Formalism
In literary criticism, Formalism refers to a style of inquiry focussing on the form, rather than the content, of works of literature. In particular Formalism usually refers to approaches of interpreting or evaluating literary works that focus exclusively on features of the text itself rather than on the biographical, historical, or intellectual contexts of its creation.
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 so-called 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 predominate the field. Theorists became suspicious of the idea that a literary work could be separated from its origins or uses, or be separated 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 or academic relevance. In recent years, as the wave Post-structural and Postmodern has itself began 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.
- 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.
According to Eichenbaum, Shklovsky was the lead critic of the group, and Shklovsky contributed two of their most well-known concepts: defamiliarization (ostraneniye, more literally, "estrangement") and the plot/story distinction (syuzhet/fabula). "Defamiliarization" is one of the crucial ways in which literary language distinguishes itself from ordinary, communicative language, and is a feature of how art in general functions: namely, by presenting things in strange and new ways that allow the reader to see the world in a different light. Innovation in literary history is, according to Shklovsky, partly a matter of finding new techniques of defamiliarization. The plot/story distinction, the second aspect of literary evolution according to Shklovsky, is the distinction between the sequence of events the text relates ("the story") from the sequence in which those events are presented in the work ("the plot"). By emphasizing how the "plot" of any fiction naturally diverges from the chronological sequence of its "story", Shklovsky was able to emphasize the importance of paying an extraordinary amount of attention to the plot—that is, the form—of a text, so as to understand its meaning. Both of these concepts are attempts to describe the significance of the form of a literary work in order to define its "literariness."
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. Jakobson left Moscow for Prague in 1920 and in 1926 co-founded the Prague Linguistic Circle, which embodied similar interests, especially in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. Jakobson's work on linguistics, and in Saussure in particular, was seminal to the development of Structuralism, a related but critically distinct style of literary theory distinct from Formalism.
I.A. Richards
(work in progress)
The New Criticism
(work in progress)
Bibliography of formalists and their critics
- Lemon, Lee T., and Marion J. Reis. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965.
- Shklovsky, Viktor. Theory of Prose. Trans. Benjamin Sher. Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive, 1990.
- Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. New York: Russell and Russell, 1957.
- Wellek, René, and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. 3rd. rev. ed. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.
Bibliography of accounts of formalism
- Erlich, Victor. Russian Formalism: History—Doctrine. 3rd ed. New Haven: Yale UP, 1981.
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