Twentieth Century criticism
Formalism
The formalist approach to literature mareks literary criticism after
Romanticism and for a large part of the 20th century.
Formalism developed in Russia in the early 1920s as a reaction to what is
known as ‘symbolist poetics’ and to the focus of criticism on social and
historical context and the biographical factors.
The Russian formalists wanted to offer the model of an objective, scientific
approach to literature and literary style.
They derive their basic principles and techniques of literary criticism from
Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist linguistics.
Russian formalists were students of literature and linguistics interested in the
difference between poetic language and ordinary speech. They developed the
concept of literariness, what makes a text a work of art, they insisted that one
could neither paraphrase a literary work nor extract from it a basic message
since literary form is an indispensable part of that message.
Hence the principle of distinction between the language of literature and other
uses of language, between (1) the referential or denotative use of everyday
and scientific language for communicative purposes (e.g. to communicate
ideas, to name things…) and (2) the connotative use of literary language.
The principle of autonomy of the literary work, hence importance of defining
the specific formal features and characteristics of particular genres: (novel,
poetry, drama…).
The commitment to the formal dimension of the literary work. Form means
the shape of the literary work including structure, language and meter and
rhyme in poetry.
The fundamental concept of defamiliarization (ostranenie in Russian) means
making strange, making new, different, strange what is known and familiar
and this is the role of literature.
‘The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar to increase the length of
perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself. A
way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important’
Schlovsky.
Literary criticism for Formalists is a distinct discipline which explained
literary works not as the result of psychological, biographical, historical or
socio-economic factors, but as an interaction of linguistic elements governed
by internal literary laws.
The major representatives of Russian formalism:
Roman Jackobson, who started his work in Russia then continued it in Prague
(Czechoslovakia) then emigrated to the USA in 1941 and had a major
influence in developing literary criticism and theory.
Victor Shlovsky: he wrote the formalist manifesto in (1917) Art as technique.
Mikhail Bakhtin, he mainly studied the novel with a formalist approach.
New criticism
An approach to literature that developed out of Formalism in England and
America the 1930s to the 1960s.
It argues that literary criticism should not be based on the author’s background
or the reader’s reactions to a work, but should evaluate the text itself or ‘the
words on the page’, this gave the practice of ‘close reading’ which means
focusing on the elements that exist in the text internally such as setting, plot,
theme, structure…
It was a reaction against the practice of criticism in the beginning of the 20th
century which first looked at the historical background and the author’s
biography.
The main principle is the focus on the text itself and the intrinsic value of the
literary work as an independent unit of meaning isolated from historical
context or biography of author.
The concept of intentional fallacy was developed by W.K.Wimsatt to describe
the assumption that an author’s assumed intention in writing a literary work is
an appropriate basis for describing the meaning and the value of a work.
Even if we did determine the author’s intentions, they don’t matter because
the text itself carries its own value.
The concept of affective fallacy was also used to refer to the supposed error of
judging a literary work on the basis of its emotional effects on the reader. The
literary work should not be understood in relation to the responses of its
readers, its merit and meaning must be inherent.
Main book of New criticism is written by I.A. Richards; Principles of
Literary Criticism (1924) & Practical Criticism (1929) in which he proposed
to his own students reading poems without knowing who the authors were to
make them just use the words on the page.
In 1939, the American critic John Crowe Ransom published his book:
New Criticism which will give the name of the movement.
