RUSSIAN FORMALISM AND NEW CRITICISM

RUSSIAN FORMALISM

It is a type of literary theory and analysis which emerged in the second decade of 

the twentieth century. As it was started in St. Petersburg and Moscow, henceforth 

the name Russian Formalism. This movement includes some crucial names like Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Jan Mukarovsky, Rene 

Wellek, Peter Bogatyrev, G. O. Vinokur, Boris Tomashevsky, Osip Brik and Yuri 

Tynyanov. 

They were mainly linguists and historians and forms two groups which 

are—

(a)Moscow Linguistic Circle, which was formed in 1915

(b) The OPOYAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language), formed in Petrogard in 1916 Formalism views literary works mainly as a specialised use of language and  draws line of distinction between the literary (or poetic) and the ordinary, “practical” use of language, as M. H. Abrams writes in his book ‘A Glossary of Literary Terms.’ He also writes that this literary movement proposes that the central function of ordinary language is to communicate to auditors a message or information by references to the world existing outside of language. But on the other hand, it conceives literary language to be self-focused which means to offer the reader a special mode of experience by drawing attention to its own “formal” features- that is, to the qualities and the internal relations of the linguistic signs themselves. And this way they developed a reaction against the dominant intellectual trends of Russia like- literary history, social criticism that focused on 

the message of a literary work. Rather they advocate for the autonomy of a 

literary work, which according to them doesn’t depend on the author’s social 

background; the author’s psyche isn’t important. The most important thing for the formalists is to find out the ‘literariness’ in it as Roman Jakobson wrote in 1921: ‘The object of study in literary science is not literature but ‘literariness’, that is which makes a given work a literary work. The rejected the role of intuition, imagination and genius in the production of a literary work. Rather, they say that accumulating literary devices, a literary is produced. For them literary devices like –ambiguity, metaphor, parallelism, imagery, personification, allusion, diction, paradox, epigraph, foreshadowing, alliteration and euphemism etc., are the most important elements of literary work. Here we can mention Shklovsky’s words “the literary work is the sum total of literary devices.’

Russian Formalism invented two most important terms while analysing a work of literature and they are –

 (a) Defamiliarization and

 (b) Foregrounding.

These two play very important role in the production of literary works according 

to the formalists. Viktor Shklovsky is the main figure who talked about ‘defamiliarization’ in his seminal book ‘Art as Technique (1917). 

The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Theory says about defamiliarization (or ostrananie): “To defamiliarize is to make fresh, new, strange, different what is familiar and known.” And this removes the automatism of the text delaying the 

perception of the reader. Because according to Shklovsky the process of 

perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.

Aktualisace is the Czech word for the English term ‘Foregrounding’ that denotes the use f devices and techniques which push the act of expression into the 

foreground so that language draws attention to itself. Foregrounding occurs 

especially in poetic language. The Czech linguist Jan Mukarovsky (in his essay 

Standard language and Poetic Language) observes: “The function of poetic 

language consists in the maximum foregrounding of the utterance……it is not 

used in the services of communication, but in order to place in the foreground the act of expression, the act of speech itself.’ In a sense, foregrounding is the art 

which reveals art rather than concealing it.

NEW CRITICISM

 The term was made prominent by John Crowe Ransom in his book The New

Criticism published in 1941. It refers to a kind of movement in literary criticism 

which developed in the in the 1920s (for the most part Americans). 

Notable critics in this mode were the Southerners, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, who’s textbook Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943) 

worked remarkably to make this criticism dominant method of teaching literature 

in American Colleges. Other prominent critics of this movement were- Allen Tate, 

W. K. Wimsatt, William Empson, Yvor Winters, R. P. Blackmur, and Kenneth 

Burke. They advocated for the ‘autonomy’, of a literary text which can stand alone 

according their point of view. For them the author is not important. The words of 

the independent text are the most relevant thing of a reader. 

They wanted the readers to look deep into the language of a text which is basically poetry in this case. Talking about New Criticism, J. A. Cuddon in his book The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Theory writes: “The New Critics advocated 'close reading ‘and ‘detailed textual analyses of poetry rather than an interest in the mind and personality of the poet, sources, the history of ideas and political and social implications.”

Principles of New Criticism

 The first law of this criticism is that it shall be objective, shall cite the nature of 

the object and shall recognize the autonomy of the work itself as existing for its own sake. In analysing and evaluating a particular work, they avoid reference to the biography and temperament and personal experiences of the author, to the social conditions at the time of its production, or to its psychological and moral effects on the reader. For its focus on the literary work in isolation from its attendant’s circumstances and effects, the New Criticism is often classified as a type of critical formalism. 

The formalistic approach adopted by the new critics implied an awareness of form. Awareness of form is seen in –sensitivity to the words of the text; denotative and connotative values and implications; awareness of multiple meanings. To get the from and read in a formalistic way, we look at the overall structure, shape, interplay, tone/mood, interrelationships, denotations and connotations, contexts, images, symbols..etc, trying to discover what constitutes the uniqueness of the work.

 The principles of the New Criticism are basically verbal. That conceives literature 

to be a special kind of language whose attributes are defined by systematic 

opposition to the language of science and of practical and logical discourse, and 

the explicative procedure is to analyse the meanings and interactions of words, 

figures of speech, and symbols. The emphasis is on the “organic unity” in a 

successful literary work, of its overall structure with its verbal meanings.

 The third principle is that the essential components of any literary work of 

literature, whether lyric, narrative, or dramatic, are conceived to be words, images, and symbols rather than character, thought, and plot. These linguistic elements, whatever the genre, are often said to be organized around a central and humanly significant theme, and to manifest high literary value to the degree that they manifest “tension”, “irony”, and “paradox”, in achieving a “reconciliation of diverse impulses” or an “equilibrium of opposed forces”; that’s what Abrams writes in his book “A Glossary of Literary Terms.”

 The new critics distrusted paraphrase. Because it necessarily means the loss of 

the context, of the experience of the poem, and hence of the poem’s full meaning. 

For the New Critics, paraphrase was, as Brooks put it in The Well-Wrought Urn, a 

‘heresy’. As well as the ‘heresy of paraphrase’ there are two major textual 

approaches associated with New Criticism. These are the ‘intentional fallacy’ and ‘affective fallacy’. Both were developed in essays published in 1946 and 1949 by Wimsatt in collaboration with Monroe Beardsley, and were collected in TheVerbal Icon.

 Intentional fallacy signifies what is claimed to be the error ofinterpreting and evaluating a literary work by reference to evidence, outside thetext itself, for the intention- the design and purposes- of its author. And on theother hand, affective fallacy signifies confusion between the poem and the results(what it is and what it does)’.

 It’s the error of evaluating a poem by its effects –

especially its emotional effects –upon the reader. As a result of this fallacy “the
poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgement, tends to disappear,” so
that criticism “ends in impressionism and relativism.”

Comparison between New Criticism and Russian Formalism Both the approaches advocate for the special use of language in literary works.

 
The literary language is different from non-literary language according to them.
Literary languages use various literary devices to attract the reader’s attention to
itself. The author’s role is irrelevant for both the approaches. 

The language of the text is all that readers need to be mindful of. Works of literature have been created
following some forms. Consciously or unconsciously the author follows that form.

 
For that, formalistic point of view can be applied to both of these movements of
literary criticism and theory which originated in two different countries. But still we can find some underlying links between the two. The readers are given the most important roles to play in analysing and interpreting literary works while the author or the creator of that particular work is kept aside or considered “dead”, to use Roland Barthes term.

 Rather ‘close-reading’ and ‘detailed textual analysis’ are applied while literary texts are studied. Structure and form are what need to be considered; the content is not important for the readers to understand the text. The author’s emotion and intention are pushed to the background, while foregrounding

the literariness of the text as Jakobson writes his seminal books about it. The formalist’s use of some new terms in their theories of analysing the literary textslike ‘defamiliarization’ of Shklovsky and ‘Foregrounding’ of Mukarovsky brought sea changes to the world of criticism. By the term ‘defamiliarization’ Shklovsky means that literary language uses devices like metaphor and imagery, to make familiar things unfamiliar. This way the readers are made to ponder over the implications of the text.

But New Criticisms on the other hand, only advocates for the connotative 

meanings of words in poetry which is the main area of this criticism unlike 

Russian Formalism which can be applied to fiction as well. New Criticism doesn’t 

differentiate between form and content but Formalism does differentiate.

Elemental units of analysis for the New Critics are the icons (images) but for the 

Formalists they are the motifs and other devices. Unlike Russian Formalists, New 

Critics value the ambiguity, paradox, irony, and intention in literature. 

The new critics have pointed out two types of fallacies as already mentioned- affective and intentional fallacy, among the readers- who sometimes become the victims of these two errors. That’s why poetry shouldn’t be interpreted from the emotional effects of the reader or the author’s intention of writing it. Rather the literary texts should be studied in isolation and independently of all these. And Formalism supports this proposition too as the formalists say that literary works are produced culminating various literary devices only, whereas the author is pushed aside.