Formalism

Formalism indicates various approaches that started in 1920-30s and in America were influential during 1940s-1950s. It is still a valid approach even today and started mainly as a reaction to literary criticism used until 1920s when critics were interested in outside issues of the text like life of an author and historical context. Formalism placed the study of literature on a scientific basis through objective analysis of the motifs, devices, techniques and other aspects that comprise the literary work.

Russian formalism: Formalism started in Russia with ROMAN JAKOBSON and the Society for the Study of Poetic Language OPOJAZ, founded by VIKTOR SHKLOVSKY and BORIS EICHENBAUM. They wanted to make literary criticism an independent subject field of its own methods. Russian formalism was oppressed by the Stalinist government in the 1920s which resulted in emigrants who helped to shape French Structuralism. They considered literature not as a window on the world but as something with specifically literary characteristics that make it literature. For them, literature should be studied for the way literary language differs from ordinary practical language.

Formalism is more concentrating on form than the content of the work since they believed that everything you need to know is in the text so you should not try to explore history because that is not creating art. They were interested in analyzing literature into its components and describing principal devices. In prose narrative they concentrated on the operations of narrative, in poetry on sound in verse. When analyzing a work, they asked what its form is and how does this form affect reading. Before interpreting what is said, they would analyze how it is said. One can begin to study The Scarlet letter for its narrative strategies instead of the ways in which it depicts Puritanism.

They claim that literary evolution is the result of the constant attempt to disrupt existing literary conventions and to create new ones. One could conclude that literature changes with the world because literature gives form to ideas outside of literary realm but for the Formalists literary devices are motivated entirely by literary origins. For literature to be literature, it must constantly defamiliarize the familiar = ostranenie (a term coined by Shklovsky), constantly evolve new ways of story-telling and poetry-making. And such change is entirely autonomous of the social or historical world.

Main emphasis is put on the language since common everyday language is quite unimaginative, has mostly denotative meaning of informative function, whereas poets use different structures and unusual words so readers can see meanings of words differently in different context = it is poetic language that makes poetry, not a topic because everything can become a theme of a poem. This approach concentrates on usage of rhythm, alliteration, repetition, metaphors (indirect comparison) and symbols that have meaning of object and some other meaning attached to it, you don’t compare two things.

British formalism: WILLIAM EMPSON and FRANK RAYMOND LEAVIS followed Russian formalism but never tried to separate meaning from the form because, according to them, poetic language multiplies the meaning and creates ambiguity which Empson described in his study Seven Types of Ambiguity.

IVOR RICHARDS came up with the technique of close reading upon realizing that his students cannot understand poetry which was later on developed further by New Critics. He also devised a reception theory in which during close reading of a poem you have to know all potential meanings and find the fitting one, recognizing metaphors, rhythm = basically dissecting poem into little pieces.

American New Criticism is associated JOHN RANSOM who published an anthology of essays New Criticism, and CLEANTH BROOKS and ROBERT PENN WARREN. They criticized critics and readers for paying too much attention to the writer so they stopped digging in authors’ life, we will never know how they really felt anyway. They also stated that literary critics should be professionals since not everybody can evaluate literary texts properly and critics should NOT make personal declarations about what they felt while reading the book because everybody can have different experience.

They used close reading as their method and claimed that poetry differs from ordinary practical speech because it uses language connotatively or in the way that evokes secondary meanings with literary devices such as metaphor, irony and paradox. In John Keats’ poem Ode on a Grecian Urn an urn can be both ordinary object and a metaphor for the eternal durability of art. The paradox in poetry cannot be expressed by science. The poem is about how art, figured in the urn, is more vivid than life itself, even though it seems lifeless. Although dead, it possesses eternal life.

THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent states that tradition is an important part of literature as you cannot evaluate the work separately but to compare it to dead authors, its predecessors. A good poet accepts history, connect with it and traces the roots, although he/she can then unintentionally copy it and lose own style. A good poet should be a depersonalised medium and must not use poetry as a therapy. Honest criticism is directed not to the poet but to the poetry. The emotions are an effect of art upon the person who enjoys it.

Eliot’s criticism on Hamlet:

According to Eliot’s essay Hamlet and His Problems, Hamlet is one of the worst plays ever, not coherent and badly edited as it was half rewritten and half stolen from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, an artistic failure. The biggest problem is the character of Hamlet and his mother. Queen Gertrude is so negative and insignificant that she arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she herself is incapable of representing. We do not really know anything about her, just that she remarries soon after her husband death and shamefully shares bed with his murdered but we do not know her motives. Killing by pouring a poison to ear can mean that the king heard something he should not have, maybe something about his wife cheating on him. Hamlet claims she is guilty but it is not based on any facts, maybe Hamlet overreacts like a typical adolescent. A lot of characters die because of this spoiled prince and he even kills his two friends.

Basic terms of Formalists

They noticed that narrative consists of two major components: Plot = events as narrated within the pages of the work, used to make the story strange. Story = the sequence of events in the order in which they occurred.

Affective fallacy – An attempt to judge by our emotional effect. We do it normally all the time (saying that movie is boring, that book is a crap) but we should not do it as real critics while writing essays because it is not objective. Emotional reactions a work provokes in readers are irrelevant to the study.

Intentional fallacy – Meaning resides in the verbal design of a literary work, not in statements regarding the intentions that the author might have.

Characters

      Protagonist - main character (not called a hero because hero is always positive)

      Antagonist – enemy of the main character

      Anti-hero – main character of problematic features but readers sympathise with them

      Round characters – they develop, seen from many sides and change though the story

      Flat character – static, still the same

Figures of speech

      Allegory – a story with some moral message

      Analogy – comparison but not to things (that is metaphor) but to relationships

      Irony – you say something but you think something else, involves paradox, often funny

      Sarcasm  - cruel

      Satire – criticism that tries to expose and criticize on problems but with intention to improve. It can be ironic but not sarcastic.

      Foreshadowing – we know in advance something is going to happen (dreams, predictions)

Points of view (narrators)

      1^st person – extremely subjective so be careful when analyzing since he/she is the one choosing what will be told and how.           

      3^rd person

o   Omniscient – can read emotions and thought of all characters, knows everything.     

o   Limited omniscient – knows only thoughts and feeling of some characters or only presents the scene as looking over characters’ shoulder.

o   Reflector – reflects what is happening around and inside the character, presents internal monologues, stream of consciousness. Reflector is also subjective but does not lie on purpose, although does not have to be always right and can change opinions.