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Subject: Theories of Language & Literature

Prepared by: Mr. Ronard Denopol


 1. Define Formalism or New
Criticism
 2. Examine critical thoughts
espoused by I.A. Richard, et. al.
apropos to New Criticism
 3. Relate the critical analysis of
any literary works of art in
teaching literature today.
 Formalism refers to a style
of inquiry that focuses,
almost exclusively, on
features of the literary text
itself, to the exclusion of
biographical, historical, or
intellectual contexts
 Insimple terms, Formalists
believed that the focus of
literary studies should be
the text itself, and not the
author's life or social class.
Art is produced according
to certain sets of rules and
with its own internal logic.
 Ivor Armstrong Richards
(February 26, 1893-1979)
was an influential literary
critic and rhetorician who is
often cited as the founder of
an Anglophone school of
Formalist criticism that would
eventually become known as
the New Criticism.
 Richards is one of the
founders of the contemporary
study of literature in English
 As a classroom assignment,
Richards would give
undergraduates short poems,
stories, or passages from
longer works without
indicating who the authors
were.
 He discovered that virtually all
of his students—even the most
exceptional ones—were utterly
at a loss to interpret, say, a
sonnet of Shakespeare's,
without relying on the clichés
drawn from Shakespeare's
biography and style.
 Inattempting to ascertain why his
students had such difficulty
interpreting literary texts without
the aid of biographical and
historical commonplaces,
Richards hit upon his method of
extremely close-reading, forcing
his students to pay an almost
captious degree of attention to
the precise wording of a text.
 Itsadherents were emphatic
in their advocacy of close
reading and attention to
texts themselves, and their
rejection of criticism based
on extra-textual sources,
especially biography.
 According to Eichenbaum,
Shklovsky was the lead critic
of the group, and Shklovsky
contributed two of their most
well-known concepts:
Defamiliarization
(ostraneniye, more literally,
"estrangement" or "making it
strange") and the plot/story
distinction (syuzhet/fabula).
 "Defamiliarization"is one of
the crucial ways in which
literary language distinguishes
itself from ordinary,
communicative language, and
is a feature of how art in
general functions: Namely, by
presenting things in strange
and new ways that allow the
reader to see the world in a
 The plot/story distinction, the
second aspect of literary evolution
according to Shklovsky, is the
distinction between the sequence of
events the text relates ("the story")
from the sequence in which those
events are presented in the work
("the plot"). By emphasizing how the
"plot" of any fiction naturally diverges
from the chronological sequence of
its "story,"
 Shklovsky was able to emphasize
the importance of paying an
extraordinary amount of attention
to the plot—that is, the form—of a
text, so as to understand its
meaning. Both of these concepts
are attempts to describe the
significance of the form of a
literary work in order to define its
"literariness."
 For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the
words on the page were all that
mattered; the reader has no
privileged access into the author's
mind to determine what the
author "intended" to say. The
importation of meanings from
outside the text was quite
irrelevant, and potentially
distracting. This became a central
tenet of New Criticism.
 Nevertheless, close reading is
now a fundamental tool of
literary criticism. Such a
reading places great emphasis
on the particular over the
general, paying close attention
to individual words, syntax,
even punctuation, and the
order in which sentences and
images unfold as they are
 Inlater times, the
excruciatingly exact style of
reading advocated by New
Criticism has been jokingly
referred to as "analyzing
the daylights out of a poem
before thirty stupefied
undergraduates."
 The major premises of New
Criticism include: "art for art's
sake," "content = form," and
"texts exist in and for
themselves." These premises lead
to the development of reading
strategies that isolate and
objectify the overt structures of
texts as well as authorial
techniques and language usage.
 Shklovsky's (quoted by
Trotsky) that "Art was always
free of life, and its color never
reflected the color of the flag
which waved over the fortress
of the City"
 Formalists value poetry rich in
ambiguity, irony, and
intention, and want to make
literary criticism a science.
This last projection introduces
the concept of expert readers
into interpretive theory.
 Happy Relearning!
-the presenter

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