Also known as rhetorical criticism and New Criticism, formalism constitutes one of the many lenses through which critics view and interpret literature. A formalist critic pays attention to the form of a literary work, including aspects such as plot, character, setting, theme, symbolism, irony, the narrator’s point of view, and the genre of the work. A formalist approach deemphasizes the author’s biography, the reader’s personal appreciation of a text, the historical background either of the author or of the text’s setting in time, and the social, political, and economic contexts of the author’s life and the story’s setting.

Formalism dominated literary criticism in England, Russia, and the United States from the 1920s to the 1970s; during this period, literary criticism became professionalized in the English departments of an expanding university system, especially in the United States. Formalism is particularly well suited to the academic circumstances of the contemporary university system: it is highly teachable in the format of the large lecture hall, and it carves out a niche for literary study that is distinct from the scholarly territories of history, psychology, sociology, and political science.

Early supporters of formalism in England during the 1920s included two American poets, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound; following the poet-critic T. E. Hulme, they rejected the Romantic emphasis on the primacy of the poet in favor of an objective approach to the poem. This emphasis on objectivity constitutes an attempt to universalize the experience of literary phenomena: instead of the unpredictably unique or idiosyncratic musings of individual readers, formalists insist that criticism must prefer the shared properties of the text that all readers can learn to recognize and understand. On this view, criticism as an intellectual activity moves closer to the methods of science and further from the inspirations of art.

In addition to this application of formalism to poetry, formalist experiments in fiction include the development of the stream-of-consciousness point of view in novels by Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce.

Important American proponents of formalism included John Crowe Ransom, William K. Wimsatt, Monroe Beardsley, and Cleanth Brooks. Ransom’s book The New Criticism (1941) became a standard text in the field. In “The Intentional Fallacy,” by Wimsatt and Beardsley, these scholars argue that an author’s intention in constructing a literary text is unknowable and therefore not relevant to the task of the interpretive critic; in “The Affective Fallacy,” the same authors argue that the feelings a literary text produces in readers is similarly irrelevant.

Important British formalists include I. A. Richards (who used the term “practical criticism”), William Empson, author of a classic critical text on the formal elements of ambiguity, F. R. Leavis, and Cyril Connolly.

In minimizing the importance of the expressive quality of an author’s work, formalists are reacting against Romanticism as canonized in Wordsworth’s insistence that poets create art through the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling. But formalism is not invulnerable to attack: feminism helped to reestablish the relevance of an author’s biography to the critical enterprise by arguing that gender matters (encapsulated in the slogan “The personal is the political”); structuralists, post-structuralists, deconstructionists, and semioticians questioned the foundational concept of objectivity; New Historicists rediscovered the importance of historical context to counterbalance the cultural bias and myopia that can allow anachronism to flourish in literary criticism.

Other schools of thought have arisen as well. In fact, in the last quarter of the 20th century, criticism became a growth industry, albeit to a minuscule market of scholars and graduate students, as competitors struggled for dominance in toppling the hegemony of formalism.

Bibliography
Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953.
Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941.
Wellek, René. A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950. Vols. 5–6. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1955.
Wimsatt, William K., and Cleanth Brooks. Literary Criticism: A Short History. New York: Knopf, 1957.

Categories: British Literature, Literary Terms and Techniques, Literature, Novel Analysis

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