Formalist Approaches

Formalist ApproachesBroadly: concerned exclusively with the

text in isolation from the world, author, or reader

Specifically: Russian Formalism focused on

literariness of texts, defamiliarization, material & device, story & plot, narrative voice

New Criticism focused on the text as an object that can be analyzed independent of author, world, or reader

New Criticism: The Quest for “Text-centricity”

• formalist school from 1920 – 1960• methodology applied to yield single, correct

“hidden meaning” of literary texts• “close readings” focused on literary devices

• looked at language-denotation, connotation, form, figures, import, structure.

• valued complexity, oppositions, irony, paradox

• emphasized objectivity in literary criticism• looks to language denotation, connotation, form,

figures, structure• asks for educated audience/“willing students”

Precursors

• Aristotle focused on elements w/ which a work is composed.

• Romantics stressed organic unity from imagination’s “esemplastic” power.

• Poe extolled the “singleness of effect” in poetry & fiction.

• James made the same case for fiction as “organic form.”

Other Names

• Aesthetic criticism • Textual criticism• Ontological criticism• Modernism• Formalism • Practical criticism

Practitioners of New Criticism

British: I. A. Richards,William Empson,

F.R. Leavis

American: W.K. Wimsatt, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Blackmur,

Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom

Origins in early 1900s

“honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry” (Eliot, Selected Essays 17).

Strove for scientific objectivity but of a special nature because words enable multiple perspectives.

Major Texts of New Criticism

I.A. Richards The Principles of Literary Criticism, Practical Criticism (1920s)The Fugitives & Southern Agrarians formed

John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism (1941): poems as a concrete entity like any other art object

Cleanth Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn (1947):

Central Argument

The poem is the raison d’etre.• to place poet or culture above the

literary expression is to move away from essential unity of poem.

• employing biography, history or affect is an inherently vague and unreliable basis for analysis.

• objective analysis is far more inclusive and forgiving methodology.

“The Heresy of Paraphrase”Cleanth Brooks, 1947

• from The Well Wrought Urn--treatment of ten poems spanning historical /canonical record from Shakespeare to Yeats.

• employs “close-reading” techniques to see “what the masterpieces had in common” (1354)

• Poems chosen for Brooks• added metaphysical (Donne) and

modern (Yeats)

William K. Wimsatt, Jr. Monroe C. Beardsley (1907-75) (1915-85)

• Born-Washington, D.C.

• Georgetown, Ph.D. Yale

• Taught @ Yale-1939• Known for works on

Samuel Johnson• Literary Criticism:

• The Verbal Icon• w/Cleanth Brooks• The Intentional

Fallacy• The Affective

Fallacy

• Born-Connecticut• Ph.D. Yale, briefly in

Philosophy dept.• Mt. Holyoke, 1944• Taught literary

criticism Swarthmore and Temple

• Aesthetics and Philosophy

• Joint w/ Wimsatt• The Intentional

Fallacy• The Affective

Fallacy

What is “Paraphrase”?

The attempt to evaluate a poem by presenting a proposition about the poem’s meaning apart from its form; i.e. giving a “prose-sense” to the poem.

Central Argument• Structure : whole is greater than

sum of parts• Rational meaning and Emotive

meaning• Import• Suggestion

• Reduction of “meaning” • lowest common denominator

• “all such formulations lead away from the center of the poem—not toward it…”

• Paraphrase strips poem of poetic power• “form and content, or content and

medium, are inseparable.”(1357)

• Longinus—remark on Euripides (154) *

Problems inherent…

Two other theoretical errors…

• “Intentionalism”-• “Affectionionalism”- *

The Intentional Fallacy• Published 1946• Objective literary criticism

defended• Criticism hampered by use of

biography or “genealogy” to evaluate the effectiveness of poetry

• Intentionalists tend to move away from the poem

What is the Intentional Fallacy?

• A confusion between the poem and its origins (genealogy-Genetic Fallacy)• Starts with the “causes” and ends in

“biography and relativism” (1388)

• Intention: “design or plan in author's mind” (1375)

• “Intention” not stable standard of literary criticism:• unavailable• undesirable

Unavailable Intention

• Work is “detached from the author at birth” (1376)

• Echoes Jean-Paul Sartre• Unduly extends the author’s creative

freedom.

• Completed work belongs to the public and to their interpretations and evaluations

• Child/Parent Analogy *

Undesirable Intention• Work measured against something

“outside of the author” (1381)

• “author psychology” (1381).

• Attractive from an historical or biographical perspective

• W & B warn against confusing “personal and poetic studies”

• “Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle”(1387)

• Settling a bet: Eliot

• Criticism must depend on recognition of difference• Internal vs. external sources of evidence of

meaning

Internal vs. External Evidence• Internal evidence of meaning

discovered through “the semantics and syntax of a poem, through grammars, dictionaries, and all the literature which is the source of dictionaries, [and] in general through all that makes a language and culture” (1381)

• External evidence of meaning consists of “revelations about how or why the poet wrote the poem” (1381)

• One moves toward poem, one moves away

Essence of Objective Critical Literary Analysis

Successful works contain all necessary and relevant information to find meaning• Example: Derek Walcott's “Ruins of a

Great House”

“The Affective Fallacy”

• Published in 1949• Companion article to “The Intentional

Fallacy”• Recount history and results of

psychological, emotion-driven conception of literary analysis

• Focus on role and function of critic• Critic is teacher or explicator of meaning• Arnoldian “personal fallacy”

What is the Affective Fallacy?

Confusing the POEM with its RESULTS

i.e. what a poem is with what a poem does

But what does that mean?How does that represent a fallacy?

*

Affective Critics:Shifting the Focus

• Critics engaged in Affective Theory will• use emotional response as evaluative

standard• subjugate poem to subjective emotional

response,• Critic/reader the actual object of cognitive

focus.

• differentiate cognitive effects and emotive affects

• In accounting for affect, reader must re-engage text

• E.g. Donne’s “The Canonization”*

SummaryThe poem is the raison d’etre.

• To place poet or culture above literary expression is to move away from essential unity of poem.

• Employing biography, history or affect is an inherently vague and unreliable basis for analysis.

• Objective analysis is far more inclusive and forgiving methodology.