Q2: Discuss a theoretical perspective which discusses the meanings of the text by favouring the formal and linguistic aspects of the text.

Question 1

What is formalism?

Answer 1

formalism - a theoretical perspective which discusses the meanings of the text by favouring the formal and linguistic aspects of the text’
- early 20th century

Question 2

What formal aspects of the text does formalism deal with?

Answer 2

• the structure
• style, tone, imagery
• characters, setting, point of view
  + how such elements work together with the text’s content to shape its effect upon readers

Question 3

What is the objective of formalist readings?

Answer 3

To regard literature as a unique form that needs to be examined on its own terms (FORM OVER CONTENT)

Question 4

Describe the formalist approach to the text.

Answer 4

• all elements text necessary for understanding the work are contained within the work itself
• form is an inherent part of content
• each piece is distinct, free from its environment, era or even author

Question 5

Give examples of formalist scholars.

Answer 5

Russian formalism: Victor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson

Question 6

What is New Criticism?

Answer 6

• a theoretical perspective evolved from formalism
• unlike formalism content was equal to form
• dominant American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th c.

Question 7

Describe New Critical approach.

Answer 7

• just like formalism, strong focus on the variety and degree of certain literary devices
• the autonomy of literature and the literary language from context outside the text (e.g. Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” not as an anti-slavery novel but actual novel)
• emplasis on “CLOSE READING” as a way to engage with a text = detailed analysis of how the literary text contains and exemplifies truths

Question 8

What was the idea introduced by Ivor Armstrong Richards?

Answer 8

That poetry is a paradigm of literary language (a scientific approach to meaning in language)

Question 9

What ideas were introduced by Cleanth Brooks?

Answer 9

• poem as a “well-wrought urn” = a skillful construct of rhetorical devices that cannot be reduced to paraphrase (“the heresy of paraphrase”)
• although a poem is full of tensions and paradoxes, its form is ultimately unififed and coherent
• poem as a “unification of attittudes into a hierarchy”

Question 10

What idea was introduced by William Empson?

Answer 10

That a poem is a combination of ambiguities that are coherently resolved in it.

Question 11

What mistakes in critical reading were described by William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley?

Answer 11

• INTENTIONAL FALLACY - to study meaning is NOT to study the author’s intentions because the text carries its own value
• AFFECTIVE FALLACY - confusing what the poem IS with what it DOES on the psychological level because we are pulluting the text with our own emotions (and we have to remain objective)