credit for making us
become more careful and serious
readers

⚬A deeper appreciation of the multiple

uses of language that a text uses
 Critique/Drawbacks
• Reduction of literature to one or a few
rhetorical devices (Irony, paradox, tension
or texture)
• This alone or together do not a poem make
• Affective fallacy- No work of literary art
can be divorced from the reader and
therefore from the reader’s response
Russian Formalism

Focus on Form
Art as Technique
• Formalists - the critics and theorists
working in Russia (actually, the
Soviet Union) in the 1910s and
1920s
• the Stalinist regime suppressed it in
the early 1930s
 Prominent Figures
• Roman Jakobson "Linguistics and Poetics"
• Jan Makarovisky
• Yuri Tynyanov "On Literary Evolution"
• Victor Shklovsky Art as Technique/“Theory of
Prose”
• Boris Eichenbaum Theory of the Formal Method
• Vladimir Propp Morphology of the Folktale
 Tenets
• Formalists introduced the distinction between what they
called "syuzhet" and "fabula"--roughly translated as
"discourse" and "story"--that is, the distinction between the
abstract storyline (fabula) and the virtually infinite number
of ways in which that story can be "plotted" (discourse).
• emphasizes the "form" of a text rather than its content.
Formalist critics also tend to eschew discussion of any
elements deemed external to the text itself (history,
politics, and biography).
• Text as Object: The text should be
studied as an object unto itself without
consider of the effects on the reader or
the author’s intentions or it historical
context.
• Ambiguity: Texts contain moments in
which meaning is not clear, when
interpretation is questioned
 Defamiliarization
• The technique of art is to make objects
‘unfamiliar’
• Everyday language, which serves simply to
communicate information, is stale and
unimaginative.
• The habitual nature of everyday experience
makes perception stale and automatic, but art
exists that one may recover the sensation of
life; it exists to make one feel things, to make
the stone stony.
 Literary language vs. Ordinary
Language
• Literary language as self-focused: its function
is not to make extrinsic references, but to
draw attention to its own "formal" features
• The primary function of ordinary language as
communicating a message, or information, by
references to the world existing outside of
language.
 Key Terms
• Estrangement/defamiliarization: making the
familiar strange, novel and exciting.
• Art should give us back a fresh view of a world
grown dull by habit
 Advantage
• formalists seek to be
objective in their
analysis
 Advantage
• caused the reader to see a
familiar object or experience
from a completely new
perspective.
 Drawbacks
• Focus on ‘form’
• The text as a completely ahistorical
• The formalist approach reduces the
importance of a text’s historical,
biographical, and cultural context.
 Quotes
• Makarovsky wrote: "Art is not a copy of nature, but
the determination to distort nature in accordance with
its reflections in the individual consciousness".
• Victor Shklovsky, in his famous essay "Art as Technique,"
offers his notion of defamiliarization.
• Art takes that which is familiar and "makes it strange,"
slowing down the act of perception and making the reader see
the world in new ways
 End of presentation
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