Literature
New Formalism
New Formalism in literature refers to a movement that emerged in the late 20th century, emphasizing the formal aspects of literary works such as structure, language, and style. It seeks to reinvigorate the study of literature by focusing on the aesthetic and technical elements of texts, challenging the dominance of historical and cultural contexts in literary analysis. This approach encourages a renewed appreciation for the craft of writing.
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8 Key excerpts on "New Formalism"
- Todd Davis, Kenneth Womack(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Red Globe Press(Publisher)
While form and content cannot be parsed from one another and clearly form has a direct impact upon meaning, nonetheless, formalist critics do not choose indiscriminately the forms they praise. Instead, humanist principles appear to direct the critic in the kinds of art studied and the elements praised. ‘The whole story is the meaning,’ Flannery O’Connor declares, ‘because it is an experience, not an abstraction’ ( Mystery and Manners 73), and the experiences that formalist critics doggedly seek after tend to be those that carry the reader toward a contemplation of human struggles and triumphs, emotional toil and joy. The limits of formalism: Universalism, eclecticism, and morality in the work of F. R. Leavis and Kenneth Burke In Literary Criticism: A Short History (1978), Brooks and Wimsatt describe the distinction between art and science and the bridge criti-cism and poetry may offer in negotiating this chasm of difference: We can have our universals in the full conceptualized discourse of science and philosophy. We can have specific detail lavishly in the newspapers and in records of trials. . . . But it is only in metaphor, and hence it is par excellence in poetry, that we encounter the most radi-cally and relevantly fused union of the detail and the universal idea. (479) 2 8 A C r i t i c a l I n t r o d u c t i o n It is this grasping after the universal that inevitably led to the demise of formalism in general and New Criticism in particular. While during the first half of the twentieth century most did not condemn the desire of critics to find what might offer universal connection between humans and their cultures – a dominant modernist perspec-tive – the critical practice that emerged from this desire became a tool for British and American dominance and an easy target of critique from more socially oriented forms of criticism like Marxism, femi-nism, and reader-response theory.
eBook - PDF1922
Literature, Culture, Politics
- Jean-Michel Rabaté(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Edited by Gerard Carruthers, David Goldie, and Alastair Renfrew, 95–109. Amsterdam and London: Rodopi, 2004. Paramonov, Boris. “Formalizm: metod ili mirovozrenie?” [Formalism: Method or Worldview?] Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 14 (1996): 35–52. Pound, Ezra. Make it New. London: Faber and Faber, 1934. Renfrew, Alastair. “The Dialectics of Parody.” Poetics Today 33, nos. 3–4 (2012): 301–28. The Beginning and the End 167 Shklovsky, Viktor B. “O poezii i zaumnom iazyke” [On Poetry and Transrational Language]. Poetika. Sborniki po poeticheskomy iazyku, 13–26. 1916. Reprint, Petrograd: Opoiaz, 1919. “Lenin, kak dekanonizator” [Lenin as Decanonizer]. Lef 1 (1924): 53–6. “Dokumental΄nyi Tolstoi.” Novyi Lef 10 (1928): 34–6. Theory of Prose. Translated by Benjamin Sher. Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990a. “Voskreshenie slova” [The Resurrection of the Word]. Gamburgskii shchet, 36– 42. 1914. Reprint, Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel΄, 1990b. “Art as Device.” Theory of Prose. Translated by Benjamin Sher, 1–14. Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990c. “The Relationship between Devices of Plot Construction and General Devices of Style.” Theory of Prose. Translated by Benjamin Sher, 15–51. Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990d. A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917–1922. Translated by Richard Sheldon. Champaign, Dublin, and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2004. Knight’s Move. Translated by Richard Sheldon. London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005. Stalin, Iosif V. Collected Works. Vol. 6. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953. Steiner, Peter. Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1984. Sternberg, Meir. “Telling in Time (III): Chronology, Estrangement, and Stories of Literary History.” Poetics Today 27, no. 1 (2006): 125–235. Todorov, Tzvetan. Théorie de la littérature: textes des formalistes Russes. Paris: Seuil, 1965. Tynianov, Iurii N. “Slovar΄ Lenin-polemista” [The Lexis of Lenin the Polemicist].
eBook - PDF- Steven Earnshaw(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
Formalists who are reluctant to concede this are as hidebound as experimentalists unable to contemplate writing a single line in pentameter. These are all cases of writers who are aware of the formal tradition they are working in, even if in some cases they have had to invent that tradition. But what many apprentice writers produce under the heading of free verse is more based in bookless assumption than any sense of continuity. And there is a structural weakness inherent in the pursuit of the apparently liberated voice. Where there is no perception of form in terms of metrics, and so no sense of an underly-ing support to decisions about line, the writer frequently must rely instead on the restraints of rhetoric. The integrity of the poetic voice becomes the strongest principle holding a poem together. This places pressure on the poet to produce significant utterance. That pressure of course already and always exists, but now the intensity of that utterance is directly related to the structural competence of the poem: it must be sound, in both senses of that word. There is therefore an inherent temptation to pump up the rhetoric and with it the status of the poet producing it, to become overblown. Ironically, form, by providing a simple means of validating poetic structure, acts as a restraint against this type of potential strain: it is a protection against preciosity. Of course there are other strategies the poet can employ before turning to formal metrics. The American poet Jane Hirshfield, for instance, places emphasis on the integrity of the syntax in her poetry. The weight of utterance in her work is comfortably held by the interaction of line break and grammar, by the clarity of punctuation: Brevity and longevity mean nothing to a button carved of horn. Nor do old dreams of passion disturb it, though once it wandered the ten thousand grasses with the musk-fragrance caught in its nostrils; though once it followed – it did, I tell you – that wind for miles.
eBook - PDFClose Reading
The Reader
- Frank Lentricchia, Andrew DuBois, Frank Lentricchia, Andrew DuBois(Authors)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Duke University Press Books(Publisher)
FORMALISM (PLUS) 1. Poetry: A Note on Ontology John Crowe Ransom A poetry may be distinguished from a poetry by virtue of subject-matter, and subject-matter may be differentiated with respect to its ontology, or the reality of its being. An excellent variety of critical doc-trine arises recently out of this differentiation, and thus perhaps criticism leans again upon ontological analysis as it was meant to do by Kant. The recent critics remark in effect that some poetry deals with things, while some other poetry deals with ideas. The two poetries will differ from each other as radically as a thing differs from an idea. The distinction in the hands of critics is a fruitful one. There is apt to go along with it a principle of valuation, which is the consequence of a tempera-ment, and therefore basic. The critic likes things and intends that his poet shall offer them: or likes ideas and intends that he shall offer them: and approves him as he does the one or the other. Criticism cannot well go much deeper than this. The critic has carried to the last terms his analysis of the stuff of which poetry is made, and valued it frankly as his temperament or his need requires him to value it. So philosophical a critic seems to be highly modern. He is; but this critic as a matter of fact is peculiarly on one side of the question. (The implication is unfavourable to the other side of the question.) He is in revolt against the tyranny of ideas, and against the poetry which celebrates ideas, and which may be identified—so far as his usual generalization may be trusted—with the hate-ful poetry of the Victorians. His bias is in favour of the things. On the other hand the critic who likes Victorian verse, or the poetry of ideas, has probably not thought of anything of so grand a simplicity as electing between the things and the ideas, being apparently not quite capable of the ontological distinction.
eBook - PDFRubble, Ruins and Romanticism
Visual Style, Narration and Identity in German Post-War Cinema
- Martina Möller(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- transcript Verlag(Publisher)
For example, it is 7 Device is the translation of the notion ‘priëm’ that was developed by the Russian Formalists, such as Victor Sklovskij. Compare: Sklovskij in Mierau (1987), p. 11-32. Cited from: Thompson in Albersmeier (2003), p. 434. 8 ‘Aristotle’s fragmentary lecture notes, The Poetics , addressed what we recognise to-day as drama and literature. Since this time we have had, Stravinsksy’s Poetics of Music , Todorov’s Poetics of Prose , a study of the poetics of architecture, as well as, the Russian Formalists’ Poetic of the Cinema . Such extensions on the original concept are plausible since it need not be restricted to any particular medium. “Poetics” de-rives from the Greek word poiesis , or active making. ’ Bordwell in Palmer (1989), p. 369-398. 9 ‘The poetic of any medium studies the finished work as the result of a process of con-struction—a process which includes a craft component, the more general principles according to which the work is composed, and its functions, effects, and uses. Any in-quiry into the fundamental principles by which a work in any representational medium is constructed can fall within the domain of poetics.’ Ibid., p. 371. 10 Ibid., p. 369-398. T HE N EOFORMALIST A PPROACH | 37 impossible to examine the function of rubble and ruins in these films without re-ferring to the historical context, because circumstances of the post-war period profoundly marked the visual and narrative functions of these aspects of decor of rubble and ruins. Finally, the discussion seeks to explore the dominant narrative and visual devices that repetitively appear in the rubble films under examination. This procedure will identify Romantic patterns as repetitive and dominant fea-tures in the selected films.
eBook - PDF- Paul H. Fry(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Yale University Press(Publisher)
He gets that from Eliot’s essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” which in turn is a review essay of a volume of Donne’s poems that made Donne overnight, for a great many readers, the central poet in the English tradition. In “The Metaphysical Poets,” Eliot makes sev-eral remarks that had far-reaching consequences for the New Criticism. He says, “Poetry in our own time—such is the complexity of the world we live in—must be diffi cult.” He says also that poetry has to reconcile all sorts of disparate experience: reading Spinoza, the smell of cooking, the sound of the typewriter. All of this needs to be yoked together in the imagery of a good poem, as is done in a poem by Donne or Herbert, and this model of complex-ity is what matters both for modern literature and for literary criticism. Other modernists like James Joyce also contribute to this idea of the inde- The New Criticism and Other Western Formalisms 71 pendent unity of the work of art. In The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Stephen in his disquisition on form and Aquinas and all the rest of it argues that the work of art is cut off from its creator because its creator withdraws from it and sits paring his fingernails, in the famous expression. You remember that Wimsatt argues—probably thinking of that passage in Joyce—that the work of art is “cut off ” from its author at birth. Its umbilical cord is removed and it roams the world on its own, a unity unto itself. Modernism is a source, then, but we need also to consider the state of academic criticism. In the 1930s, Ransom, in his polemical manifestos The New Criticism and The World’s Body, singled out two main adversaries: first there was old-fashioned philology, which would always insist that “plastic” means what it meant in the eighteenth century. The philologists made up a large majority of the professors. This was the golden age during which liter-ary scholarship reached its maturity.
eBook - PDFLocal Transcendence
Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database
- Alan Liu(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
/ 52 / Chapter One the period in which (in my initiatory history of the New Historicism) the mimetic turned symbolist. We are not very far here, it may be seen, from modern formalism full-blown and the long sequence of criticisms that brings us at last to the New Historicism: a further reflection, as I called it, on the transition between mimesis and symbolism initiated in romanticism. To move from Emp-son’s denunciation of “shuffl ing” to Russian Formalism’s atomization of “motive,” to Saussure’s hugely demotivated langue (a structure of the arbitrary, contentless, unconscious), to Lévi-Strauss’s savage mind, to Fou-cault’s agentless archive, to mindless (i.e., Logos-less) différance , and to the New Historicism’s paradigms uncertain in their subject and action is only to change our valorization. Empson’s “shuffl ing,” we may speculate, was a demobilized, post–world war nightmare of the action the nineteenth century accounted to its problematized subject: the mob, crowd, folk, race, nation, and, ultimately, “spirit of the times.” Mob-like “ spirit at once intelligent and without intelligence” is what formalism in its successive states from Russian Formalism and American Southern agrarianism on has attempted to find a safe, a literate, way to enact. Form, after all, is that which contains the mobility of subversive plu-rality within a myth of organic wholeness, “ambiguity” within “unity.” Or, where organic wholes have been demystified, form contains différance within paper tiger wholes (in many ways just as compulsive and neces-sary to the system) on the order of Derrida’s “entire history of metaphys-ics” or poststructuralism’s boundless, all-containing textuality. Whether offered as myth or demystification, the unity of the New Critical poem and the omnium-gatherum of deconstructive metaphysics-into-textuality are, finally, only very delimited wholes—like schoolyards—designed to allow formal thought to play safely.
eBook - PDFA History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism
The Soviet Age and Beyond
- Evgeny Dobrenko, Galin Tihanov, Evgeny Dobrenko, Galin Tihanov(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- University of Pittsburgh Press(Publisher)
A vigilant censorship and other repressive state apparatuses, the prescriptions of party congresses and academic hi-erarchies all combined to discourage critical thinking. Literary scholarship, which had rejected the formalists’ attempts to examine literature as a process with its own dynamics and evolution, had become particularly vulnerable to the demands of the political apparatus. By an irony of cultural history Soviet literary criticism had fol-lowed the pattern of innovation and mechanization outlined by the formalist theory of literary evolution: the innovative and socially committed literary criticism of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia with its utilitarian view of literature and its understanding of art as a reflection of reality had become institutionalized and stultifying, a barrier to reexamining the considerable role of literature in Russian society. Yet some disciplines, because of their remoteness, abstractness (linguistics), or technological promise (cybernetics, information theory) were relatively exempt from the official ideologization of academic life. It was to these disciplines that a number of young linguists and philologists turned for support in renewing the hu-manities during the latter half of the 1950s and the early 1960s. Their fascination with the “exact methods” and “objective scholarship” that these formalized disci-plines offered ultimately must be understood in the context of the impasse that schol-arship had reached. This fascination turned them and others back to a recovery of the heritage of the formalists, much of which reappeared or was published posthumously during the post-Stalin years. These publications, however, encompassed only the most technical and theoretical of the formalists’ writing, not their provocative sociological writings of the late 1920s, which challenged Marxist theory by focusing on literary institu-tions rather than on the aesthetics of reflection and base-superstructure models.
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