An Introduction to Criticism

Literature - Film - Culture

Michael Ryan

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444357059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Théorie de la critique littéraire

An accessible and thorough introduction to literary theory and contemporary critical practice, this book is an essential resource for beginning students of literary criticism.

• Covers traditional approaches such as formalism and structuralism, as well as more recent developments in criticism such as evolutionary theory, cognitive studies, ethical criticism, and ecocriticism
• Offers explanations of key works and major ideas in literary criticism and suggests key elements to look for in a literary text
• Also applies critical approaches to various examples from film studies
• Helps students to build a critical framework and write analytically

1

Formalism

Major Texts

Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”

Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk-Tale

Mikhail Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel

Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn

Major Ideas

• Formalists pay attention to the “how” in “how things are done.” They notice form. When a ballerina executes the familiar moves of the dances in Swan Lake, she performs the story of the ballet, but she also performs moves that are technical in nature; she follows certain well-known forms. Those watching might be struck by what good form the ballerina has or by how well she executes moves they know so well, quite apart from the content of the story of the ballet. Form in this example would consist of “the way something is done” as opposed to “what it is about” or “the story being told.”
• The story of the ballet would not be possible without the dances that construct the story, the forms the ballerina uses or performs. If you removed the dances and sat in the theater watching the stage, there would be no story and no Swan Lake. Form in this broad sense means the practical dimension of art, the way it is executed and constructed so that it can tell stories or make meanings. Some would say that form in this sense is all that art is. The narrative reality of Swan Lake on the stage consists of practical exercises in balletic form. You may think you are seeing a story, but in fact all you are seeing is performers executing techniques.
• If content is not possible without form, form is also radically separable from content, the things stories are about. Think of a ballerina in the practice room going through the moves that she will be performing that evening in the actual ballet. They are the same as those in the ballet, but they are without significance. They are forms only, mere exercises in technique. In this sense, form is pure technique or technique without any content attached to it. The study of this practical dimension of a work of art constitutes Formalist Criticism.
• The Russian Formalists argued that the language of literature should be studied in and of itself, without reference to meaning. For example, the way stories are told (the “narrative”) is an important dimension of fiction. Certain writers are more known for the way they tell stories than for the ideas they advance. James Joyce is famous for his “stream of consciousness” technique, for example, in his epic novel Ulysses. Marcel Proust, in Remembrance of Things Past, engages in a meditation on the role of time in human life by telling his entire novel retrospectively, beginning in the distant past and ending in the present. Technique and form are crucial to poetry. Some forms were prescribed, such as the sonnet, but more recent poetry is free-form. In poetry, such techniques as rhyme and repetition distinguish poetic form from other literary forms such as prose.
• Another group of Formalist critics, the American New Critics, felt literature embodied universal truth in concrete form. They were more concerned with how literature made meaning than with how techniques could be studied entirely on their own apart from what they meant. Often the meanings these Formalist critics were interested in were religious paradoxes – such as one loses mortal life but gains eternal life. They also felt “great” poems were complex, made up of elements in ironic tension with one another – a universal idea and a concrete image, for example. Irony means that two very different things are said in the same statement, and the New Critics felt that great complex poetry was ironic for this reason. It is universal and particular, ideal and concrete, idea and image all at once. Moreover, if one studies a poem, one usually finds that it is an organic unity: the form of the poem and the ideas it communicates are inseparable. Form is usually a perfect embodiment of theme in great poetry. The “what” of literature is usually bound up quite tightly with the “how” of literature. For example, William Wordsworth felt life was paradoxical; the simplest natural things tend, according to him, to embody universal truths. And his poems rely quite heavily on paradox.

Major Terms

Form/Content Form is how a work of art is done or made, the techniques and procedures that an artist uses to construct a story or convey a feeling or an idea. Content is what a work of art is about.

Technique A technique is a particular way of doing something such as telling a story or establishing a setting or constructing a character. Techniques are also called devices and procedures.

Narration/Story The narration or fabula is the series of events that are actually reported or represented in a novel or a film. The story or szujhet (or subject matter) is the much longer span of time and of life from which the events reported, represented, or narrated are selected. It is the story world itself, rather than the story about that world. Another term for story is “diegesis.”

Perspective/Point of View Perspective is the position from which a narration operates. A film like Iron Man is told from the point of view or perspective of a wealthy western white man. Predictably, the way people very different from him – angry Middle Easterners, for example – are portrayed is skewed by that perspective; they appear menacing because they are so different; his perspective is laden with fear and he paints the world accordingly. Other terms associated with perspective are “focus” and “focalization.”

Motif A recurring element of a narration such as a particular event or a particular symbol or metaphor used repeatedly.

Function Narratives often follow patterns that they share with other narratives. In folk-tales, a common function is “the hero leaves home.” All tales seemed to have this particular narrative turn.

Discourse A coherent body of statements about something such as an event, an object, or an issue – for example, the discourse on race or the discourse of science. A discourse is generated by rules for making statements that produce consistency and uniformity across different statements. Such norms make for unity or consistency across different statements. They also make for easily demarcated boundaries between statements internal to the discourse and statements that fall outside its range.

Genre A group of artistic works that share certain traits. Works within the genre are easily recognized as being similar to one another and as being examples of the genre’s rules or conventions (agreements to do something a certain way). For example, works in the genre of melodrama usually contain a theme of unjust action wronging someone, who must vindicate his or her virtue.

Hypotaxis and Parataxis These terms describe two different ways in which relationships between successive ideas are expressed. In parataxis, the main elements are placed in a sequence of simple phrases, linked together by the conjunction and (or variations such as but). In hypotaxis, relations are specified as subordinate clauses joined by temporal or relational links such as when, although, after, etc. The Old Testament largely uses parataxis, but many modern translations use hypotaxis extensively, as it is seen by modern readers as providing more interest and variety. However, the narrative pace is changed by doing this, and certain deliberate breaks in the pattern are obscured. An (invented) example of the same idea, rendered in the two different styles is: “When Joseph arrived at the field, he spoke to his brothers, urging them to come home even though they were unwilling,” and “Joseph arrived at the field and spoke to his brothers and said ‘come home’ but they would not.”

Poetic Meter Traditional metric poetry uses five rhythms of stressed and unstressed syllables. An iambic foot of verse is unstressed/stressed: “That time of year thou mayst in me behold.” A trochaic foot is stressed/unstressed: “Tell me not in mournful numbers.” A spondaic foot is stressed/stressed: “Break, break, break / On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!” Lines vary in number of feet. The iambic pentameter consists of five iambic feet as in the example above. Tetrameter has four feet, trimeter three, and hexameter six.

New Criticism The approach to literature advocated by a group of critics in the middle of the 20th century in America. Alan Tate, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and others argued that literary study should focus only on the text – not on history, psychology, or sociology. The goal was to describe the organic unity of the work, the way form and content cohered perfectly. An author’s intention was irrelevant, as was a reader’s reaction. Only the text, especially the intricate web of image and argument, was worthy of “close reading.” The New Critics were therefore skeptical of the notion that a writer’s intention determined what a work meant (the “intentional fallacy”), and they opposed criticism that relied on a reader’s emotional reaction to or impression of a work (the “affective fallacy”).

Summary and Discussion

How you do something is sometimes more important than what you do. If you walk into a job interview with an arrogant swagger dressed as if you just got out of bed and sit slouched picking your nose and daydreaming while the interviewer poses questions, you in all likelihood will do less well, despite being eminently well qualified for the position, than if you adopted a more professional demeanor, dressed in a suit, adhered to the rules of proper manners, and listened attentively while sitting up straight. Good posture can be everything. It is a species of what is called “good form,” which means “playing by the rules” or “following the reigning conventions of behavior.”

Similarly, how you say something can be as important as what you say. You can say “I love you” softly and gently, and it will mean one thing – a sincere expression of affection and commitment – or you can say it with the emphasis falling heavily on “you” followed by a questioning rise in tone – as in “I love YOU? (of all people).” The tone is now sarcastic rather than sincere, and the meaning changes as a result from sincere affection to something like “You’ve got to be kidding.” The feelings your statement generates will be quite different.

Formalists attend to these differences in how things are said or done. All works of culture – film, poem, rap song, novel – consist of technical choices that have meaning. You may have an idea – “adultery is really not a vice; it can be an expression of genuine, even divine love” – but getting it across in a work of fiction requires that you use literary techniques to create character, plot, situation, and event. You have to use words, wrought in a certain way, to make meaning. Or you have to choose where to place your camera, what lighting to use, how to direct actors to deliver lines, and so on.

Formalist critics notice that “how” is often as important as, or more important than, “what.” We like to think books and movies and songs are about life. And they are, of course. But they are also technical exercises that entail choices regarding such things as the perspective from which the story will be told, the kind of tone used, the logical evolution of the narrative, the way characters are constructed, the way lyrics are chosen and arranged, the structure of the melody, the placement of the camera, the kind of lighting used, the images chosen to illustrate points, and the like.

In order to mean, cultural works must have a formal dimension that consists of carefully chosen and arranged techniques.

Formalists in literary study were initially concerned primarily with poetry because poetry is so different from ordinary speech. It is clearly formed, made different by being arranged differently. It possesses rhythm and rhyme; it has melody and depends often on phonic harmony created by alliteration or the repetition of sounds. “Poetics” is the term for the formal study of poetry.

The formal analysis of a poem begins with a simple non-judgmental and non-interpretive description of the work. It describes the themes, the setting, the speaker or narrator, the characters if any, the implied world of the poem (what precedes the poem and what follows), the structure of the poem, such as the breakdown into stanzas, the genre or type of poem, the meter used (such as iambic pentameter), the rhyme scheme, the emotional movement of the poem toward a climax if any, the repetition of words, the images used, the figurative language such as metaphors and symbols, the congruence or dissonance of sounds in alliteration and assonance, the overall thematic argument as that is worked out in the language, etc.

Here are websites that will provide you with most of the important terms to use in such a basic description: http://www.infoplease.com/spot/pmglossary1.html; http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0903237.html.

Formalists are also concerned with rhetoric, the shape a writer gives to thoughts or themes in various language constructions. Rhetoric consists of more complex forms of speech or writing that writers use. For example, a favorite rhetorical form American New Critical Formalists studied was paradox (as in the Shakespeare line “Reason in madness”). Another was irony, as when Orson Welles juxtaposes an image of Charlie Kane feeling triumphant with an image of him reflected in glass and looking quite insubstantial and ephemeral. If paradox brings opposed ideas together, irony undermines one proposition with another. It consists of saying one thing and meaning something quite different (as when someone says “You look lovely, darling,” when in fact you just got out of bed). Irony is also found in theater and film, when a situation is such that the audience knows more than one of the characters. Irony of situation occurs when a result is quite different from what was intended (e.g., an attempt to save a life ends a life).

For a list of rhetorical terms used in such analysis, here is another site: http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/lit_terms/.

American New Critical Formalists like Cleanth Brooks (The Well-Wrought Urn) were concerned with how poems embody universal truth. Poems contain concrete images that are just the opposite of universal truths, which are abstract rather than concrete. Brooks believed all poetry, therefore, was paradoxical because it was both universal and specific at the same time. He favored a religious view of poetry that saw it as the embodiment of spiritual meaning (universal truth) in concrete figural form (the poem).

Examples of Formalist Critical Analysis

A good example of a poem that clearly embodies what New Critic Cleanth Brooks contends is Williams Wordsworth’s “Intimations Ode” (http://www.bartleby.com/101/536.html).

It is organized around a paradox: all that we cherish passes, yet it passes away only in order to last forever. It is still possible to find something permanent and enduring in nature, and that is spirit. Spirit guarantees a more enduring life than the one of physical experience that is so fleeting and that passes so quickly. In a way, although we lose, we gain. That is the paradox of nature in as much as it embodies an enduring, transcendental spirit.

The kind of spiritualist thinking one finds in Wordsworth and Brooks has been increasingly displaced in recent decades by more scientific ways of thinking. Now it is more common to believe that there is no spirit world. The physical world is all we have. Many wr...