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.
7 Key excerpts on "New Formalism"
eBook - ePub- Gregory Castle(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...Formalism is less interested in the universal character of language as a structure than in how language is used to create different forms of DISCOURSE. Viktor Shklovsky, like Jakobson associated with the Moscow Circle of linguists, argues, in Theory of Prose (1925), that literary texts actually reveal or “lay bare” their own form through processes of estrangement and defamiliarization. These techniques make possible a revaluation of literary language and narrative forms to the extent that these formal processes determine or become themselves the meaning of the text. Linked to these schools of thought is the New Criticism, a practical formalism that owes a tremendous debt to the criticism and poetics of T. S. Eliot. The New Criticism flourished from the 1920s through the 1940s and was primarily concerned with poetry and poetic form. But whereas Russian formalism grew out of the science of linguistics and provided a theoretical basis for innovation in a wide variety of other disciplines, the New Criticism emerged out of literary modernism as a set of interpretive strategies that did not have a wide impact outside literary studies. These strategies were grounded in large part on the practice and theoretical insights of modernist poet-critics, like Eliot (who edited Criterion), Robert Penn Warren (who co-edited the Southern Review), and Allen Tate (associated with the Sewanee Review). These writers, and the contributors and readers of the “little magazines,” were instrumental in promoting the new critical doctrines in England and the United States. The New Criticism, which privileged the kind of esoteric and erudite poetry that invited close reading and that was eminently suited both to the teacher in the classroom and to the professional critic, was crucial to this development...
eBook - ePubContemporary Art
1989 to the Present
- Alexander Dumbadze, Suzanne Hudson, Alexander Dumbadze, Suzanne Hudson(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...3 FORMALISM Formalism is an interpretive method that emphasizes the form of an artwork as opposed to its content. Formalist criticism excludes external considerations such as symbolism, history, politics, economics, or authorship, focusing instead on the forms structuring a work of art. Two main camps of literary critics greatly determined formalism’s significance for visual art: the “New Critics” (e.g., I. A. Richards, C. P. Snow, and T. S. Eliot) and intellectuals in Prague and Moscow (e.g., Roman Jakobson, Boris Eichenbaum, and Viktor Shklovsky). In the spirit of “New Criticism,” the American art critic Clement Greenberg argued stringently that art should divest itself of its representational and illusionistic aspects. Beginning in the late 1970s, after the wane of Greenberg’s influence, formalism was often allied to structuralist modes of thinking that sought to understand the workings of an artwork, or group of artworks, based on properties internal to them. Reinterpreted by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Shklovsky in particular became very important for his ideas about the technical support as well as his connection between form and social practice. Among these strains of formalism, it was Greenberg’s—especially in the United States and Western Europe—that came to represent modernism so totally as to become synonymous with it. Thus did critics’ appropriation of Shklovsky represent an attempt to pry formalism away from its identification with Greenberg: to resist throwing away the baby with the bathwater. Still, the postmodern reaction against formalism in the 1980s largely condemned it on the basis of its hermeticism and disinterest in worldly affairs...
eBook - ePub- Sara Upstone(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Teach Yourself(Publisher)
...2 Formalism and new criticism Literary criticism is a matter of not only when but where. The multitude of perspectives now available in the study of literature is testament to a contemporary global culture that has, over time, drawn its influences from across the world. In the early twentieth century, everyone, it seemed, was reading poetry: decadent, aesthetic poetry and modernist poetry. And the reading of this poetry changed the face of literary studies. In continental Europe, these readers would come to develop a literary method known as formalism. In Britain and the United States, developments in reading practice would be called practical criticism and – later – new criticism. Both schools of thought would go on to have profound influence on how we read literary texts. Both new critics and formalists are interested in what is on the page. They argue that it is only textual detail that should be of interest. The Anglo-American poet T. S. Eliot, writing in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), argues that good poetry relegates the personality of the poet and his emotions in favour of artistry that keeps the reader’s attention on the text. At the centre of this are two facets central to early twentieth-century criticism: firstly, an intense focus on the text and, secondly, a preoccupation with quality that would evolve into the contemporary idea of the literary canon. ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.’ T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) Spotlight T. S. Eliot is famous for his ‘difficult’ modernist poetry. He is famously quoted as having declared, ‘A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.’ Practical criticism When the academic I. A...
eBook - ePub- Andrew Bennett(Author)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The overlapping schools of formalism and new criticism were both concerned to examine in detail the workings of ‘the words on the page’. In this respect, formalists and new critics were concerned above all with a certain purity, with a desire for the purification of criticism, and this purification involved, in particular, the rejection of questions of authorship as pertinent to interpretation. The sense that attending to authors’ lives can easily slide into literary gossip is suggested by the case of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, a work that famously raises troubling questions of authorship. ‘That there is so little genuine criticism in the terrifying number of books and essays on Shakespeare’s sonnets’, L.C. Knights begins a 1934 essay, ‘can only be partly accounted for by the superior attractiveness of gossip’ (Knights 1946: 40). Such a concern with the possibility that talk about the sonnets will turn into gossip about Shakespeare’s life spans the twentieth century, in fact: writing in the Introduction to his 1986 edition of Shakespeare’s poems, John Kerrigan comments that ‘biographical reading. . . has so little purchase’ on Shakespeare’s poems that ‘criticism directed along such lines soon finds itself spinning off the text into vacuous literary chit-chat’ (Kerrigan 1986: 11; see Burrow 1998: 44). Both Knights and Kerrigan, in their different ways, share at least some of the characteristics of ‘new’ or ‘formalist’ criticism, criticism that was conceived as rigorously and exclusively literary, that was language-based and text-bound, and that makes the literary text its ‘central concern’ (Brooks 1998: 52). Indeed, ever vigilant for the lurking temptations, the tempting addictions, of biography and of ‘psychological’ interpretation, one of the major concerns of formalism and new criticism is to establish a clear demarcation between work and life...
eBook - ePubKey Concepts
A Guide to Aesthetics, Criticism and the Arts in Education
- Trevor Pateman(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...‘Form, Formalism’ and ‘Structuralism’) having been condemned by the Soviet social realists for their emphasis on literary language and structure and allegedly ahistorical approach to art. In Marxist aesthetics, as in the aesthetics of Hegel, form is determined historically by the content it has to convey, and changes in form occur when content itself changes. Form and content are, however, distinct, and the relations between them form a dialectic. Trotsky sees new forms developing when there is a ‘collective psychological demand’, but he also acknowledges that literature has a degree of autonomy (Literature and Revolution). Fragments of earlier forms may remain within a new form because literary tradition is available to the writer, but whether old forms can be reworked to create something which is new depends on whether there is an ideological change. If art reflects reality, then it reflects the base, not merely in the sense of the base as an object, but also in the sense of movements behind events. This, according to the critic Lukacs, was what the realist novel was able to do. Balzac is a great writer, although conservative in ideology, because he depicts the typical, and it is this which demonstrates the forces in society which will lead to change. Lukacs saw realism as a revolutionary form which was concerned with a totality, a total representation of reality, which would look at underlying causes and work towards reconciling contradictions. He opposed realism to naturalism, an inferior movement at the tail-end of realism which described only the surface of the everyday world and in its quasi-scientific descriptive method failed to consider historical forces (an example would be the novels of Zola). He also regarded modernism as inferior, seeing it as a formalist movement, which in showing private despair and alienation, cannot be dialectical (an example would be the novels of Kafka) (q.v...
eBook - ePub- Jean-Michel Rabaté(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...Chapter 24 Aesthetic Formalism, the Form of Artworks, and Formalist Criticism Jonathan Loesberg As my title indicates, the words “form” and “formalism,” even when limited to the contexts of aesthetic and literary theory, can have different meanings and refer to ostensibly very different formal objects. Specifically, “formalism” can refer to an aesthetic theory about either what artworks do or what they ought to do: they are autonomous and either do as a matter of definition or ought to, as a matter of evaluation, attend to their autonomous aesthetic form. But, of course, formalism can also refer to a school of art criticism, opposed to various other schools, claiming that art criticism, at least if it wishes to focus on the specifically artistic qualities of artworks, ought to attend to the features of form that makess the object of its attention an artwork and not something else. The Oxford English Dictionary, it should be noted, dates the first use of the word “formalism” in an aesthetic sense to the Russian Formalists and, without offering a separate definition of the second use, under “formalist,” offers the first citation that describes a type of criticism as occurring in 1967. Given the work, not only of the Russian Formalists, but of Adorno, Greenberg, and the New Critics, one can doubt that that is the earliest such usage, but one cannot doubt that the concept dates, as does the first usage, to the rise of modernism in the early twentieth century. From this coincidence of occurrence that we will see will emerge as causal, I will make three related claims: First, since modernism took itself to be an aesthetic built on the classic Aesthetic arguments of the prior one hundred and fifty years, the original definitions of those theories, as exemplified by Kant and Hegel, will lead to necessary, though productive contradictions in modernism's self-definitions...
eBook - ePubShakespeare and Contemporary Theory
New Historicism and Cultural Materialism
- Neema Parvini(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
.... That in a successful work, form and content cannot be separated. . . That form is meaning. . . That the purpose of literature is not to point to a moral. 55 Just as we saw in the work of G. Wilson Knight, New Criticism sought unity in texts above all else. A typical analysis would move from close reading to a conclusion praising how the work has achieved unity, often with open awe. Brooks’ famous conclusion about Shakespeare’s ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ might serve for any of New Criticism’s reading of any (‘good’) poem: The urn to which we are summoned, the urn which holds the ashes of the phoenix, is like the well-wrought urn of Donne’s ‘Canonization’ which holds the phoenix-lovers’ ashes: it is the poem itself. 56 This type of formalism gave rise to an inherent political conservatism. The text is an art-object studied almost in isolation; if anything is to be referred to outside of the text, it is invariably another text. A text produces its own poetics or structural system and therefore its relation to any other structural system, for example history or culture, is not relevant to the analysis. Thus, during the Cold War years, literary criticism managed to stave off controversy simply by disregarding politics in literature. Let us consider Roman Jakobson and L. G...
