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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10 Key excerpts on "New Formalism"
eBook - ePubUnending Design
The Forms of Postmodern Poetry
- Joseph M. Conte(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Cornell University Press(Publisher)
Thus he must lamely and falsely argue that the use of metrical language “is clearly the best means for poets to come to terms with their experience now.” 9 One may argue that it is possible to express contemporary experience in traditional forms—particularly if one is willing to modify either the form or the experience—but it is mistaken to assert that the Shakespearian sonnet is the “best” means by which poets give shape to the experience of the last two decades. Such a shape needed to be, and has been, invented. Those who see poetic form as a narrowly defined set of metrical rules and permissible variants gotten out of handbooks inevitably and misguidedly see formal innovation as mere decadence. One must ask, is the New Formalism really “new”? Perhaps a more accurate title for the group would be the Old Formalism Revisited. An examination of the group’s practice reveals how little these poets deviate from most basic assumptions of the New Criticism. James E. B. Breslin, in his essay on American poetry from 1945 to the present in the Columbia Literary History of the United States, refers to the current generation of traditionalist poets as the New New Formalists, since the appellation New Formalists had already been applied to the late-fifties work of such poets as James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, and Richard Wilbur. 10 Of course, the most recent drive for a return to “traditional” poetic values seems to coincide with a general conservative swing in national politics, as was also the case in the fifties. The opposition between the retrogressive New Formalists and the avant-garde Language poetries comes at a crucial moment. Many of the poets in both groups were born after 1945 and constitute a fourth generation of twentieth-century American poets. As such, they have had no immediate debt to, or personal contact with, the great modernist poets, most of whom were born in the 1880s
eBook - ePubNew Formalist Criticism
Theory and Practice
- F. Bogel(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
70 From this perspective, the persistence of the question of organic unity may be less about interpretive assumptions and more about the maturing of literary criticism as a discipline. Formalism, as Poovey puts it,turns out to have been the prerequisite for literary study’s professionalization in universities in the 1930s and 1940s…. In order to understand how formalism triumphed … it is necessary to explore how a rudimentary project of grouping and classifying literary effects gave way to the objectification of the literary text, which resulted in both an ideology of aesthetic autonomy and a discourse about literature as specialized as the discourse about science.71In another contrast to New Critical concerns, at times more thematic than methodological, New Formalism follows in the wake of criticism and theory from the late 1960s to the present that is interested in kinds of dissonance, contradiction, and disharmony in the text that go beyond New Critical “irony” and “tension,” which almost always enriched rather than impeded or troubled final unification. New Formalism admits more and different sorts of tension – largely derived from the textual practices of deconstruction and to some extent of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and (more recently) Queer Theory – and is far less concerned that these be gathered into a comprehensive totality or last roundup. Related to this expectation – even assumption – of thematic or rhetorical or semantic tension and disharmony is an increased awareness of the operations of power in texts: strategies of exclusion, marginalization, hierarchy, legitimation, and illegitimation, and so on. This awareness comes from a variety of sources: from deconstructive analyses of hierarchy; from feminist and other modes of attention to strategies of exclusion; from Marxist alertness to the political and hierarchical significance of masked or seemingly innocent deployments of power; from Foucault’s analyses of the production of knowledge and knowledge-spaces within which certain kinds of fact or assumption are possible or impossible. And, of course, from the renewed interest in rhetoric, itself generated by various sources including belated appreciation of Kenneth Burke, new work by theorists of composition, and others.
eBook - ePubReconstruction in Literary Studies
An Informalist Approach
- B. Vescio(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Introduction Formalism, Antiformalism, and InformalismWhen a discipline is no longer sure what it’s supposed to be doing, it starts to theorize. Judging by its history of proliferating theories, the institution of academic literary studies has never been too sure of just what it does. Maybe the closest it came was in the early 1960s, when almost everyone seemed to be satisfied with the formalist justifications of the New Critics. But the wave of theory that swept over the discipline later that decade demonstrated that what formalist critics claimed to be doing is impossible and that what they were actually doing was something very different, and in some respects insidious. The process of undermining formalist conceptions of literature and revising the practices they served to justify is now more or less complete. Curiously, though, contemporary literary theory has done little to replace those formalist conceptions with more coherent ones. The consequences of this fact are worth exploring.Many literary scholars today are eager to trumpet the “end of theory” as if the discipline had once and for all resolved the central question that, by definition, drives literary theory: that of the nature or function of “literature.”1 To be sure, academic literary critics have reached some tacit understandings about what sorts of practices are acceptable within their discipline, but conspicuously absent from these understandings is a shared sense of what defines the category of the “literary.” A cursory glance at a few prominent journals of literary scholarship confirms that one of the profession’s most commonly held assumptions is that race, class, gender, and sexuality are the most important contexts in which to discuss literary texts. But which texts are those? Theorists of race, class, gender, and sexuality certainly offer important correctives to formalist theory and practice, but they fail to provide a viable alternative to the formalist conception of literature. They merely change the subject from literature to culture, leaving wide open the question of what literature is.2
- Robert Sheppard(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
2006 : 256). This passion seems lacking, for example, in the non-evaluative semiology of Lotman, which is one reason why it is used selectively in this study.Before we take solace in the vantage of formal criticism, it is worth examining Virgil Nemoianu’s arguments in ‘Hating and Loving Aesthetic Formalism’, published in one of the New Formalists’ founding documents, the anthology Reading for Form (2006 ), to examine what formalist purity might look like in its least appealing apparel: ‘In a philosophical vision that will admit some (any!) kind of transcendence, aesthetic formalism might act as a link between the immanent and the transcendent. It might be, for instance, a substitute for the latter; it might be one of its foreshadowings; it might mirror it’ (Nemoianu 2006 : 64). A neo-Paterist aestheticism underlines what appears to be a Kantian formulation, but is not quite. Formalism bears the promises of transcendence on its broad shoulders, to deliver us from materialism while hinting at the spiritual. While aesthetic ‘writing incorporates complexity and multiplicity, “overdetermination”, multidimensionality, the dialectics of harmony and contradictoriness, the coexistence of displeasure with the pleasures and hopes of beauty’, we are told, ‘New Historicism and related movements’—which are aligned summarily with totalitarian regimes of left and right—‘den[y] the existence of a human nature and essence and replaces them with negativity, conflict, adversariness, and, at bottom, hatred as the central value and ultimate motivation of human behavior’ (Nemoianu 2006 : 56). In this account, postmodernist terms such as multiplicity rub shoulders with liberal humanist values and unexamined claims on behalf of the immutable human soul. The mordancy of this defense is unappealing, as much as its terms are suspect in a postmodern world conceived of as one of multiple spaces populated by dynamic forces of subjectivation, for example. It is a relief that one editor of Reading for Form , the influential formalist Susan J. Wolfson, comments, in contrast to this narrow compass, ‘The vitality of reading for form is freedom from program and manifesto, from any uniform discipline’ (Wolfson and Brown 2006
eBook - ePubAn Introduction to Criticism
Literature - Film - Culture
- Michael Ryan(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
- If content is not possible without form, form is also radically separable from content, the things stories are about. Think of a ballerina in the practice room going through the moves that she will be performing that evening in the actual ballet. They are the same as those in the ballet, but they are without significance. They are forms only, mere exercises in technique. In this sense, form is pure technique or technique without any content attached to it. The study of this practical dimension of a work of art constitutes Formalist Criticism.
- The Russian Formalists argued that the language of literature should be studied in and of itself, without reference to meaning. For example, the way stories are told (the “narrative”) is an important dimension of fiction. Certain writers are more known for the way they tell stories than for the ideas they advance. James Joyce is famous for his “stream of consciousness” technique, for example, in his epic novel Ulysses . Marcel Proust, in Remembrance of Things Past , engages in a meditation on the role of time in human life by telling his entire novel retrospectively, beginning in the distant past and ending in the present. Technique and form are crucial to poetry. Some forms were prescribed, such as the sonnet, but more recent poetry is free-form. In poetry, such techniques as rhyme and repetition distinguish poetic form from other literary forms such as prose.
- Another group of Formalist critics, the American New Critics, felt literature embodied universal truth in concrete form. They were more concerned with how literature made meaning than with how techniques could be studied entirely on their own apart from what they meant. Often the meanings these Formalist critics were interested in were religious paradoxes – such as one loses mortal life but gains eternal life. They also felt “great” poems were complex, made up of elements in ironic tension with one another – a universal idea and a concrete image, for example. Irony means that two very different things are said in the same statement, and the New Critics felt that great complex poetry was ironic for this reason. It is universal and particular, ideal and concrete, idea and image all at once. Moreover, if one studies a poem, one usually finds that it is an organic unity: the form of the poem and the ideas it communicates are inseparable. Form is usually a perfect embodiment of theme in great poetry. The “what” of literature is usually bound up quite tightly with the “how” of literature. For example, William Wordsworth felt life was paradoxical; the simplest natural things tend, according to him, to embody universal truths. And his poems rely quite heavily on paradox.
eBook - ePub- Susan J. Wolfson, Marshall Brown, Susan J. Wolfson, Marshall Brown(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- University of Washington Press(Publisher)
8Middle English poems present special challenges to formalist inquiry, in no small part because medieval poets like to describe their forms and genres in frustratingly vague, baggy, and imprecise ways. The well-known prologue to the Lay le Freine describes numerous topics for “layes,” but says little about their poetic shapes and sounds beyond that they “ben in harping” (“are set to music”).9 A “romance” might be an interlaced narrative of amatory and chivalric action, or it could simply be a narrative in the vernacular; its formal commitments are unidentified. This is not to say, however, that medieval readers and writers didn’t think about poems in abstract, almost purely formal ways. Literature was the province of an educated elite, for whom “form” usually denoted the material shape of a text, including orthographic practice: in Piers Plowman, one figure complains about the “newe clerkes” who cannot “versifye faire ne formaliche enditen, / Ne naught oon among an hundred that an auctour kan construwe.”10 Yet both Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight display real formal deliberation: a circular structure of 101 stanzas and numbered divisions corresponding to important thematic and narrative points.11 Scribes often identified the formal schemes of lyrics by bracketing rhymed lines.12 Especially in Latin, where inflectional endings produce similiter cadens rather than rhyme, the final morphological element may be written just once, to the side of the poem, and lines drawn from it to the relevant words. We now recognize the arrangement as a compression code that translates temporal audition into a visual and pictorial register.This was not how medieval readers addressed form, even if their practices were drawn to the possibility. Poetic practices do the critical work, even in the absence of programmatic articulation. In the thirteenth century a highly abstract conception of literary form organized along numerical relationships started to yield to shaping by the four Aristotelian causes: the material cause (the plot, narrative, topic), the final cause (its purpose), the efficient cause (the author), and the formal cause.13 The formal cause is divided into two parts: the forma tractatus, the work’s structure (ordinatio: chapters, prologue, and so forth), and the forma tractandi, its mode of proceeding (modus procedendi). The forma tractandi gradually came to include matters of style, rhetorical tropes, rationales for textual faults or disjunctions, and assignments of genre (comedic, lamentational, exhortative, songlike).14 It even extended to mimetic play: Hugh of St. Cher summons “See how he comes leaping on the mountains, bounding over the hills” (Song of Songs) to gloss the fitful style of the book of Isaiah.15 Forma tractandi
eBook - ePub- Tony Bennett(Author)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
9 However, as Jakobson brilliantly maintained in his essay ‘On Realism in Art’, all literary forms are equally conventional modes of signifying reality no matter what ideological claims they might lodge with respect to their ‘realism’. In contradistinction to the Futurists, the defamiliarization effected by literary texts does not, according to the Formalists, reveal the world ‘as it really is’ but merely constitutes one distinctive form of cognition amongst others.Shklovsky makes this clear in the distinction he proposes between ‘recognition’ and ‘seeing’:This new attitude to objects in which, in the last analysis, the object becomes perceptible, is that artificiality which, in our opinion, creates art. A phenomenon, perceived many times, and no longer perceivable, or rather, the method of such dimmed perception, is what I call ‘recognition’ as opposed to ‘seeing’. The aim of imagery, the aim of creating new art is to return the object from ‘recognition’ to ‘seeing’.10Literature is thus distinguishable as one among several different forms of cognition. In particular, it is distinguished from the way in which reality is spontaneously experienced in prosaic language and from the abstractions of science. It offers neither a direct, experiential relation to reality nor a scientific knowledge of it, but a ‘vision’ of it.Likewise, the ‘reality’ which literary works are said to defamiliarize is not some presumed raw, conceptually unprocessed, ‘out-there’ reality but ‘reality’ as mediated through the categories of some other form of cognition. Literature characteristically works on and subverts those linguistic, perceptual and cognitive forms which conventionally condition our access to ‘reality’ and which, in their taken-for-grantedness, present the particular ‘reality’ they construct as reality itself. Literature thus effects a two-fold shift of perceptions. For what it makes appear strange is not merely the ‘reality’ which has been distanced from habitual modes of representation but also those habitual modes of representation themselves. Literature offers not only a new insight into ‘reality’ but also reveals the formal operations whereby what is commonly taken for ‘reality’ is constructed.
eBook - ePub- David H. Richter, David H. Richter(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
12 If literature were just a series of authors, or books, or great authors and great books, there could be no history of that, beyond the life‐and‐works summaries dear to journalistic criticism, the indiscriminate masses of contextual information accumulated by academic criticism, or the timeless conversations among lofty souls projected by philosophical criticism. If, however, you conceive of literature in terms of techniques, genres, and styles, then you have topics that can be studied in a historically specific way. The functionalism of the Formalists also contributes to their historical outlook. If literature consisted of themes (“content”) set into forms by writers, literary history could only be source study. But if you think of literature as a network of motifs and devices to be identified through the functions they serve in compositions then, as Victor Erlich puts it (1981: 268), the historical question is no longer where from, but what for?Fundamental to the Formalist conception of literary history is conflict. The (gendered) slogan coined by Shklovsky and repeated across the movement, that literary tradition does not pass from father to son, but uncle to nephew, only intimates the kind of storm and stress that the Formalists associated with literary change, and that many of them witnessed first‐hand as youthful partisans of Futurism and similar movements.13 As scholars attempting to put these slogans to use in the study of previous episodes in literary history, they tended to present literary phenomena as elements in a struggle. In Young Tolstoy (1922), for example, Eikhenbaum describes Tolstoy as someone who categorically rejected the literary practices of his own time and place, looking for themes and techniques in eighteenth‐century works by non‐Russian authors like Sterne and Rousseau. Eikhenbaum emphasizes conflict even more strongly in Lermontov
- Josephine Guy, Ian Small(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
More generally, and as we will explain in more detail in Chapter 4, it has been persuasively argued that the preconditions for the formal experimentation associated with Modernism are to be found in the Aesthetic Movement’s licensing of non-normative creativity in the 1870s. The Aesthetes’ divorce of art from morality allowed for a celebration of the formal rather than the representational and didactic qualities of literary works; as one critic has recently phrased it, it is the very concentration on form which ‘makes the transition from aestheticism to modernism’ (Leighton 2008: 14). As we noted in Chapter 1, the identification by literary historians of a distinctive period between Victorianism and Modernism, that of the ‘fin-de-siècle’ or ‘literature of transition’, can also be seen as an attempt to revise Modernism’s own account of its uniqueness. Adifferent, though related, strategy of revaluing the formal innovation of nineteenth-century literature has been to disregard the connections with Modernism in favour of focusing on those nineteenth-century works which figure as important models for later literary experiments – to see connections between, say, the work of George Eliot and Ian McEwan’s attempts to reinvigorate the realist novel as an arena for ethical debate. Or to see in the subversive wit of Wilde’s society comedies a dramatic template for the provocative farces of Joe Orton (1933–67). More generally, it has been noted that the late decades of the twentieth century saw a significant revival of interest in all things Victorian, with several writers of contemporary fiction, including Peter Ackroyd, John Fowles, A. S. Byatt, Peter Carey, Sarah Waters and most recently Will Self, taking direct inspiration from writers such as Dickens, Collins, Tennyson and (again) Wilde (Kaplan 2007)
eBook - ePubThe Activist Humanist
Form and Method in the Climate Crisis
- Caroline Levine(Author)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
Aesthetic critics have analytic skills that we can take to the forms of social worlds, but we are not the only ones carrying a formalist toolbox. A vast range of objects, from sounds to neighborhoods to coral reefs, can be analyzed for their structures and patterns, which means that there are scholars attentive to shapes and structures working across fields, from religious studies to entomology to urban planning. In this respect, formalism belongs to all fields, or to none.Formalism in fact has the potential to be a useful metadisciplinary method in two specific ways. First, a formalism that works across disciplines can help us recognize the limits and the possibilities of different forms of knowledge. My own disciplinary training has taught me to focus my attention on the novel, and in the past I, like many other critics, would have thought it was my job to ask how the novel seeks to understand and respond to a whole range of political problems, from gender inequality to racial capitalism. But a metadisciplinary formalism allows me to think as much about the limits as the capacities of the novel, and to see it as one form among others, with constraints that may be obstacles to both knowing and reshaping the polis.The contemporary novel, according to Amitav Ghosh, “banishes the collective from the territory of the fictional imagination.” He blames this limitation on the specific ideologies of our historical moment.20 But it is also a long-standing problem of form. The realist novel has long been organized around plots and protagonists—exciting events and exceptional individuals—which makes it especially well suited to the scale of a few persons. Even when the classic nineteenth-century realist novel has aspirations to convey massive social structures and systems, as Alex Woloch has argued, it repeatedly narrows its attention to a small number of richly rounded characters at the expense of the mass.21 A huge range of novels since then, from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable to Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Yuri Herrera’s Señales que precederán al fin del mundo, train our attention on a single protagonist or two in a specific historical situation. Many novels work in the Luká csian mode, using one main character’s experience to convey social structures or conflicts.22 Sometimes the novel uses specific characters to stand for whole populations. The postbellum American novel, to give just one example, repeatedly joins a Confederate man with a Northern woman in its marriage plots, recruiting this narrative arc as an illusory resolution to the ongoing problem of national disunity.23
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