RUSSIAN FORMALISM AND
NEW CRITICISM
RUSSIAN FORMALISM
Russian Formalism is a literary scholarship which originated in the second decade of the twentieth century, and was forcibly
supressed in 1930.
The Russian Formalist movement was championed by unorthodox philologists and literary historians, e.g. Victor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Boris Eichenbaum, Boris Tomashevsky and Yuri
Tynyanov.
Its main strongholds were the Moscow Linguistic Circle founded in 1915 and the Petrograd « Society for the Study of Poetic
Language» (OPOYAZ) formed in 1916. The initial statement of the
Formalist position is found in the symposium, Poetics. Studies in
the Theory of Poetic Language (1919), and in Modern Russian
Poetry (1921) by Roman Jakobson.
Academic eclecticism which weighed heavily upon Russian literary history,
The message-mindedness of the «social» critics,
The metaphysical bias of the Symbolists.
The driving force behind Formalist theorizing was the desire to
bring to an end the methodological confusion which prevailed in
traditional literary studies, and to establish literary scholorship as
a distinct and integrated field of intellectual endeavor. It is high
time, argued the Formalists, that the study of literature limit its
area and define its subject of inquiry .
«The subject of literary scholarship is not literature in its totality but literariness, i.e., that which makes of a given work a work of literature.»
Roman Jakobson
«The literary scholar ought to be concerned solely with the inquiry into distinguishing features of the literary materials.»
Boris Eichenbaum
Literariness : the language used in the text.
According to the Formalists, literary language is different from
everyday language.
The locus of the peculiarly literary was to be sought not in the author’s or reader’s pysche, but in the work itself.
The difference between literature and non-literature had to be
sought in the mode of presentation.
Russian Formalists rejected many nineteenth-century
assumptions of textual analysis, especially the belief that a work of literature was the expression of the author’s worldview and their dismissal of psychological and biographical criticism as being irrelevant to interpretation. These scholars declared the autonomy of literature and poetic language, advocating a
scientific approach to literary interpretation.
To study literature is to study poetics, which is an analysis of work’s constituent parts – its linguistic and structural features – or its form. Form, they asserted, included the internal mechanics of the work itself, especially its poetic language. These internal mechanics, or what the Formalists called devices, comprise the artfulness and literariness of any given text, not a work’s
content.
«If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic.
Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us. […] This
characteristic of thought suggests that we apprehend objects
only as shapes with imprecise extensions; we do not see them in their entirety but rather recognize them by their main
characteristics. […] The object, perceived thus in this manner of prose perception, fades and does not leave even a first
impression; ultimately even the essence of what it was is
forgotten.»
«Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to
make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The technique of
art is to make objects «unfamiliar», to make forms difficult, to
increase the difficulty and length of perception because the
process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be
prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an
object: the object is not important…»
Defamiliarization, or making strange, causes the audience to confront the object on a different level, elevating and
transforming it from something ordinary or practical into work that is considered art. It means to remove the automatism or
perception and the author’s purpose is to create the vision which
results from that deautomatized perception.
By creating the work artistically, its perception is impeded and the greatest possible effect is produced through the slowness of the perception.
Shklovsky points out that Tolstoy's Kholstomer is an example of
defamiliarization because the narrator is a horse, making the
work seem strange and "unfamiliar".
«I understood well what they said about whipping and
Christianity. But then I was absolutely in the dark. What’s the
meaning of «his own», «his colt»? From these phrases I saw that people thought there was some sort of connection between me and the stable. At the time I simply could not understand the connection. Only much later, when they separated me from the other horses, did I begin to understand. But even then I simply could not see what it meant when they called me «man’s
property». The words «my horse» referred to me, a living horse, and seemed as strange to me as the words «my land», «my air»,
«my water» […]»
Animal Farm is an example of defamiliarization in English
Literature, because all of the characters are animals. This rescues the work from becoming just another political piece about the evils of Communism and the corruption of power and transforms it into artistic literature. Defamiliarization not only forces the audience to see Animal Farm as art, but allows the author and audience to
distance themselves from the seriousness of the message so that
the piece can be enjoyed as art and does not become just another
political rant.
«According to Aristotle, poetic language must appear strange and
wonderful; and, in fact, it is often actually foreign: the Sumerian used by the Assyrians, the Latin of Europe during the middle ages, the Arabisms of the Persians, the Old Bulgarian of Russian literature, or the elevated,
almost literary language of folk songs.»
An example of this is T.S. Eliot's use of Greek, Latin, German and other languages in The Wasteland, which forces the reader to become a more active participant in the process by having to make an extra effort to decode the strange and exotic words in order to understand the poem.
One is never allowed to feel comfortable and be a passive listener/reader
when dealing with T.S. Elliot.
According to Shklovsky narrative prose has two important aspects:
fabula (story)
syuzhet (plot)
Fabula is the raw material of the story and can be considered close to the writer’s working outline. This contains the chronological
series of events of the story. The syuzhet is the literary devices the
writer uses to transform a story into a plot.
There is a distinction between the actual sequence of a story’s event as they happen and the way they are presented in the narrative. For example, the fabula is always chronological,
moving from beginning to end, whereas the syuzhet may start in
the middle (in media res) and then jump back and forth within
the chain of events.
As a group, The Russian Formalists were suppressed and
disbanded in 1930 by the Soviet government because they were unwilling to view literature through the Stalinist regime’s political and ideological perspectives. Their influence, however, continued to flourish in Czechoslovakia through the work of Prague
Linguistic Circle (founded in 1926, its leading figure being Roman Jakobson) and through the Russian folktale scholar Vladimir
Propp.
Gulliver’sTravels
The aim of this analysis is not to probe the satire the stories reserve, rather it is to analyze the fourth voyage of Gulliver to the land of Houyhnhnm’s in terms of «defamiliarization» that is used as a literary device by Jonathan Swift. His visits to to the island of Liliput, the voyage to Brobdinbgag and to Laputa are also written with this technique, however the cope of this
analysis will be restricted to the last voyage.
Shklovsky asserts that «the technique of art is to make objects
«unfamiliar», to make forms difficult, in other words to make stone more stony, to increase the difficulty and length of
perception because the perception is an aesthetic end in itself
and must be prolonged».
Like Brobdingnag, Houyhnhnm (pronounced "whinim") Land is completely cut off from other nations – no one on Houyhnhnm Land has ever visited another country. This kind of isolation appears to be good for producing relatively virtuous societies. After all, the chief problem Gulliver sees with Lilliput and Laputa – their tendency to fight and conquer other peoples – isn't really possible on Brobdingnag and Houyhnhnm Land, where there are no other peoples available for conquest. At the same time, there are two distinct kinds living on Houyhnhnm Land, and it is the differences between these two that form the final part of the satire of Gulliver's Travels.
When Gulliver first starts exploring the island, he runs across a herd of
deformed animals with hair on their heads and covering their genitals
but leaving the rest of their bodies bare. They seem swift, but they
also tend to sit around on their butts a lot. The females have bare
faces, without the long, goatish beards of the men, and their breasts
hang down almost to the ground. These creatures are violent and
easily frightened. When Gulliver strikes one with the flat part of his
sword, a whole bunch of them swarm around him throwing feces, until
he thinks he's going to be smothered in poo.
Just as Gulliver thinks he's going to suffocate in poo, another resident of the island comes to his rescue: a kind, gentle looking gray horse who seems to frighten these gross animals away. The horse seems fascinated by Gulliver, and particularly by Gulliver's clothing. As Gulliver hears this horse apparently speaking to another horse, he realizes that the horse's neighs and whinnies (from which the word
"Houyhnhnm" comes) are slowly starting to make sense to him. The
horse keeps saying the word "Yahoo" and gesturing to Gulliver.
The gray horse leads Gulliver through his own house and out to a kind of stable where a bunch of those vile beasts from the earlier scene are kept chained to a wall, surrounded by bits of raw donkey meat. Suddenly,
Gulliver realizes the awful truth: these grotesque, violent, brutal,
cowardly, hairy-but-also-way-too-naked creatures are, in fact, humans just like Gulliver. The horses, which are the reasonable creatures of this island, call humans "Yahoos," and keep a tight leash on them, because otherwise they'll misbehave.
This slow introduction to the Yahoos (gross humans) and the
Houyhnhnms (lovely, smart horses) makes humanity unfamiliar and
horrible to the reader.
However, Gulliver is forced to leave the island: the Houyhnhnms have an island-wide assembly every four years where they discuss important
matters. Gulliver happens to be the important matter at the current
assembly. The Houyhnhnms all decide that, as a superior Yahoo, Gulliver might some day go off and convince all the other Yahoos to organize and rise up against the Houyhnhnms. They decide he's too dangerous to
have around, so they boot him out of the country.
Some Qualifications of Houyhnhnms
There are no words in Houyhnhnm language for any of the bad things we humans do, including lying, power, greed, or jealousy.
The Houyhnhnms don't need laws or a special class of lawyers because they are completely governed by reason.
The Houyhnhnms accept hard facts; anything outside of fact, you can't argue about, because by definition you can't know what the correct answer is.
they are equally friendly with all members of their tribe.
Jonathan Swift, in this part, removes objects from automatism of perception by making the familiar seem strange by naming the familiar object, which are horses and human beings in this
example, in a different way. Instead of just calling them horses he gives a different name «Houyhnhnm» to horses and the
people are named as «Yahoos». Thus, he prevents the readers from automatizing these concepts and leads them to think in a different way, to understand the Houyhnhnm civilization, their philosophies and to distance themselves from Yahoos. Swift attacks the dogmas and characteristics of human beings as is they are unfamiliar to us. Being adapted to the World of
Houyhnhnm’s provoke him to distance himself from human World and he chooses to spend time with horses instead of human
beings which means that Gulliver’s usual perception of an object
is transfered into a sphere of new perception.
NEW CRITICISM
New Criticism provides readers with a formula for arriving at the correct interpretation of a text using only the text itself.
According to New Criticism the poem’s overall meaning or form
depends solely on the text. No library research, no studying of
the author’s life and times, and no other extratextual information
is needed; the poem itself contains all the necessary information
to discover its meaning.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s study of «Venus and Adonis» in Biographia Literaria furnishes a kind of epitome of many of the considerations that
recur over and over again in the new criticism: imagination as it relates to versification and the ability to reduce a multitude of feelings to their proper proportion in relation to the total unity of the work; dissociating the literary work from its origins in the writer’s own life – so that the work lives
impersonally and with its own kind of wholeness; union of «creative power and intellectual energy» or as we say more commonly now, «the union of thought and feeling»; complexity in the sense that one perceives the «flux and reflux of the mind in all its subtlest thoughts» and in the sense that imagery, versification, tone and so forth, contribute in the most minute ways to the dominant feeling and thematic lines unifying the work.
Thanks to the publication of the 1938 college text Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students by Brooks and Warren, New Critcism emerged in American universities as the leading form of textual analysis throughout the late 1930s until the early 1960s.
However, its roots stem from two British critics and authors, T.S.Eliot and I.A. Richards. From Eliot, New Criticism borrows its insistence that ciricism be directed toward the poem, not the poet. The poet, declares Eliot, does not infuse the poem with his or her personality and emotions, but uses language in such a way as to incorporate within the poem the impersonal feelings and emotions common to all humankind.
Thus, poetry is not freeing of the poet’s emotions, but an escape
from them.
The New Critics also borrow Eliot’s belief that the reader of
poetry must be instructed in literary technique. Eliot maintains that a good reader perceives the poem structurally, resulting in good criticism. Such a reader must necessarily be trained in
reading good poetry and be well acquainted with established poetic traditions. A poor reader, on the other hand, simply
expresses his or her personal emotions and reactions to a text.
Objective Correlative
According to Eliot, the only way of expressing emotion through art is by finding an objective correlative, or a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, or reactions that can effectively
awaken in the reader the emotional response the author desires
without being a direct statement of that emotion.
Close Reading
From I.A. Richards, a psychologist and literary critic, New
Criticism borrows a term that has become synonymous with its methods of analysis, practical criticism.
In an experiment at Cambridge University, Richards distributed to his students copies of poems minus such information as the authors, dates, spelling and punctuation, and asked them to record their responses. From these data he identified the
difficulties that poetry presents to its readers, including matters of interpretation, poetic techniques, and specific meanings. From this analysis, Rischards then devised an intricate system for
arriving at a poem’s meaning. This close scrutiny or close
reading of a text has become synonymous with New Criricism.
New Critics assert that a poem has ontological status; that is, it possesses its own being and exists like any other object.
For them, to believe that a poem’s meaning is nothing more than an expression of the private experiences or intentions of its
author is to commit a fundamental error of interpretation, which they call the Intentional Fallacy.
Any literary work is a public text that can only be understood by
applying the standards of public discourse, not simply the private
experience, concerns and vocabulary of its author.
That the poem is related to author can not be denied. Eliot explains the role of the authour with an anology. He asserts that, certain chemical reactions occur in the presence of a catalyst, an element that causes, but is not affected by the reaction. He gives the example of the hydogen peroxide that stops to be hydrogen peroxide when exposed to sun rays, as sun rays are catalyst that turns it into something different.
So, the poet’s mind serves as a catalyst for the reaction that yields the poem. During the creative process, the poet’s mind, serving as the
catalyst, brings together the experiences of the author’s personality (not
his personal traits, but rather his personal experiences) into an external
object and a new creation: the poem. For Eliot the poet’s experiences
are similar to all of our experiences, by structuring these experiences,
the poem allows us to examine them objectively.
Affective Fallacy
Placing little emphasis on the author, the social context, or a text’s historical situation as sources for discovering a poem’s meaning, the New Critics assert that a reader’s emotional
response to the text is neither important nor equivalent to its
interpretation. Such an error in judgment, is called the Affective
Fallacy.
Where can we find the poem’s meaning?
As the poem itself is an artifact or an objective entity, its
meaning must reside within its own structure. The New Critics assert that a careful scrutiny reveals that a poem’s structure operates according to a complex series of laws. By closely analyzing this structure, they believe they have devised a
methodology and a standard of excellence that we can apply to
all poems to discover their correct meaning.
What is the chief concern of the poem?
The chief concern of the poem is coherence or interrelatedness.
Borrowing their ideas from the writings of Samuel T. Coleridge, the New Critics posit the organic unity of a poem, that is, all parts of a poem are necessarily interrelated, with each part
reflecting and helping to support the poem’s central idea. Such organic unity allows for the harmonization of conflicting ideas, feelings, and attitudes and results in the poem’s oneness.
Superior poetry, declare the New Critics, achieves such oneness
through paradox, irony and ambiguity.
Because the poem’s chief characteristic is its oneness, New
Critics believe that a poem’s form and content are inseparable.
Therefore, it is inconceivable for the New Critics to belive that a poem’s interpretation is equal to a mere paraphrased version of the text. Labeling such an erroneous belief the Heresy of
Paraphrase, they maintain that a poem is not simply a
statement that is either true or false, but a bundle of harmonized
tensions and resolved stresses.
Methodology
Unlike scientific discourse with its precision of terminology,
poetic diction often has multiple meanings and can immediately
set up a series of tensions within the text. For example, many
words have both a denotation, or dictionary meaning, and
connotations, or implied meanings. A word’s denotation may
directly conflict with its connotative meaning determined by the
context of the poem.
New Critics call this tension ambiguity, or language’s capacity to
sustain multiple meanings. At the heart of literary language or discourse is ambiguity. However, at the end of a close reading of a text all such ambiguities must be resolved.
Paradox and irony are two other chief elements in a poem. A paradox
