INTRODUCTION

Formalism is a general term covering several similar types of literary

criticism that arose in the 1920s and 1930s, flourished during the 1940s and 1950s,

and are still in evidence today.

In literary theory, formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze,

interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. These features include not only

grammar and syntax but also literary devices such as meter and tropes. The

formalist approach reduces the importance of a texts historical, biographical, and

cultural context.

Formalism in literary studies was not merely about formal elements of

literature, though it stressed the importance of studying form. In fact, it proclaimed

the unity of form and content by emphasizing that in a literary work the former

cannot properly be understood when separated from the latter and vice versa. At

the same time, formalism stressed the need to view literature as an autonomous

verbal art, one that is oriented toward itself. Thus, formalism addressed the

language of literature and established the basis for the origins and development of

structuralism in literary studies.

FORMALISM AS A SCHOOL OF THOUGHT IN LITERATURE

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

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to show how the text was indebted to forms and other works that had preceded it.

Two schools of formalist literary criticism developed, Russian formalism, and soon

after Anglo-American New Criticism. Formalism was the dominant mode of

academic literary study in the US at least from the end of the Second World War

through the 1970s.

Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having

mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text. It is the study of a text

without taking into account any outside influence. Formalism rejects (or sometimes

simply "brackets," i.e., ignores for the purpose of analysis) notions of culture or

societal influence, authorship, and content, and instead focuses on modes, genres,

discourse, and forms.

In literary criticism, Formalism refers to a style of inquiry that focuses,

almost exclusively, on features of the literary text itself, to the exclusion of

biographical, historical, or intellectual contexts. The name "Formalism" derives

from one of the central tenets of Formalist thought: That the form of a work of

literature is inherently a part of its content, and that the attempt to separate the two

is fallacious. By focusing on literary form and excluding superfluous contexts,

Formalists believed that it would be possible to trace the evolution and

development of literary forms, and thus, literature itself.

In simple terms, Formalists believed that the focus of literary studies should

be the text itself, and not the author's life or social class. The object of reflection is

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the text's "literariness," that which makes it a work of art and not a piece of

journalism. This attention to the details of the literary text was an attempt on the

part of literature to turn its discipline into a science.

History

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 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 one another

Beginning in the late 1970s, Formalism began to fall out of favor in the

scholarly community. A 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
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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 methods has again come to light, and some believe

that the future of literary criticism will involve a resurgence of Formalist ideas.

Russian Formalism

"Russian Formalism" refers primarily to the work of the Society for the Study

of Poetic Language founded in 1916 in St. Petersburg (then Petrograd) by Boris

Eichenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky, and Yury Tynyanov, and secondarily to the

Moscow Linguistic Circle founded in 1914 by Roman Jakobson. Eichenbaum's

1926 essay "The Theory of the 'Formal Method'" (translated in Lemon and Reis)

provides an economical overview of the approach the Formalists advocated, which

included the following basic ideas:

The aim is to produce "a science of literature that would be both independent

and factual."

Since literature is made of language, linguistics will be a foundational

element of the science of literature.

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 Literature is autonomous from external conditions in the sense that literary

language is distinct from ordinary uses of language, not least because it is

not entirely communicative.

Literature has its own history, a history of innovation in formal structures,

and is not determined by external, material history.

What a work of literature says cannot be separated from how the literary

work says it, and therefore the form and structure of a work, far from being

merely the decorative wrapping of the content, is in fact an integral part of

the content of the work.

The Prague Circle and structuralism

The Moscow Linguistic Circle, founded by Jakobson, was more directly

concerned with recent developments in linguistics than Eichenbaum's group. They

combined an interest in literary theory with an interest in linguistics, especially

work of Ferdinand de Saussure.

The clearest and most important example of Prague School structuralism lies in its

treatment of phonemics. Rather than simply compile a list of which sounds occur

in a language, the Prague School sought to examine how they were related.

I.A. Richards

Ivor Armstrong Richards (February 26, 1893-1979) 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

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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-speaking countries, is often thought of as the beginning of 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.

The New Criticism

New Criticism was the dominant trend in English and American literary

criticism of the mid twentieth-century, from the 1920s to the mid-to-late 1960s. Its

adherents were emphatic in their advocacy of close reading and attention to texts

themselves, and their rejection of criticism based on extra-textual sources,

especially biography. At their best, New Critical readings were brilliant,

articulately argued, and broad in scope, but at their worst the New Critics were

pedantic, idiosyncratic, and at times dogmatic in their refusal to investigate other,

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contextual avenues of critical inquiry. As a result of these failings, the New Critics

were eventually usurped by the development of Post-structuralism, Deconstruction,

Postcolonialism, and Cultural Studies, more politically-oriented schools of literary

theory. New Criticism became a byword for a backwards model of conducting

literary research that paid no attention to anything outside the small world of a

closed text.

Synopsis of New Critical Thought

Although the New Critics are often thought of as a school, it is important to

note that, due to key ideological differences among some of its most prominent

members, New Criticism never coalesced into a unified "science of literature." The

major critics who are often grouped together as being the seminal figures of New

Criticism are: T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, William Empson, Robert Penn Warren, John

Crowe Ransom, and Cleanth Brooks. It is worthwhile to note that the New

Criticism was rather unique because a sizable number of practicing New Critics

were also active as poets, novelists, and short-story writers, while almost all

literary critics today are exclusively scholars and academics.

Although difficult to summarize, it is sufficient to say that New Criticism

resembled the Formalism of I.A. Richards, in that it focused on a meticulous

analysis of the literary text to the exclusion of outside details. In particular, the

notion of the ambiguity of literary language is an important concept within New

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Criticism; several prominent New Critics have been particularly fascinated with

the way that a text can display multiple simultaneous meanings.

Because New Critics admit no information other than that contained in the

text, no proper New Critical investigation should include biographical information

on the author. Furthermore, studying a passage of prose or poetry in New Critical

style requires careful, exacting scrutiny of the passage itselfa rigid attitude for

which the New Critics have often been reproached in later times. Nevertheless,

close reading is now a fundamental tool of literary criticism. Such a reading places

great emphasis on the particular over the general, paying close attention to

individual words, syntax, even punctuation, and the order in which sentences and

images unfold as they are read. In later times, the excruciatingly exact style of

reading advocated by New Criticism has been jokingly referred to as "analyzing

the daylights out of a poem before thirty stupified undergraduates."

Nevertheless, despite the numerous flaws of an exclusively New Critical approach,

the New Critics were one of the most successful schools of literary theory in the

admittedly brief history of literary studies. In the hundred or so years that literature

has been taken seriously as an academic discipline within the university system,

the New Critics are undoubtedly the most influential, and longest-lasting, of all

critical schools.

MAJOR AREAS OF CONCERN

A formalist approach to literature seeks out meaning from a work by giving

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attention to the form or structure of a work and literary devices operating in it.

While other approaches might be interested in how the literary work connects to

social, cultural, or political realities outside of the text, Formalism examines the

exclusively literary aspects of the work, focusing on the internal workings of the

text rather than its external influences. Formalist critics like Roman Jakobson and

Viktor Shklovsky highlighted the importance of form in their critique of literary

works and aimed for an objective analysis of the literariness of the text. New

Criticism adopted the formalist emphasis on form and objectivity. For New

Critics, the goal was to separate the literary work from any historical context and

view the work as a world unto itself. This approach to the text opposes other

approaches that emerged later, such as Marxist theory, New Historicism, and

cultural materialism. Unlike Formalism, these theories approached the text with an

eye for the impact and influence of social and historical realities on the text.

WHAT WRITING IS CONSIDERED FORMALIST

Formalists see the literary work as an object in its own right. Thus, they

tend to devote their attention to its intrinsic nature, concentrating their analyses on

the interplay and relationships between the texts essential verbal elements. They

study the form of the work (as opposed to its content), although form to a formalist

can connote anything from genre (for example, one may speak of "the sonnet

form") to grammatical or rhetorical structure to the "emotional imperative" that

engenders the work's (more mechanical) structure. No matter which connotation of

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form pertains, however, formalists seek to be objective in their analysis, focusing

on the work itself and eschewing external considerations. They pay particular

attention to literary devices used in the work and to the patterns these devices

establish.

A formalist critic examines the form of the work as a whole, the form of

each individual part of the text (the individual scenes and chapters), the

characters, the settings, the tone, the point of view, the diction, and all other

elements of the text which join to make it a single text. After analyzing each

part, the critic then describes how they work together to make give meaning

(theme) to the text. Things to be considered closely are Point of View, Setting,

Characters, Plot, Symbols, Theme, etc.

REFERENCES

Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. New York: Russell and Russell, 1957.
ISBN 1931859167
Wellek, Ren, and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. 3rd. rev. ed. San Diego:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. ISBN 978-0224607667
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