Module 3

Formalism I

Formalism

In literary criticism, Formalism refers to a style of inquiry that focuses, almost exclusively, on

features of the literary text itself, to the exclusion of biographical, historical, or intellectual

contexts. The name “Formalism” derives from one of the central tenets of Formalist thought:

That the form of a work of literature is inherently a part of its content, and that the attempt to

separate the two is fallacious. By focusing on literary form and excluding superfluous contexts,

Formalists believed that it would be possible to trace the evolution and development of literary

forms, and thus, literature itself.

In simple terms, Formalists believed that the focus of literary studies should be the text itself, and

not the author’s life or social class. Art is produced according to certain sets of rules and with its

own internal logic. New forms of art represent a break with past forms and an introduction of

new rules and logic. The goal of the critic is to examine this feature of art. In the case of

literature, the object of reflection is the text’s literariness, that which makes it a work of art and

not a piece of journalism. This attention to the details of the literary text was an attempt on the

part of literature to turn its discipline into a science.

The History of Formalism

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 “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

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 dominate the field. Theorists became suspicious of the idea that a literary work could be

separated from its origins or uses, or from the background of political and social contexts. For a

number of decades following the early 1970s, the word “Formalism” took on a negative

connotation, denoting works of literary criticism that were so absorbed in meticulous reading as

to have no larger cultural relevance. In recent years, as the wave of Post-

structural and Postmodern criticism has itself begun 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 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” 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.

Anglo-American New Criticism

New Criticism was the dominant trend in English and American literary criticism of the mid

twentieth-century, from the 1920s to the mid-to-late 1960s. Its adherents were emphatic in their

advocacy of close reading and attention to texts themselves, and their rejection of criticism based

on extra-textual sources, especially biography. At their best, New Critical readings were brilliant,
articulately argued, and broad in scope, but at their worst the New Critics were pedantic,

idiosyncratic, and at times dogmatic in their refusal to investigate other, contextual avenues of

critical inquiry. As a result of these failings, the New Critics were eventually usurped by the

development of Post-structuralism, Deconstruction, Postcolonialism, and Cultural Studies, more

politically-oriented schools of literary theory. New Criticism became a byword for a backwards

model of conducting literary research that paid no attention to anything outside the small world

of a closed text. In recent years, literary theory—suffering from a critical lack of structure and an

increasingly complex and chaotic academic environment—has begun to turn back and re-

examine some of the more open-minded and incisive works of the New Critics.

Key Proponents of Formalism

The Russian Formalist critics, Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shklovsky, and I.A Richard are probably

the most popular proponents of formalism. Roman Jakobson was a bridge between Russian

formalism and structuralism. He was a founder member of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and his

writings reveal the centrality of linguistic theory in his thought and especially the influence of

Saussure. Jakobson attempted the daunting task of trying to define “literariness” in linguistic

term.

Shklovsky was the lead critic of the group. Shklovsky’s main objective in “Art, as Device” is to

dispute the conception of literature and literary criticism common in Russia at that time. Broadly

speaking, literature was considered, on the one hand, to be a social or political product. On the

other hand, literature was considered to be the personal expression of an author’s world vision,

expressed by means of images and symbols. In both cases, literature is not considered as such,

but evaluated on a broad socio-political or a vague psycho-logical background. The aim of

He also contributed two of their most well-known concepts: Defamiliarization and the plot/story

distinction.

Ivor Armstrong Richards was an influential literary critic and rhetorician who is often cited as

the founder of an Anglophone school of Formalist criticism that would eventually become

known as the New Criticism. Richards’ books, especially “The Meaning of Meaning”,

“Principles of Literary Criticism”, “Practical Criticism”, and “The Philosophy of Rhetoric”, were

seminal documents not only for the development of New Criticism, but also for the fields of

semiotics, the philosophy of language, and linguistics. Since the New Criticism, at least in

English-speaking countries, is often thought of as the beginning of modern literary criticism,

Richards is one of the founders of the contemporary study of literature in English. 

Fundamental Principles

The Formalist adage that the purpose of literature was “to make the stones stonier” nicely

expresses their notion of literariness. In formalism the text is perceived as “Art” and the

autonomy of the text is advocated. Formalists focus on the intrinsic nature of the text excluding

external factors such as, the author, the reader, historical context as well as cultural context of the

piece of work. Formalists believe that it is not possible to understand words without first

understanding the relationship that exists between the object, emotion or experience and the

symbol that signifies it.

Similarly, it is the relationships that exist between words that make different interpretations of a

sentence possible. They believe that every aspect of the text is integral and that the text possess

all the meaning necessary for interpretation. Additionally different sentences make it possible for
a text to be interpreted in different ways. At this juncture, it is worth noting that formalists were

very interested in paying attention to the poetic attributes of language. They argued that poetic

attributes of a language, if well used, could enable the reader perceive a familiar situation in a

completely new way, thereby enhancing meaning while at the same time making the text more

interesting.

Formalism analyses, interprets and evaluates the internal features of the text inclusive of

grammar, syntax and literary devices. The formalist considers that tensions are vital to the text

and are created through irony, paradox and ambiguity. One of the major concerns of formalism is

unity in literature; the coming together of various parts of the text to build up a whole. For the

formalist, in a successful text, form and content cannot be separated because form also has

meaning.

In Formalism, the text is analysed based on the relationship between the form of the text and the

content of the text. Formalism is perhaps best known in Shklovsky’s concept of

‘defamiliarization.’ The routine of ordinary experience, Shklovsky contended, rendered invisible

the uniqueness and particularity of the objects of existence. Literary language, partly by calling

attention to itself as language, estranged the reader from the familiar and made fresh the

experience of daily life.

Key Concepts

Literary and Practical Language- The founding assumption of Formalism, that poetic

language differs from the language of ordinary communication, spawned numerous

investigations of what the Formalists called ‘literariness’ – the qualities that make a work artistic.

This distinction between practical and poetic language also allowed the Formalists to argue that
literature was an autonomous branch of human activity, evolving according to its own immanent

laws rather than as a consequence or reflection of historical events. Proceeding from this

theoretical model, the Formalists viewed literary works as responses to previous literature rather

than to the outside world.

Defamiliarisation- Defamiliarization (ostraneniye, more literally, ‘estrangement’ or ‘making it

strange’) 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.

Plot/Story Distinction (syuzhet/fabula)- 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.

Literariness- Jakobson declared that it is literariness that makes a given work a literary work. In

other words, literariness is a feature that distinguishes literature from other human creations and

is made of certain artistic techniques, or devices, employed in literary works. These devices
became the primary object of the formalists’ analyses and, as concrete structural components of

the works of literature, were essential in determining the status of literary study as a science.

Foregrounding- Foregrounding is a literary concept developed by formalist Jan Mukařovský.

Foregrounding is a technique within literary devices whereby the author creates defamiliarization

through linguistic (i.e., pertaining to language) ‘dislocation’ that calls readers’ attention to

the strangeness of the world or the perception of the world portrayed or depicted in the literary

work.

Assignment Questions

1. What is Formalism?

2. Trace the Historical Evolution of Formalism.

3. Russian Formalism vs Anglo American New Criticism.

4. The Key Proponents of Formalism and their Contributions.

5. Elaborate the key concepts of Formalism.

Books for Reference

Abrams, M. H. and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Handbook of Literary Terms. Cengage

Learning, 2009.

Babu, Murukan C., editor. A Textbook of Literary Criticism and Theory. Trinity, 2014.

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory.

Manchester University Press, 2009.

to Ecocriticism. Pearson Education, 2009.

Xavier, Robin. The Methodology of Literature. Mainspring, 2015.

Web Links

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Formalism

https://sutrismi.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/a-summary-of-formalism/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Criticism

https://www.studymode.com/essays/Formalism-And-New-Criticism-1395032.html

Objective Questions

1. According to Formalism, the _________ of a work of literature is inherently a part of its

content, and that the attempt to separate the two is fallacious. (form)

2. Russian Formalism refers primarily to the work of the ____________ founded in 1916 in St.

Petersburg. (Society for the Study of Poetic Language)

3. _____________ wrote the essay “The Theory of the Formal Method”. (Eichenbaum)

4. ________________ wrote “The Meaning of Meaning”, “Principles of Literary Criticism”,

“Practical Criticism”, and “The Philosophy of Rhetoric”. (I.A. Richards)

5. Foregrounding is a literary concept developed by formalist ______________________. (Jan

Mukařovský)
Frequently Asked Questions

1. The Derivation of the name ‘Formalism.

2. Roman Jakobson’s Moscow Linguistic Circle.

3. Viktor Shklovsky and his Contributions.

4. The Central Tenents of Formalism.

5. The Plot/ Story distinction.

Glossary

1. Defamiliarization - The routine of ordinary experience, Shklovsky contended, rendered

invisible the uniqueness and particularity of the objects of existence. Literary language, partly by

calling attention to itself as language, estranged the reader from the familiar and made fresh the

experience of daily life.

2. Literariness - The founding assumption of Formalism, that poetic language differs from the

language of ordinary communication, spawned numerous investigations of what the Formalists

called ‘literariness’ – the qualities that make a work artistic.

3. Moscow Linguistic Circle - Moscow Linguistic Circle founded in 1914 by Roman Jakobson

and contributed to the development of Russian Formalism.

4. Plot - The sequence in which the events are presented in the work.

5. Story - The sequence of events the text relates.