New Criticism and

Russian Formalism

The text The text

The text
Only the poem itself
 Time/Period
• From late 1920s to 1970s
• Flourished during the 1940s and 1950s,
and are still in evidence today

• Reaction against traditional Criticism

which is highly impressionistic

• Method: Close reading/intensive reading

 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 interpretations
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 text
• The era of composition • The structural
• The author organization/internal
• The reader’s emotional pattern/interrelationship
response
•
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
 Russian Formalism
• Emphasis on the form of the work
• Form-the organization of the material . . .
for the creation of the total effect.
“Art entails form; form takes many forms”
• What the work says and how it says it are
inseparable issues(form and Content)
• Art for art’s sake
 Time/Period
• 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
 Go ahead…
experiment with
different approaches
to literary criticism!
End of presentation
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