FORMALISM

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FORMALISM

• Reading for form 1 (New Criticism)
• Reading for form 2 (Russian Formalism)

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New criticism America in the 1930s

• The New Critics saw poetry as a way of living
  authentically in a shallow world (post-war mass
  disappointment).
• In their vision, interpreting a text excludes
  both the reader and the poet.
• The form is paramount in order to find the real
  of the text meaning.

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Intentional Fallacy theory (IF)

• IF(W. K. Wimsatt) the confusion of auctorial
  intention with the reality of the text
• The text in itself needs to guide us, not
  indicate what the author meant.
• The authors intentions/commentaries are of
  little importance. The text is self-sufficient.

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. Affective Fallacy theory (AF)

• The reader takes his/her emotional reaction to
  the text with what the text really means to
  convey.
• The real meaning of the text is hidden from the
  reader.
• The New criticism postulated reading and
  interpreted the sheer text.
• Once the reader and author have been eliminated,
  the act of criticism is reduced to analyzing the
  techniques and strategies used to convey the
  literature effect.

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Reading for form (New Criticism)

• The New Critics have created a special kind of
  critical canon, a Procustian bed.
• The main characteristics are irony, ambiguity,
  maturity, self-discipline (the poet/writer were
  not allowed to personalize the poem/work)
• This theory is reflected in Virginia Woolfs To
  the Lighthouse, or J. Joyces Ulysses.
• This type of literature becomes the blue-print of
  authenticity, and masculine lucidity.

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Russian Formalism

• In the first decades of 20th century in Moscow
  and St. Petersburg emerges the European tradition
  of modern literary studies.
• Research was moved to Prague in the late 20s
  because of the repressive Soviet regime.
• The Formalist School is eventually established in
  France after the 2nd World War.
• The Formalist school reaches its peak in the 60s
  (Structuralism).

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Russian Formalism (follow-up)

• It becomes notorious when the linguist Roman
  Jakobson moves to N.Y., before 2nd world war.
• The formalists works were translated into
  English btw. 1950-1960.
• In France there was a parallel movement of
  cultural anthropology Cl. Levi Strauss.
• France was the promoter of Structuralism which
  was also going to become famous in NY.

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Russian Formalism

• Initially focused on poetry.
• Their only concern is the form of a literary
  work, in order to read the deep meaning of the
  text.
• Not interested in the social function of
  literature.
• They ignore the referential function (the old
  Aristotelian mimesis concept)
• They believed literature is autonomous from the
  rest of reality.
• Highly interested in deciphering the way in which
  literature functions.

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Essential questions of the Formalist approach

• What makes a text literature/literary?
• What do all literary texts have in common?
• Is there a common literary factor?
• The Formalists answer literarity is the sum of
  all specific definitions for establishing the
  boundaries for non-literature.

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Traditional ways of identifying literature

• Mimesis - the oldest of criteria. Restrictive
  because it excludes everything that is not
  mimetic (poetry).
• Expresivity - emerging emotions though empathy.
• Rethorics relying on stylistic devices, as well
  as on their capacity to impress and influence the
  reader.
• Poetics those traits which differentiate a
  poetic text from another literary text.
• Narativity - permanently circumscribed to
  literature.

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Means of identifying literarity in Formalism

• Defined by a combination of de procedures
• defamiliarizing of common language through ritmic
  and metrice structures (R. Jakobson)
• narrative constuction (Slovski, Propp)
• stylistic devices (Vinogradov)
• dialectics of genres (Tanianov)
• thematic structures (Tomasevski)