Formalism is a literary theory that analyzes a text based on its structural features alone, without considering biographical or socio-political context. It was introduced by Russian scholars in the early 20th century and influenced structuralism and new criticism. Formalist scholars focus only on what is explicitly stated in a text, avoiding any subtext or symbolism. The new criticism combines formalist thinking with a deeper analysis of aesthetics.
Formalism is a school of critical literary theory that analyzes a text based on its structural features alone rather than incorporating biographical, socio-political, or interdisciplinary analyses. One formalist scholar says that everything needed to evaluate a narrative can be found within the grammatical constructs and literary devices that make up the piece. Formalism presented a radical change from previous schools of literary thought where a text was viewed primarily in the context of the author. This school of thought was introduced by a group of Russian scholars in the early 20th century and laid the foundations for both structuralism and the new critique, as well as several schools that contradicted the premise of formalism.
As an analytical framework, the formalism is extremely literal. While structure depends on the exclusive use of textual analysis, formalist scholars do not delve into metaphors, allegories, and symbolisms to support the analysis. Instead, a formalist scholar uses only what is explicitly stated in a given text, avoiding any subtext. If a text presents a man throwing a stone into a pond, a formalist scholar considers only a man throwing a stone into a pond, without any consideration for what the man, the rock and the pond may symbolize within the storytelling. A formalist scholar would examine how the author, on a sentence-by-sentence and word-by-word level, describes the event rather than on the meaning of the event.
In 1916, a group of Russian scholars created the Society for the Study of Poetic Language, which soon developed many of the foundations of formalism. The Society was created as a response to the scholarship surrounding the Romantic lyrics of the previous century. While the analysis of these texts focused almost exclusively on the author, formalism created a theoretical revolution in scholarship by being the first school in the modern academy to focus on the actual rather than the intentional. Led by such eminent scholars as Viktor Shklovsky and Boris Eichenbaum, formalism gave rise to numerous schools of critical theory, both for and against it, that would dominate the field throughout the 20th century.
Structuralism and the New Criticism were directly influenced by formalist scholarship, but deviated from the stark literalness of the original. The new criticism is closely concerned with textual features such as grammar, syntax, poetic meter, and other literary devices, but its scholars often also incorporate analysis of metaphor and allegory. In a sense, the new criticism attempts to take the best of formalist thinking and combine it with a deeper and more symbolic analysis of the aesthetics of a given text.
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