LECTURE 3

ALI 201: MODERN THEORIES OF LITERATURE

FORMALISM
Objectives
By the end of this lecture, the student should be able to:
a) give a background to formalism
b) trace the origin of formalism
c) identify the main interpretive strategies of formalism
d) state the theoretical postulations of formalism
e) define the goal formalism
f) explain the meaning of the concept of ‘defamiliarisation’ as applied to formalism
g) name some African formalists
h) list the criticisms against formalist theory and criticism
i) give a reason for the decline of formalism
j) describe the influence of formalism in the growth of literary theory
k) draw a conclusion on formalism
l) summarise the concept of formalism

a) Introduction
 Formalism is also known as ‘the theory of art for art sake’.
 Formalist theory regards literature as a unique form of human knowledge that needs to be
examined on its own terms.
 It holds that literature should assert its autonomy devoid of ethics or politics.
 To a formalist therefore, a poem or story is not primarily a social, historical, or biographical
document; it is a literary work that can be understood only by reference to its intrinsic literary
features, that is, those elements found in the text itself.
 To analyse a poem or story, therefore, the formalist critic focuses on the words of the text
rather than facts about the author's life or the historical milieu in which it was written.
 The critic pays special attention to the formal features of the text—the style, structure,
imagery, tone, and genre.
 These features, however, are usually not examined in isolation, because formalist critics
believe that what gives a literary text its special status as art is how all its elements work
together to create the reader's total experience.
 Art for art sake is a movement that appeals to a pure aesthetic element of form.

b) The Origin of Formalism

 Formalism originated in Russia in 1915 with the founding of the Moscow Linguistic Circle.
 The following year, 1916, its St. Petersburg counterpart, Opayaz, was established.
 Formalism or Russian formalism as it is also called is a 20th-century phenomenon.
 However, in Britain and America, a group of writers and academics aligned-themselves to
the principles of formalist criticism and came to be known as the New Critics (New
Criticism).
 The major actors in this critical school include:
i) Victor Shklovsky
ii) Roman Jakobson
iii) Boris Eikhenbaum

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 iv) Osip Brik
v) Yury Tynyanav and
vi) Vadimir Propp.
 Formalism as a critical perspective began by rejecting the unsystematic and eclectic
(selecting what seems best of various styles or ideas) critical approaches which had
previously dominated literary study.
 It attempted to create a 'literary science' by paying attention to the study of language.

c) Main Interpretative Strategies of Formalism

 The formalist approach to literature pays close and careful attention to the language, form,
and structure of literary texts while regarding individual texts as the principal object of
critical investigation.
 To the formalists, the meaning of literary texts resides primarily in the texts themselves
rather than in anything else.
 Literature has to be seen or read in special ways because style, form, and technique play roles
in literary texts that are different from the roles they play in ordinary discursive texts.
 For formalism, literary criticism is seen to be a specialised art and literary texts are to be
interpreted according to certain well-defined and objective criteria rather than simply
according to the impressionistic and subjective response of the individual critic.

d) Theoretical Postulations of Formalism

 Formalists pay attention to three aspects of literary texts:
1. The rejection and consequent reversal of the traditional relation between form and content;
literary and non-literary language, and literary text and reality. Formalist critics are
concerned with the study of poetic language which they think can reveal the 'literariness' of a
work. By literariness is meant that which makes a given work a literary work. It is its
exclusive claim to literature.
2. Emphasis on basic elements of texts which are literary in character. This allows it to
emphasise the differences between literary language and non-literary or ordinary language. It
is the goal of formalism to make the study of literature an autonomous and specific
discipline, to shift attention from the poet to poetry itself.
3. Rigorously and systematically excludes the non-literary from the purely literary. The sources
and genesis of particular works, author's biography, history, politics, philosophy, etc are
thoroughly excluded from literary analysis. Literature has an independent existence and
formalism attempts to create an independent science which studies specifically literary
material.

e) The Goal of Formalism

 Formalism excludes all mimetic and expressive definitions of literature.
 For formalists, literature is not seen as the expression of an author's personality and world-
vision, or as a realistic (mimetic) representation of world in which he lived.
 This is because in reading the literary text as an instrument of expression or representation,
the specificity of its literary qualities is likely to be overlooked.
 Formalism emphasises the independent existence of literary studies.

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f) The Concept of ‘Defamiliarisation in Formalism
 Formalism holds that literature is different from all other materials because it tends to
defamiliarise objects, that is, make things strange.
 It refreshes our sense of life and experience.
 Art defamiliarises things that have become habitual or automatic.
 The familiar is made strange in art.
 Practical everyday language is made strange in poetry because the effect of poetry is to make
language 'oblique’, ‘difficult’, ‘attenuated' or 'tortuous'.
 Even the physical sounds of words themselves become unusually prominent.
 This defamiliarised perception of words, which in ordinary circumstances we fail to notice, is
the result of the formal basis of poetry.
 Formalists believe that poetic speech does not differ from ordinary speech just because it
may include construction different from everyday language and word order inversions, but
because its formal devices (rhyme and rhythm) act on ordinary words to renew our
perception of them.

m) Some African Formalists

 In Africa, some of the well-known formalist critics include:
i) Ben Obumselu,
ii) Solomon Iyasere,
iii) Dan S. Izevbaye and
iv) Charles Nnolim.

h) Criticisms against Formalism

1) Formalist criticism does not assign any significance to the author, the world outside, or even
thought. No recognition is given to the relation between text and reality which are key
elements in other critical theories. For the formalists, literature has nothing to do with vision
or with authorial meaning. A given work of art is only part of the general body of literature,
not a part of the personality of its author.
2) Formalist critics tell us that the emphasis in practical language is on the referent and the
reality referred to. Every other thing such as rhyme or alliteration is only secondary to the
purpose of the communication. But in poetic language, referentiality is irrelevant and the
emphasis is on the means of expression itself. Because of this, a poetic utterance has no
functionalities with, the real context in which it is produced and cannot be assumed to refer
to any aspect of its producer's existence.
3) Language in poetry does not point to an object beyond itself. It is entirely self-sufficient,
autonomous. What is important is not the author, but literariness. Literature does not refer to
anything in the world of reality; it does not reflect that world. Indeed, literary texts make
familiar things to become strange. It dislocates our habitual perceptions of the real world so
as to make it the object of a renewed attention.
4) It does not recognise the traditional dichotomy between Form and Content. It is interested
only in Form. Traditionally, form was considered to be a kind of 'decorative supplement
while content is the thought or idea. Formalist theory reversed the priority of content over
form and exclusively promoted the importance of form over content. Content then becomes
dependent on form. Content does not have any separate independent existence in literature.

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 No amount of literary analysis can distil content from form. Form itself is determined, not by
content, but by mother forms. Form predetermines content.

i) Decline of Formalism
 With the rise of Marxism in Russia in the 1930s, formalism was driven out of literary
discourse in Stalinist USSR, hence the formalists see Marxist critics as their literary or
ideological enemies.
 The formalist theory that literature is a special realm to be (distinguished-from the social and
political world) clearly stands in direct opposition to the Marxist belief that literature cannot
be understood apart from its historical context.

j) Influence of Formalism in Literary Theory

 Because of its emphasis on structure or language, formalism has inspired or given rise to
other language-based theories of literary criticism.
 One of such critical perspectives is Structuralism, which is the focus of the next unit.

k) Conclusion
 Formalist criticism developed and flourished in Russia in the middle of the 20th century.
 To the formalists, a work of literature is perceived as being autotelic in the sense that such is
―self-complete, written for its own sake, and unified by its form‖.
 Form (methods, devices, etc) used to present ideas in a work of literature is exalted more than
content (theme).
 From the Formalist‘s standpoint, a work of literature is evaluated on the basis of its literary
devices and the susceptibility of the same to scientific investigation.
 The critic‘s concern therefore is to identify and discuss those devices in order to determine
the ‘literariness’ of such a text.

l) Summary
 Formalist criticism regards literature as a unique form of human knowledge that needs to be
examined on its own terms.
 Formalist critics believe that what gives a literary text its special status as art is how all its
elements work together to create the reader's total experience.
 A key method that formalists use to explore the intense relationships within a poem is close
reading, a careful step-by-step analysis and explication of a text.
 The purpose of close reading is to understand how various elements in a literary text work
together to shape its effects on the reader.
 One of the shortcomings of formalist criticism is that it loses the organic essence of literature
when it distances form from content. This is so because a work of literature is a
representation of a central idea or theme whose interpretation is dependent on the different
elements that contribute to its fulfillment and meaning. A focus only on this aspect of a text
is a mere pursuance of shadow at the expense of substance.