Formalism

Formalism

Formalism mainly started with two movements.

First movement was started by Edmund Husserl. The movement insisted on not seeing art and literature as a window to see the work rather look at the artistic piece itself, just like we would do to a painting. Give art its own value and not label it as a representation or mere copy of our world. This concept was followed by Russian Formalists namely Roman Jakobson etc.

Second movement was started by Benedetto Croce. He said that science is not the only truth in this world. There lot of other truths that literature can cover through its literary devices and science cannot. But that does not mean that what science cannot prove is false. This movement was followed by The American New Critics namely Cleanth Brooks etc.

Any formalist would concentrate only on the text, analyzing literature into its components, it’s literary devices, language, narratives and other literary techniques like euphemism, metaphor, onometapia, paradox etc. the text would be first divided into story (the content) and plot (the sequence in which the story is being narrated). They also distinguished language into literary (used for writing literature) and non-literary (generally used for normal interactions) languages. Thus Roman Jakobson rightly put it literature as organized violence on ordinary speech.

Literary evolution is a concept that is agreed by both formalists and non-formalist but both of them look at it differently. Non-formalists say literary evolution is obvious as the world is evolving and literature being a representation of it is also changing. But formalists argue that literary evolution is autonomous. It is evolving on its own and not as a reflection to the evolving world.

There is a strong historical and methodological link between structuralism and formalism. Roman Jackobson one of the major Roman formalists in 1920’s migrated to France and became a part of French structuralism in 1930 and 1940’s.

There are certain differences between Roman formalists and New American criticism. Roman formalists concentrated on modes of operation of the entire genre like novels and were more scientific in their methods where as American new critics used methods like close reading to explain the universal truths in the text and generally focused on individual work like poetries and use rather unscientific methods.

Intentional fallacy: While analyzing the text formalists don’t care about the author’s intention behind writing the statement. They only concentrate on the literal meaning of the sentences.

Affective fallacy: here the affect on the reader after reading the text is not taking into consideration as it doesn’t help in the analysis of text anyway, and the objective structure of the text is only important.

Thus American New Critics describes literary devices signifying universal meaning which was a direct attack on modern positivist science. Russian Formalists found a value-free mode of critical description for finding the literariness in literature.

Formalism springs from phenomenology by Edmund Husserl which sets out to analyse human consciousness as experienced in the lived world irrespective our prior suppositions through common sense or philosophy.