FORMALIST APPROACH

Objectives:

 To identify the difference of formalist approach among the other kinds of approach
 To elaborate in the easiest way possible what is Formalist Approach all about
 To find and evaluate literary work or movie that shows a Formalist Approach

History/ Background Information

 Formalism rose to prominence in the early twentieth century as a reaction against Romanticist
theories of literature, which centered on the artist and individual creative genius.
 By focusing on literary form and excluding superfluous contexts, Formalists believed that it
would be possible to trace the evolution and development of literary forms, and thus, literature
itself.
 Formalism was the dominant mode of academic literary study in the US at least from the end of
the Second World War through the 1970s, especially as embodied in René Wellek and Austin
Warren's Theory of Literature
 Formalism has advantage of forcing writers to evaluate a work on its own terms rather to relay
on “accepted” notions of writer work
 Two schools of formalist literary criticism developed, Russian formalism, and soon after Anglo-
American New Criticism.
 New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary
criticism. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of
literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object.
 Russian formalism was a school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It
was a diverse movement, producing no unified doctrine, and no consensus amongst its
proponents on a central aim to their endeavours.

Definition

 This approach regards literature as “a unique form of human knowledge that needs to be
examined on its own terms.”
 All the elements necessary for understanding the work are contained within the work itself.
 Of particular interest to the formalist critic are the elements of form—style, structure, tone,
imagery, etc.—that are found within the text.
 A primary goal for formalist critics is to determine how such elements work together with the
text’s content to shape its effects upon readers.
 The formalistic approach reduces the importance of a text’s historical, biographical, and cultural
context.

Application in Critiques

 A formalist approach studies a text as only a text, considering its features—for example, rhymes,
cadences, literary devices—in an isolated way, not attempting to apply their own say as to what
the text means. In general, formalists are focused on the facts of a text, because they want to
study the text, not what others say about it.
https://www.slideshare.net/mariaraja232/formalism-literary-theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formalism_(literature)

http://home.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/spring97/litcrit.html