FORMALISMS By Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan

It has become commonplace of literary study that to study literature is to study language, yet prior to the formalist movements of the twentieth centuryRussian Formalism and American New Criticismthe study of literature was concerned with everything about literature except language, from the historical context of a literary work to the biography of its author. How literary language worked was of less importance than what a literary work was about. Two movements in early twentieth-century thought helped move literary study away from this orientation. The first movement was the attempt on the part of philosophers of science like Edmund Husserl to isolate objects of knowledge in their unmixed purity. The Russian Formalists, a group of young scholars (Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Boris Tomashevsky, Boris Eikhenbaum) who wrote in the teens and twenties, were influenced by this approach. For them, literature would be considered not as a window on the world but as something with specifically literary characteristics that make it literature as opposed to philosophy or sociology or biography. Literature is not a window for looking at sociological themes or philosophic ideas or biographical information; rather, it is a mural or wall painting, something with a palpability of its own which arrests the eye and merits study. The manipulation of representational devices may create a semblance of reality and allow one to have the impression of gazing through glass, but it is the devices alone that produce that impression, and they alone are what make literature literary. The second movement was the attempt on the part of idealist philosophers like Benedetto Croce to develop a new aesthetics, or philosophy of art, which would rebut the claim of science that all truth is grounded in empirical acts knowable through scientific methods. Art provides access to a different kind of truth than is available to science, a truth that is immune to scientific investigation because it is accessible only through connotative language (allusion, metaphor, symbolism, etc.) and cannot be rendered in the direct, denotative, fact-naming language of the sciences. The American New Critics (Cleanth Brooks, William K. Wimsett, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate) were influenced by the new aesthetic philosophies. For them, literature should be studied for the way literary language differs from ordinary practical language and for the unique truths conveyed only through such literary language. The Russian Formalists were interested both in describing the general characteristics of literary language and in analyzing the specific devices or modes of operation of such language. Perhaps their most famous general claim is that literary language consists of an act of defamiliarization, by which they mean that such literature presents objects or experiences from such an unusual perspective or in such unconventional and self-conscious language that our habitual, ordinary, rote perception of those things are disturbed. We are forced to see things that had become automatic and overly familiar in new ways. Shklovsky cites the example of Tolstoy, who presents a meditation on property from the point of view of a horse, or who recounts the story of a flogging in such a blank manner that the then accepted practice seems strange and novel to the otherwise inured reader. More specifically, the Formalists were interested in analyzing literature into its component parts and in describing its principal devices and modes of operation. This analysis took two main forms in the two major genres of prose narrative and poetry, concentrating in the first on the operations of narrative and in the second on sound in verse. The Formalists noticed that narrative literature consisted of two major components: the plot, by which they meant the story as narrated within the pages of the book (with all the attendant arrangements of chronological sequence, point of view, etc.), and the story, by which they meant the sequence of events in the order and the actual duration in which they ostensibly occurred. Once this simple distinction is made, one can begin to analyze all of the features of story-telling, the many devices such as point of view, delayed disclosure, narrative voice, and the like that go into the creation of the imaginary story through the manipulation of plot or story-telling devices. One can, for example, begin to study a novel like The Scarlet Letter for its narrative strategies instead of for the ways in which it depicts Puritanism. In the analysis of poetry, the Formalist focus was on the qualities of poetic language that distinguish it from ordinary practical language, the distinction between the literary and the non-literary

being more pronounced in this genre. Whereas ordinary language must subordinate its rules of operation (grammar) to the practical goal of communicating information, poetic language is distinguished by the foregrounding of such devices or motifs as euphony, rhythm, alliteration, consonance, repetition, and rhyme which obey a very different logic from that required to communicate information. A meteorologist might say that precipitation in the Iberian peninsula is concentrated in the central plateau, and in light of that practical use of language, the internal rhyming of the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain will seem impractical and unnecessary, but it is such devices that make poetry a distinct linguistic undertaking, a mode of language use with autonomous rules of operation which, unlike grammar, are not subordinated to a practical function. While practical speech facilitates access to information by making language as transparent as possible, poetic speech contorts and roughens up ordinary language and submits it to what Roman Jakobson called organized violence, and it is this roughening up of ordinary language into tortuous formed speech that makes poetry poetry rather than a weather report. While literature for the Formalists is characterized by invariant patterns, recurring devices, and law-like relations, it also changes over time and varies from one historical epoch to another. The Formalists account for such change in two ways. They claim that literary evolution is the result of the constant attempt to disrupt existing literary conventions and to generate new ones. And they argue that literary change is the result of the autonomous evolution of literary devices. A more traditional concept of the content/form distinction might lead one to conclude that literature changes when the world changes because literature merely gives one form to ideas and realities that lie outside the literary realm and constitute its cause or motivation. But for the Formalists, literary devices owe no debt to such motivations; they evolve autonomous of them and are motivated entirely by literary origins. For literature to be literature, it must constantly defamiliarize the familiar, constantly evolve new procedures for story-telling or poetry-making. And such change is entirely autonomous of the social and historical world from which the materials of literature are taken. Cervantes satiric novel Don Quixote, for example, makes fun of the popular romantic novels about knights and quests which constituted the dominant form of story-telling in his day. It emerged not because of changes in the world or in Cervantes life but rather as a result of a specifically literary evolution. The new device of the problematic hero was made possible and necessary by the development of the novel form itself. You will find a major Russian Formalist, Roman Jakobson, placed under Structuralism in this compilation because there is a strong historical as well as methodological link between the two intellectual movements. Half the original Formalists were linguists, with Jakobson being the most influential. He left Russia in 1920 and traveled to Czechoslovakia, where he was part of the linguistic circles that inspired French Structuralism in the 1940s and 1950s. The Structuralists, whose work was particularly influential in France through the 1960s, share a methodological interest with Formalist linguistics in that they saw culture in general as constituted by the same rules of operation that one finds in language. Although the Russian Formalists were suppressed by the Stalinist government in Russia in the 1920s, news of their work was borne West by East European migrs such as Ren Wellek, Julia Kristeva, and Tzvetan Todorov, where it helped shape both French Structuralism as well as such literary critical schools as poetics, stylistics, and narratology. The impulse toward formal analysis was not limited to Russia to the group of thinkers usually clustered under the rubric Russian Formalists. Vladimir Propp was a scholar of folktales who wrote at the same time as the Formalists and who analyzed the component features of folktale narratives. A wide range of tales could be shown to share the same sequence of narrative motifs, from hero leaves home to the hero receives a magic token to the hero is tested in battle. The work of Mikhail Bakhtin, while it is historically at odds with the Formalists in its emphasis on the social and ideological features of literature, shares their concern with describing those formal elements that make a literary genre such as the novel distinct from other literary forms. His work also represents an expansion of the original Formalist undertaking to include not only genres but also extra-linguistic uses of language such as that of the carnival, which Bakhtin saw influencing the work of certain writers such as Franois Rabelais. While the Russian Formalists movement was scientific and rational, the other major formalist schoolAmerican New Criticismwas anti-scientific and interested in the nonrational dimension of art. Both critical movements nevertheless shared an interest in what it is about literary language that makes it

different from the ordinary use of language, and both consider the proper object of literary study to be literary texts and how they worked rather than the authors lives or the social and historical worlds to which literature refers. Two well-known terms that are part of a New Critical legacythe intentional fallacy and the affective fallacyname this act of delimiting the object of literary study and separating it from biography or sociology. According to the intentional fallacy, meaning resides in the verbal design of a literary work, not in statements regarding his or her intention that the author might make. According to the affective fallacy, the subjective effects or emotional reactions a work provokes in readers are irrelevant to the study of the verbal object itself, since its objective structure alone contains the meaning of the work. While the Russian Formalists were concerned with elucidating the modes of operation of entire genres such as the novel, the New Critics concentrated their energies on individual literary works, especially poems. Close reading is the term most often used to describe their method. The purpose of such close reading was not, however, the analysis of literary devices or motifs considered as an end in itself. It was instead the elucidation of the way literature embodies of concretely enacts universal truths, what the New Critics called concrete universals. Poetry, they argued, differs from ordinary practical speech, which uses language denotatively (one word for one thing), in that poetry uses language connotatively or in a way that evokes secondary meanings. Such language use allows poetry to be both concrete and specific, as well as universal and general. An urn can be both an ordinary object and a metaphor for the eternal durability of art. Poetic language thus reconciles the ordinarily opposed elements of the concrete and the universal, the specific word and general meaning, body and spirit. Such reconciliation is possible in connotative poetic tropes such as paradox, irony, and metaphor, tropes which either join ordinary objects to universal meanings (metaphor, symbol) or reconcile seemingly opposed elements (irony, paradox). Cleanth Brooks, for example, notices in a famous close reading that Keats poem Ode on a Grecian Urn is full of paradoxes such as Cold pastoral and unheard melodies which imply both life and death at once, the paradoxical cohabitation of what is vivid and moving with what is frozen and still. This is so, Brooks argues, because 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. The practical denotative language of science cannot name such truths because such language is limited to the naming of positive empirical facts that can be grasped by the senses. The realm of universal meaning, however, is beyond sensory experience and cannot be analyzed using scientific methods. It can only be alluded to indirectly in poetic language and cannot be paraphrased in literal, denotative speech. For the American New Critics, therefore, the description of literary devices such as metaphor, irony, and paradox was inseparable from a theory of universal meaning that was a polemic response to modern positivist science. While the Russian Formalists sought a value-free mode of critical description, one that would scientifically specify what it is about literature that is literary, the New Critics informed the study of literature with a concern for traditional religious and aesthetic values of Christian theology and idealistic aesthetics (that is, an aesthetics rooted in the idea that universal truth is available through art of a kind that is not determined by material social and historical circumstances). Those values have receded in importance with time, and the legacy of the New Criticism that has remained most abiding is the concern with the close reading of texts and with the analysis of the operation of literary language in all its complexity.

New Criticism
Principles of New Criticism T.S. Elliot Cleanth Brooks Works Consulted Issues and Questions Raised Ivor Armstrong Richards F.R. Leavis

Introduction New Criticism was influential from the late 1930s and prominent until the late 1970s, however it was based on the works developed by critics and theorists as early as the 1920s. The term New Criticism was coined and given credit to John Crowe Ransom and his leading work Criticism Inc in 1937, which argued that students of the future must be permitted to study literature, and not merely about literature (Lodge, 230). New Criticism has been considered a school of the formalist movement and both are closely associated with modernism of which focused mainly on the literary form of a text. Principles of New Criticism 1. In the words of F.R. Leavis, New Critics focus strongly on the words on the page. 2. New Critics want to know how the work speaks itself through The words on the page Figures of speech Symbols 3. New Critics are interested in how the parts of a text relate to create Harmony Order Tension Paradox Ambivalence Ambiguity 4. New Critics are primarily concerned with the language (verbal meaning) and the organisation (overall structure) of a text. 5. New Critics solely focused on poetry and not fiction. Although there have been attempts to apply New Criticism to fiction based works, poetry in their main focus. 6. New Criticism dealt with how a work can be read objectively and accurately by examining the structure and form. Therefore, New Critics conclude that there is one single or correct interpretation of a text. 7. New Criticism is not concerned with external circumstances like the Biography of the author Historical context Social conditions at the time of production Effects on the reader and They have a minimal interest in the content of the text (message/ideas)
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Issues and Questions Raised about New Criticism 1. Is the poem self-contained? 2. Should a poem involve personal feelings? (author and reader) 3. Are there great works of literature known as the canon? 4. Should poetry be considered as a separate entity from other literature? 5. What are the effects of paraphrasing or summarizing a text?

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T.S. Eliot and New Criticism

According to Selden, T.S. Eliot was the single most influential figure behind New Criticism. His essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, written in 1919 was a building block for much Anglo-American criticism. In his essay, Eliot argues that writers must have the historical sense, which can be seen as a sense of tradition (Selden 14). Tradition to Eliot is the presence of the past. It is not the knowledge of specific events in history, but rather an encompassing feeling of past literature, which inspires the writer to write originally and with the spirit of the past in mind. In this way, the writing is not repetitious and handed down from the immediate predecessors, but is new material merely written in the spirit of the past. Eliot says that whenever a new work is written it will be compared to the past and that the value of existing works will be readjusted to accommodate the new work: this is conformity between the old and the new (Eliot 5). Therefore, a poet should be aware that they will be judged by the standards of the past and compared to works that are thought to be good. In writing a new work, a poet must not conform to past writing because to conform would merely be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new and would therefore not be a work of art (Eliot 5). Aside from tradition, the other issue Eliot raises in Tradition and the Individual Talent is the likening of writing to science and the detachment from emotion that a writer must have while writing in order to achieve this scientific state. Eliot declares that the business of the poet is not to find new emotions but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all (Eliot 10). Eliot does not think that poetry should be personal and that most of it should reflect conscious and deliberate thought. Further Eliot argues that poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion; it is not an expression of personality but an escape from personality (Eliot 10). Basically in his writing Eliot emphasised science, objectivity, impersonality, and that the poem should be the object of analysis, not the poet. Eliot also claimed that the poem should contain the essence of tradition based on the great works of the past (Selden 15).
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Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893-1979) Certain elements of the works of I. A. Richards were essential to the development of the New Criticism movement. Well-known works by Richards include The Meaning of Meaning, Principles of Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism. One of the essential elements found in these works is Richards concept that poetry is psychological and not cognitive. Richards also pays a great deal of attention to the use of language in poetry. According to Richards: It has to be recognised that all our natural turns of speech are misleading, especially those we use in discussing works of art. We become so accustomed to them that even when we are aware that they are ellipses, it is easy to forget the fact (Richards, 20). Richards approach to poetry is a psychological one. That is, he would invade our discussions by insisting that what we think of as knowledge is less indicative of the objective than it is to our own subjective emotions and desires. Richards would suggest that science is autonomous in the sense that its cognitions are affected only by other cognitions and not by emotions and desires. In symbolic speech the essential considerations are the correctness of the symbolisation and the truth of the references. In evocative speech (poetry) the essential consideration is the character of the attitude aroused. Symbolic statements may indeed be used as a means of evoking attitudes, but when this use is occurring it will be noticed that the truth or falsity of the statements is of no consequence provided that they are accepted by the hearer (Ransom, 8). Essentially, poetry is all well and good, but it has no real connection to the world. Its purpose is psychological rather than cognitive.
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Cleanth Brooks In Modern Poetry and The Tradition, Cleanth Brooks discussed his beliefs on the critical revolution, which he thought was about to happen if not already started. He believed that there were two extreme types of critics and poets: the traditionalists and modernists. (Brooks, 68) Brooks believed that the

modernist view of flat out rejection of old clichs and worn-out literary materials as well as other stereotypes of Victorianism which they perceived as lifeless conventions to the extreme (Brooks, 69). Brooks believed that poets should make simple readjustments opposed to flat out rejection In The Well Wrought Urn, Cleanth Brooks discusses how he believed that new critics should be objective and scientific in their criticism and in practice relate the work in question to the cultural matrix out of which it came. (Brooks, 68). Brooks said critics should not forget the differences between historical periods but forget those qualities those periods have in common. (Brooks, 217). Brooks also believed that critics should be self-consistent in their criticism and that New Criticism should make universal judgements as poetry does. Along with making universal judgements poetry must be original, otherwise he would not considerate poetry at all (Brooks, 217). Brooks believed that poetry should be a statement of Carpe Diem or seize the day and that poetry should not mean but be, if the poem had an outside meaning than the reader was distracted from the actual poem. Brooks also discussed paradox as the most important language and literary convention in poetry. Brooks argued that the paradox must be sophisticated, witty, and bright in order to enhance poetry. Brooks believed that paradox should be intellectual rather than emotional. This became a problem when Brooks tried to apply his theories of new criticism to fiction, often paradox became too emotional rather than intellectual and could no longer be controlled, which he believed was critical to his theories (Brooks, 8). Brooks believed that metaphorical language should not and could not be used as decoration or ornamental but it was the poem, to remove it (the metaphorical language) would be to destroy the poem; as a result a poem cannot be reduced to paraphrasing. (Brooks, 19-20)
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F. R. Leavis F.R. Leavis was a teacher at Cambridge University. His employment as an educator had a profound affect on his criticism, (as did his geographical location). Many of the other New Critics lived in the United States. For Leavis, living across the ocean in England gave him a different, if related, perspective. F. R. Leavis was not entirely a New Critic, but his close analysis of the poem itself (the words on the page) and his belief that a poem should be self-sustaining (its reason for being should exist only inside its text and meaning), make him important to New Criticism. Leaviss major influences include T.S. Eliot and Matthew Arnold and his major works include The Common Pursuit, The Great Tradition, Revaluation, and Education and the University. While New Criticism was especially dominant in the 1940s and 1950s, Leavisite criticism became especially dominant in the 1970s. Leavis became, according to A Readers Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, the major single target for the new critical theory of the 1970s and beyond (Selden, 23). Leaviss criticism did not have a clearly defined theory, (in fact he refused to define his theories at all), but it was based on a common sense approach which dealt closely with the text of the poem. Leavis believed that there were great works of literature, therefore remaining a strong supporter of an existing canon. He also had defined ideas about what was poetry and what was not. He did not hesitate to dismiss many popular authors as non-poetic. Tennyson, Lang (The Odyssey), and Browning were a few of those who he dismissed as writing in poetic form, but not writing true poetry. He believed that poetry should express something personal about the poet and the poet should be emotionally involved with the poem. Leavis also believed that the poet was (or should be) and enlightened being and be profoundly affected by life. Leavis says, in his book New Bearings In English Poetry, poetry matters because of the kind of poet who is more alive than other people, more alive in his own age. A poet must also have the power of making words express what he feels and this should be indistinguishable from his awareness of what he feels. He should be unusually sensitive, unusually aware, more sincere and more himself than any ordinary man should be. If a poet and his or her work did not conform to Leaviss ideas, the poem was not poetry (at least, certainly not great poetry). Some of those authors who he felt accomplished true poetry were Eliot, Hardy, Yeats and De La Mare. Leaviss criticism had a sense of the past. It related historical context to the poem and poet. The era that the poem was written in and the types of poetry that were being composed in that particular era, he believed, had an effect on the poetry that was composed, the ideas behind it, and the shape/form of that poetry. Historical and social backgrounds were not a focus of Leaviss criticism. However, the focus of

Leaviss criticism was always on the text in terms of words and how they related to one another, (their ambiguities and contrasts). Hopefully, this chapter will have put New Criticism in a nutshell for you even though Brooks and Selden would disapprove of our paraphrasing what we think it is all about. We have seen the progression of theorists from the 1920s to the 1970s as well as how over time deviations have occurred and theorists have gone beyond the trodden path. However, New Criticism is still the same and the heart of New Criticism remains the words on the page.
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Works Consulted
Brooks, Cleanth. Modern Poetry and the Tradition. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1939. Brooks, Cleanth. Well Wrought Urn. New York: Harcourt, 1947. Davis, Robert Con. Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies. New York: Longman, 1994. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. London: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Eliot, T.S. Selected Essays 1919-1932. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1964. Leitch, Vincent B. Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Poststructualism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Lodge, David. 20th Century Literary Criticism. London: Longman, 1972. Lucy, Niall. Postmodern Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell publishers Inc., 1997. Selden, Raman. A Readers Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. London: Prentice Hall, 1997. Simpson, Lewis. The Possibilities of Order: Cleanth Brooks and His Work. Baton Rogue: Louisiana State University, 1976. Ransom, J. C. (1941). The New Criticism. New Directions, Norfolk, Connecticut. Richards, I. A. (1959). Principles of Literary Criticism. Routledge & Kegan Paul LTD, London. Wellek, Rene. A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.