formalism / new criticism

literary theories

Literary Theories and Forms of Criticism are broadly categorized or divided according to the emphasis they place upon:

• The Text

• The Context (including historical, social, political context as well as the author’s background)

• The Reader

formalism

1. Emphasis on the text and its form (structure and technique)

2. Method: close reading

3. Scientific method of defining literature

4. Emphasis on the text’s structures and technique

5. No contextual information examined

6. Difference between poetic and practical language

7. “Literariness”: what makes a text literary

eichenbaum

• “The so-called ‘formal method’ grew out of a struggle for a science of literature that would be both independent and factual” (102).

• Main Purpose: “to show how the formal method, by gradually evolving and broadening its field of research … became a special science of literature, a specific ordering of facts” (103).

• Key element in Formal method: “the understanding and the study of technique” (104).

new criticism

• Emphasis on the text as an independent existence, autonomous, and “closed”.

• Against the “affective fallacy” (judging a text according to readers’ emotional responses to it) and against the “intentional fallacy” (judging a text according to what the author intended it to be).

• Focus on literary devices, such as paradox, juxtapositions, contradictions, irony, conflicts, and the way in which they contribute to textual unity.

• An end in their criticism therefore: to examine how specific devices are resolved into a larger textual unity.