Constants of the Formalistic
Approach: Some Key
Concepts, Terms, and Devices
吴怡雯
142200324
A. Form and Organic Form
•Form
external form
e.g. Define sonnet, couplets, tercets, ottava rima,
quatrains, Spenserian stanza, blank verse, free verse
etc.
Sonnet 18
QuatrainⅠ：
A：Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
B：Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
A：Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
B：And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
QuatrainⅡ：
C：Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
D：And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
C：And every fair from fair sometime declines,
D：By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed.
Quatrain Ⅲ：
E：But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
F：Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
E：Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
F：When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st.
Couplet：
G：So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
G：So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
A. Form and Organic Form
•The formalist critic is only moderately interested in
external forms.
•The process of formalistic analysis is complete
only when everything in the work has been
accounted for in terms of its overall form.
A. Form and Organic Form
•Organic Form:
Important to the New Critics
Inherited from the English Romantics
A. Form and Organic Form
•The notion may go so far as
Wordsworthian pantheism,
or what some thought to be
pantheism, where a breeze in
nature may awaken within
the persona of the Prelude.
•Pantheism is the belief that the Universe (or nature as
the totality of everything) is identical with divinity, or
that everything composes an all-encompassing,
immanent god.
——Wikipedia
A. Form and Organic Form
•Coleridge: The Eolian Harp Aeolian lyre or harp
•Shelley: Ode to the West / Defence of Poetry
A. Form and Organic Form
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee:
A wave to pant beneath thy power , and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as im my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderigs over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seem'd a vision; I would ne'er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh, lift me as a wave , a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
A. Form and Organic Form
•Assumption: a given literary experience takes a
shape proper to itself, or at the least that the shape
and the experience are functions of each other
•e.g. the interrelationships of a plot and subplot in
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Henry IV, Part 1, or The
Tempest; or in the complex stream of consciousness
of Joyce’s Ulysses or Faulkner’s The Sound and the
Fury
•Seeming paradox: the absence of the form is the
form, precisely
A. Form and Organic Form
•Local texture and logical structure proposed by
Ransom
The logical structure refers to the argument or the
concept within the work; local texture comprises the
particular details and devices of the work (e.g.
specific metaphors and images)
•Brooks “heresy of paraphrase”
•The form of a poem is the organization of the
material…for the creation of the total effect.”
——Brook & Warren ( Understanding Poetry)
A. Form and Organic Form
•Modern criticism has shown that to speak of
content as such is not to speak of art at all, but of
experience; and that it is only when we speak of
achieved content, the form, the work of art as a
work of art, that we speak as critics. The difference
between content, or experience, and achieved
content, or art, is technique
•Technique is the only means has of discovering,
exploring, developing his subject, of conveying its
meaning, and, finally, of evaluating it.
—— Mark Schorer (Technique as Discovery)
B. Texture, Image, Symbol
•Imagery + Metaphor = An integral part of the work
•Aristotle discussed metaphor in his Poetics
•New Critics emphasize on the consistency of
imagery
texture (John Crowe Ransom)
interest in Metaphysical poetry & conceit (e.g. the
publication of Herbert Grierson’s collection
Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth
Century)
B. Texture, Image, Symbol
THE FLEA.
by John Donne
O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.
Though parents grudge, and you, we're met,
And cloister'd in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.
B. Texture, Image, Symbol
When The Lamp Is Shattered
As music and splendor
When the lamp is shattered,
Survive not the lamp and the lute,
The light in the dust lies dead;
The heart's echoes render
When the cloud is scattered,
No song when the spirit is mute:-The rainbow's glory is shed;
No song but sad dirges,
When the lute is broken,
Sweet tones are remembered not; Like the wind through a ruined cell,
Or the mournful surges
When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents are soon forgot. That ring the dead seaman's knell.
B. Texture, Image, Symbol
•Symbol = image takes on meaning beyond its objective self
•Dilemma for some formalistic critics
•Symbol is a way of using something integral to the work to
reach beyond the work and engage the world of value
outside the work.(e.g. the apparent happenstance of events in
a naturalistic writer like Thomas Hardy)
•Question this reductionism
Keats’s Grecian urn, whether beauty and truth are indeed the
same
Emerson’s speaker in “The Rhodora”, who said that “beauty
is its own excuse for being”
C. Fallacies
•Intentional Fallacy: not divorce the literary work
from any intention that the author might have had
for the work
•Affective Fallacy: the work is judged by its effect
on the reader or viewer, particularly its emotional
effect
C. Fallacies
•The work must give us from within itself any intention that
might be garner, and we must not go to the author for his or
her intention: at the very least the author is not a reliable
witness.
—— Wimsatt & Beardsley, The Verbal Icon (1954)
•No work of literary art can be divorced from the reader and
therefore from the reader’s response.
•The formalistic approach is correct in urging caution
D. Point of View
•A virtue in the work of literary art
•A nonexistent point of view flaws the work
•We grant the omniscient narrator
•Wayne Booth: narrators may be either reliable or unreliable
e.g. Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) is a completely
reliable narrator for his “Hemingway code”
The lawyer in Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener is unreliable
in his early evaluations of himself for his lack of humanity
•In a first-person narration, the author may condition the
form even more. (e.g. Huckleberry Finn)
•Shifting point of view (e.g. Chaucer The Canterbury Tale)
•Multiple points of view (Faulkner The Sound and the Fury)
E. The Speaker’s Voice
•In lyric poetry, the tone of voice is analogous to point
of view
•In a lyric there is a speaker——that is, a first-person
situation; possibly a hearer, a second person
•Both the speaker and hearer condition the experience
•Robert Browning “Andrea del Sarto”:
Andrea is addressing a woman and they are among his
paintings at certain time of day
E. The Speaker’s Voice
Song
John Donne
GO and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.
E. The Speaker’s Voice
If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true and fair.
If thou find'st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might mee
Though she were true, when you
met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.
•The way the reader hears the speaker will condition the
poem and may make the poem into poems by varying the
voice
F. Tension, Irony, Paradox
•Tension is the resolution of opposites, often in irony and
paradox
•The basic terms —— tension, irony, paradox ——are often
nearly indistinguishable, so closely do they work together
•C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon:
“A term introduced by Allen Tate, meaning the integral unity
that results from the successful resolution of the conflicts of
abstraction and concreteness, of general and particular, of
denotation and connotation… Good poetry, Tate asserts, is
the ‘full, organized body of all the extension and intension
that we can find in it.' This concept has been widely used by
the New Critics, particularly of poetry as a pattern of
paradox or as a form of irony.”