RUSSIAN FORMALISM
BEFORE RUSSIAN FORMALISM
 By the end of the nineteenth century,
no single school of criticism dominated
literary studies
 Literary work was a social or political
product encased in a particular history.
 Texts are the personal impressions and
visions of its creator, a place where the
author and the reader can imaginatively
revel in the text.
 A literary work should be read
biographically, seeing the author's life
and private concerns peeping
throughout the text.
RUSSIAN FORMALISM
 Rejected the belief that a work of
literature was the expression of the
author’s worldview and their dismissal
of psychological and biographical
criticism as being irrelevant to
interpretation.
 Literature, they believed, should be
investigated as its own discipline, not
merely as a platform for discussing
religious, political, sociological, or
philosophical ideas.
 The proper study of literature, they
declared, is literature itself. To study
literature is to study poetics, which is an
analysis of a work’s constituent parts its linguistic and structural features - or
its form.
“The purpose of art is to impart the
sensation of things as they are
perceived and not as they are
known. The technique of art is to
make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make
forms difficult to increase the
difficulty and length of perception
because the process of perception
is an aesthetic end in itself and
must be prolonged.” – Shklovsky
 Form, they asserted, included the
internal mechanics of the work
itself, especially its poetic
language.
 These internal mechanics, or what
the formalists called devices,
comprise the artfulness and
literariness of any given text, not a
work's subject matter or content.
 The schools chief focus of literary
analysis was the examination of a
text’s literariness. Unlike everyday
literary language, literary language
foregrounds itself.
 Ultimately, this produced the
defining feature of literariness,
defamiliarization.
DEFAMILIARIZATION
 Coined by the Russian Formalist
Victor Shklovsky, defamiliarization
is the process of making strange
(ostranenie) the familiar, of putting
the old in new light, what
Shklovsky called a "sphere of new
perception.”


Our ordinary experience of
everyday language is slowed down
because we must now unpack the
meaning of the author's choice of
language.
RUSSIAN FORMALISM
 Shklovsky analyzed narrative
prose and declared that the
structure of a narrative has two
aspects:
 Fabula (story) is the raw
material of the story and
can be considered
somewhat akin to the
writer's working outline.
This outline contains the
chronological series of
events of the story.
 Syuzhet (plot) the literary
devices the writer uses to
transform a story (the
fabula) into plot. By using
such techniques as
digressions, surprises, and
disruptions, the writer
dramatically alters the
fabula, making it a work of
literature that now has the
potential to provoke
defamiliarization, "to make
strange" the language of
the text and render a fresh
view of language, the
reader's world, or both.
TEXT FOR FORMALISTS
 A unified collection of various literary
devices and conventions that can be
objectively analyzed. Literature is not,
they declared, the vision of an author or
authorial intent.
 No library research, no studying of the
author's life and times, and no other
extra textual information is needed; the
poem itself contains all the necessary
information to discover its meaning.
BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN
RUSSIAN FORMALISM AND NEW
CRITICISM
 Although both schools use some similar
terminology and are identified as types
of Formalism, no direct relationship
exists between them. New Criticism has
its own unique history and development
in Great Britain and the United States.
 Interestingly, however, in the 1940s,
two leading Russian Formalists, Roman
Jakobson and Rene Wellek, came to
the United States and actively
participated in the scholarly discussions
of the New Critics. The interaction of
these two Russian Formalists with the
New Critics does evidence itself in
some of the Russian Formalism's ideas
being mirrored in New Critical
principles.
 The term New Criticism came into
popular use to describe this approach
to understanding literature with the
1941 publication of John Crowe
Ransom's The New Criticism, which
contained Ransom's personal analysis
of several of his contemporary theorists
and critics.
 In The New Criticism, Ransom
articulates the principles of these
various groups and calls for an
ontological critic, one who will
recognize that a poem (used as a
synonym in New Criticism for any
literary work) is a concrete entity.
 Similar to concrete objects, a poem can
be analyzed to discover its true or
correct meaning independent of its
author's intention or of the emotional
state, values, or beliefs of either its
author or reader.
ASSUMPTIONS
AMERICAN NEW CRITICISM
(ASSUMPTIONS & METHODOLOGY)
BASIC TENET OF NEW CRITICISM
 The poem's overall meaning or form
depends solely on the text in front of
the reader.
THE TERM
 Intentional Fallacy
o To believe that a poem's
meaning is nothing more than
an expression of the private
experiences or intentions of its
author.
o Eliot asserts that the poem is
about the experiences of the
author that are similar to all of
our experiences. By structuring
these experiences, the poem
allows us to examine them
objectively.
 Affective Fallacy
o To believe that a reader's
emotional response to the text is
important or is equivalent to its
interpretation.
o This fallacy is a confusion of
what a poem is (its meaning)
with what it does (its effect).
 The chief characteristic of the poemand therefore of its structure-is
coherence or interrelatedness.
 New Critics posit the organic unity of
a poem- that is, all parts of a poem
are necessarily interrelated.
 Superior poetry, declare the New
Critics, achieves such oneness
through paradox, irony, and
ambiguity.
 Good critics examine a poem's
structure by scrutinizing its poetic
elements and demonstrating how the
poem supports its overall meaning in
reconciling tensions into a unified
whole.
 Bad critics are those who impose
extrinsic evidence, such as historical
or biographical information, on a text
to discover its meaning.
METHODOLOGY


Although most New Critics would
agree that the process of
discovering the poem's form is not
necessarily linear (because
advanced readers often see
ambiguities and ironies when first
reading a text), New Criticism
provides readers with a distinct
methodology to help uncover the
paradox or chief tension.
These guided steps allow both
novices and advanced literary
scholars together to enter the
discussion of a text's ultimate
meaning, each contributing to the
poem's interpretation.
METHODOLOGY: STEPS