What is Formalism?

Formalism is an object-centered theory of critical approach to literature. It focuses

only on the work itself and completely ignores the author of the work, time and
background information of the work, and the audiences’ feeling or perception about
the work.

Formalism asserts that formal properties are the only things that matter about
literature.

The formal properties of a literary work include:

 Words (meaning of the words)
 Shape/structure of the text
 Harmony of the words
 The rhythm of the sentences
 Rhyming of the words
 Meaning of the text as a whole
The formal properties of a literary work do NOT include: 
 Time of the work
 Background of the work
 Representation of the work
 The symbolism of the words
 Author’s moral, religious, or political values
 Author’s personal life

Formalist Criticism analyzes the form of a literary work to discover its true

meaning (not what the audiences think but what the text says). Formalism holds that
true meaning can be determined only by analyzing the literary elements of the text
and by understanding how these elements work together to form up a cohesive
whole.
Formalist critics examine a text regardless of its time period, social/political/religious
setting, and author’s background. They believe that true meaning of the text lies only
in the text. Other issues create a false impression of the text and thus jeopardize the
audiences’ interpretation. So the formalist critics believe that a text should not be
interpreted based on a reader's response to it (affective fallacy), the author's stated
or inferred intention (intentional fallacy), author's life (biographical fallacy), and
historical/religious/social contexts (contextual fallacies). According to formalism,
 these fallacies are the subjective biases and a text should be analyzed objectively to
determine its true meaning.
Formalism emphasizes close readings of the text to analyze the deeper meanings
of the words individually and collectively.     

What is a Text?  

According to Formalism,
 A text is a literary work which is a finished product and nothing can change its meaning
and form.
 The form and contents of the text cannot be separated. It creates meaning as a whole.
 A literary text has a fixed meaning.
 The greatest literary texts are ‘constant’, ‘coherent’, ‘timeless’, and ‘universal’.

A Checklist for Formalist Criticism:

A formalist critic analyzes:  
 How the work is structured or organized (formed)
 How it begins
 How it is advancing/transiting to the next lines
 How it ends
 How the plot is built
 How the plot relates to its structure
 How each part of the work relates to the work as a whole
 How all the parts relate to one another
 How the narrator/speaker narrates the story
 Point of view of the narrator
 The major and the minor characters
 How the characters are related to one another
 Actions of the characters
 The language of the literary work
 Style of the writing
 Literary devices such as imageries, similes, metaphors, ironies, paradox, etc.
 How the literary devices function to create meaning
Formalism (1930s-present)
FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION: RUSSIAN FORMALISM, NEW CRITICISM, NEO-
ARISTOTELIANISM
Formalists disagreed about what specific elements make a literary
work "good" or "bad"; but generally, Formalism maintains that a
literary work contains certain intrinsic features, and the theory
"...defined and addressed the specifically literary qualities in the text"
(Richter 699). Therefore, it's easy to see Formalism's relation to
Aristotle's theories of dramatic construction.
Formalism attempts to treat each work as its own distinct piece, free
from its environment, era, and even author. This point of view
developed in reaction to "...forms of 'extrinsic' criticism that viewed the
text as either the product of social and historical forces or a document
making an ethical statement" (699). Formalists assume that the keys
to understanding a text exist within "the text itself" (a common saying
among New Critics), and thus focus a great deal on, you guessed it,
form (Tyson 118).
For the most part, traditional Formalism is no longer used in the
academy. However, New Critical theories are still sometimes used in
secondary- and post-secondary-level instruction in literature and
writing (Tyson 115). There has been a renewed interest in form
among groups like the New Formalists.
Typical questions:

 How does the work use imagery to develop its own symbols?
(i.e. making a certain road stand for death by constant
association)
 What is the quality of the work's organic unity "...the working
together of all the parts to make an inseparable whole..." (Tyson
121)? In other words, does how the work is put together reflect
what it is?
 How are the various parts of the work interconnected?
 How do paradox, irony, ambiguity, and tension work in the text?
 How do these parts and their collective whole contribute to or not
contribute to the aesthetic quality of the work?
 How does the author resolve apparent contradictions within the
work?
  What does the form of the work say about its content?
 Is there a central or focal passage that can be said to sum up the
entirety of the work?
 How do the rhythms and/or rhyme schemes of a poem contribute
to the meaning or effect of the piece?

Here is a list of scholars we encourage you to explore to further your

understanding of this theory:
Russian Formalism

 Victor Shklovsky
 Roman Jakobson
 Victor Erlich - Russian Formalism: History - Doctrine, 1955
 Yuri Tynyanov

New Criticism

 John Crowe Ransom - The New Criticism, 1938

 I.A. Richards
 William Empson
 T.S. Eliot
 Allen Tate
 Cleanth Brooks

Neo-Aristotelianism (Chicago School of Criticism)

 R.S. Crane - Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern, 1952

 Elder Olson
 Norman Maclean
 W.R. Keast
 Wayne C. Booth - The Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961

Marxist Criticism (1930s-present)

WHOM DOES IT BENEFIT?
Based on the theories of Karl Marx (and so influenced by philosopher
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel), this school concerns itself with class
differences, economic and otherwise, as well as the implications and
complications of the capitalist system: "Marxism attempts to reveal the
ways in which our socioeconomic system is the ultimate source of our
experience" (Tyson 277).
Theorists working in the Marxist tradition, therefore, are interested in
answering the overarching question, whom does it [the work, the
effort, the policy, the road, etc.] benefit? The elite? The middle class?
Marxist critics are also interested in how the lower or working classes
are oppressed - in everyday life and in literature.
THE MATERIAL DIALECTIC
The Marxist school follows a process of thinking called the material
dialectic. This belief system maintains that "...what drives historical
change are the material realities of the economic base of society,
rather than the ideological superstructure of politics, law, philosophy,
religion, and art that is built upon that economic base" (Richter 1088).
Marx asserts that "...stable societies develop sites of resistance:
contradictions build into the social system that ultimately lead to social
revolution and the development of a new society upon the old" (1088).
This cycle of contradiction, tension, and revolution must continue:
there will always be conflict between the upper, middle, and lower
(working) classes and this conflict will be reflected in literature and
other forms of expression - art, music, movies, etc.
THE REVOLUTION
The continuing conflict between the classes will lead to upheaval and
revolution by oppressed peoples and form the groundwork for a new
order of society and economics where capitalism is abolished.
According to Marx, the revolution will be led by the working class
(others think peasants will lead the uprising) under the guidance of
intellectuals. Once the elite and middle class are overthrown, the
intellectuals will compose an equal society where everyone owns
everything (socialism - not to be confused with Soviet or Maoist
Communism).
Though a staggering number of different nuances exist within this
school of literary theory, Marxist critics generally work in areas
covered by the following questions.
Typical questions:

 Whom does it benefit if the work or effort is

accepted/successful/believed, etc.?
 What is the social class of the author?
  Which class does the work claim to represent?
 What values does it reinforce?
 What values does it subvert?
 What conflict can be seen between the values the work
champions and those it portrays?
 What social classes do the characters represent?
 How do characters from different classes interact or conflict?

Here is a list of scholars we encourage you to explore to further your

understanding of this theory:

 Karl Marx - (with Friedrich Engels) The Communist Manifesto,

1848; Das Kapital, 1867; "Consciousness Derived from Material
Conditions" from The German Ideology, 1932; "On Greek Art in
Its Time" from A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy, 1859
 Leon Trotsky - "Literature and Revolution," 1923
 Georg Lukács - "The Ideology of Modernism," 1956
 Walter Benjamin - "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction," 1936
 Theodor W. Adorno
 Louis Althusser - Reading Capital, 1965
 Terry Eagleton - Marxism and Literary Criticism, Criticism and
Ideology, 1976
 Frederic Jameson - Marxism and Form, The Political
Unconscious, 1971
 Jürgen Habermas - The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,
1990

Reader-Response Criticism (1960s-present)

WHAT DO YOU THINK?
At its most basic level, reader-response criticism considers readers'
reactions to literature as vital to interpreting the meaning of the text.
However, reader-response criticism can take a number of different
approaches. A critic deploying reader-response theory can use a
psychoanalytic lens, a feminist lens, or even a structuralist lens. What
these different lenses have in common when using a reader-response
approach is they maintain "...that what a text is cannot be separated
from what it does" (Tyson 154).
Tyson explains that "...reader-response theorists share two beliefs: 1)
that the role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of
literature and 2) that readers do not passively consume the meaning
presented to them by an objective literary text; rather they actively
make the meaning they find in literature" (154). In this way, reader-
response theory shares common ground with some of the
deconstructionists discussed in the Post-structural area when they talk
about "the death of the author," or her displacement as the
(author)itarian figure in the text.
Typical questions:

 How does the interaction of text and reader create meaning?

 What does a phrase-by-phrase analysis of a short literary text, or
a key portion of a longer text, tell us about the reading
experience prestructured by (built into) that text?
 Do the sounds/shapes of the words as they appear on the page
or how they are spoken by the reader enhance or change the
meaning of the word/work?
 How might we interpret a literary text to show that the reader's
response is, or is analogous to, the topic of the story?
 What does the body of criticism published about a literary text
suggest about the critics who interpreted that text and/or about
the reading experience produced by that text? (Tyson 191)

Here is a list of scholars we encourage you to explore to further your

understanding of this theory:

 Peter Rabinowitz - Before Reading, 1987

 Stanley Fish - Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of
Interpretive Communities, 1980
 Elizabeth Freund - The Return of the Reader: Reader-Response
Criticism, 1987
 David Bleich
 Norman Holland - The Dynamics of Literary Response, 1968
 Louise Rosenblatt
  Wolfgang Iser - The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication
in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett, 1974
 Hans Robert Jauss
Feminist Criticism (1960s-present)
Feminist criticism is concerned with "the ways in which literature (and
other cultural productions) reinforce or undermine the economic,
political, social, and psychological oppression of women" (Tyson 83).
This school of theory looks at how aspects of our culture are
inherently patriarchal (male dominated) and aims to expose misogyny
in writing about women, which can take explicit and implicit forms.
This misogyny, Tyson reminds us, can extend into diverse areas of
our culture: "Perhaps the most chilling example...is found in the world
of modern medicine, where drugs prescribed for both sexes often
have been tested on male subjects only" (85).
Feminist criticism is also concerned with less obvious forms of
marginalization such as the exclusion of women writers from the
traditional literary canon: "...unless the critical or historical point of
view is feminist, there is a tendency to underrepresent the contribution
of women writers" (Tyson 84).
COMMON SPACE IN FEMINIST THEORIES
Though a number of different approaches exist in feminist criticism,
there exist some areas of commonality. This list is excerpted from
Tyson (92):

1. Women are oppressed by patriarchy economically, politically,

socially, and psychologically; patriarchal ideology is the primary
means by which women are oppressed.
2. In every domain where patriarchy reigns, woman is other: she is
marginalized, defined only by her difference from male norms
and values.
3. All of Western (Anglo-European) civilization is deeply rooted in
patriarchal ideology, for example, in the Biblical portrayal of Eve
as the origin of sin and death in the world.
4. While biology determines our sex (male or female), culture
determines our gender (scales of masculine and feminine).
 5. All feminist activity, including feminist theory and literary
criticism, has as its ultimate goal to change the world by
prompting gender equality.
6. Gender issues play a part in every aspect of human production
and experience, including the production and experience of
literature, whether we are consciously aware of these issues or
not.

Feminist criticism has, in many ways, followed what some theorists

call the three waves of feminism:

1. First Wave Feminism - late 1700s-early 1900's: writers like

Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Women,
1792) highlight the inequalities between the sexes. Activists like
Susan B. Anthony and Victoria Woodhull contribute to the
women's suffrage movement, which leads to National Universal
Suffrage in 1920 with the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment.
2. Second Wave Feminism - early 1960s-late 1970s: building on
more equal working conditions necessary in America during
World War II, movements such as the National Organization for
Women (NOW), formed in 1966, cohere feminist political
activism. Writers like Simone de Beauvoir (Le Deuxième Sexe,
1949) and Elaine Showalter established the groundwork for the
dissemination of feminist theories dove-tailed with the American
Civil Rights movement.
3. Third Wave Feminism - early 1990s-present: resisting the
perceived essentialist (over generalized, over simplified)
ideologies and a white, heterosexual, middle class focus of
second wave feminism, third wave feminism borrows from post-
structural and contemporary gender and race theories (see
below) to expand on marginalized populations' experiences.
Writers like Alice Walker work to "...reconcile it [feminism] with
the concerns of the black community...[and] the survival and
wholeness of her people, men and women both, and for the
promotion of dialog and community as well as for the valorization
of women and of all the varieties of work women perform" (Tyson
107).
Typical questions:

 How is the relationship between men and women portrayed?

 What are the power relationships between men and women (or
characters assuming male/female roles)?
 How are male and female roles defined?
 What constitutes masculinity and femininity?
 How do characters embody these traits?
 Do characters take on traits from opposite genders? How so?
How does this change others’ reactions to them?
 What does the work reveal about the operations (economically,
politically, socially, or psychologically) of patriarchy?
 What does the work imply about the possibilities of sisterhood as
a mode of resisting patriarchy?
 What does the work say about women's creativity?
 What does the history of the work's reception by the public and
by the critics tell us about the operation of patriarchy?
 What role does the work play in terms of women's literary history
and literary tradition? (Tyson)

Here is a list of scholars we encourage you to explore to further your

understanding of this theory:

 Mary Wollstonecraft - A Vindication of the Rights of Women,

1792
 Simone de Beauvoir - Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex),
1949
 Julia Kristeva - About Chinese Women, 1977
 Elaine Showalter - A Literature of Their Own, 1977; "Toward a
Feminist Poetics," 1979
 Deborah E. McDowell - "New Directions for Black Feminist
Criticism," 1980
 Alice Walker - In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, 1983
 Lillian S. Robinson - "Treason out Text: Feminist Challenges to
the Literary Canon," 1983
 Camille Paglia - Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature
and Art, 1990
Here is the Tyson source referenced above:

 Lois Tyson - Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide, 2nd

ed., 2006.
Gender Studies and Queer Theory (1970s-present)
GENDER(S), POWER, AND MARGINALIZATION
Gender studies and queer theory explore issues of sexuality, power,
and marginalized populations (woman as other) in literature and
culture. Much of the work in gender studies and queer theory, while
influenced by feminist criticism, emerges from post-structural interest
in fragmented, de-centered knowledge building (Nietzsche, Derrida,
Foucault), language (the breakdown of sign-signifier), and
psychoanalysis (Lacan).
A primary concern in gender studies and queer theory is the manner
in which gender and sexuality is discussed: "Effective as this work
[feminism] was in changing what teachers taught and what the
students read, there was a sense on the part of some feminist critics
that...it was still the old game that was being played, when what it
needed was a new game entirely. The argument posed was that in
order to counter patriarchy, it was necessary not merely to think about
new texts, but to think about them in radically new ways" (Richter
1432).
Therefore, a critic working in gender studies and queer theory might
even be uncomfortable with the binary established by many feminist
scholars between masculine and feminine: "Cixous (following Derrida
in Of Grammatology) sets up a series of binary oppositions
(active/passive, sun/moon...father/mother, logos/pathos). Each pair
can be analyzed as a hierarchy in which the former term represents
the positive and masculine and the latter the negative and feminine
principle" (Richter 1433-1434).
IN-BETWEENS
Many critics working with gender and queer theory are interested in
the breakdown of binaries such as male and female, the in-betweens
(also following Derrida's interstitial knowledge building). For example,
gender studies and queer theory maintains that cultural definitions of
sexuality and what it means to be male and female are in flux: "...the
distinction between "masculine" and "feminine" activities and behavior
is constantly changing, so that women who wear baseball caps and
fatigues...can be perceived as more piquantly sexy by some
heterosexual men than those women who wear white frocks and
gloves and look down demurely" (Richter 1437).
Moreover, Richter reminds us that as we learn more about our genetic
structure, the biology of male/female becomes increasingly complex
and murky: "even the physical dualism of sexual genetic structures
and bodily parts breaks down when one considers those instances -
XXY syndromes, natural sexual bimorphisms, as well as surgical
transsexuals - that defy attempts at binary classification" (1437).
Typical questions:

 What elements of the text can be perceived as being masculine

(active, powerful) and feminine (passive, marginalized) and how
do the characters support these traditional roles?
 What sort of support (if any) is given to elements or characters
who question the masculine/feminine binary? What happens to
those elements/characters?
 What elements in the text exist in the middle, between the
perceived masculine/feminine binary? In other words, what
elements exhibit traits of both (bisexual)?
 How does the author present the text? Is it a traditional
narrative? Is it secure and forceful? Or is it more hesitant or even
collaborative?
 What are the politics (ideological agendas) of specific gay,
lesbian, or queer works, and how are those politics revealed
in...the work's thematic content or portrayals of its characters?
 What are the poetics (literary devices and strategies) of a
specific lesbian, gay, or queer works?
 What does the work contribute to our knowledge of queer, gay,
or lesbian experience and history, including literary history?
 How is queer, gay, or lesbian experience coded in texts that are
by writers who are apparently homosexual?
 What does the work reveal about the operations (socially,
politically, psychologically) homophobic?
 How does the literary text illustrate the problematics of sexuality
and sexual "identity," that is the ways in which human sexuality
 does not fall neatly into the separate categories defined by the
words homosexual and heterosexual?

Here is a list of scholars we encourage you to explore to further your

understanding of this theory:

 Luce Irigaray - Speculum of the Other Woman, 1974

 Hélène Cixous - "The Laugh of the Medusa," 1976
 Laura Mulvey - "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," 1975;
"Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," 1981
 Michel Foucault - The History of Sexuality, Volume I, 1980
 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - Epistemology of the Closet, 1994
 Lee Edelman - "Homographesis," 1989
 Michael Warner
 Judith Butler - "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," 1991