Formalism and Russian Formalism

Formalism (1920s)

• Art is style, emphasizing literary device structure, deeming "device the only hero of literature".
• Focuses on historical background; distinguishes between ordinary and poetic language to generate emotions, known as Defamiliarisation.

Russian Formalism

• This ignores historical and social contexts.
• Tomashevski introduced 'motif' as the smallest plot unit.
• Jan Mukarovsky conceptualized 'Foregrounding.'

Mikhail Bakhtin

• Considers text as struggle between authority and popular culture.
• The Bakhtin school opposed Russian formalism in the 1920s.

Bakhtin's Works and Concepts

• "Freudianism: A Marxist Critique" (1927).
• "Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics" (1929 & 1969) - Includes polyphony, unfinalizability, dialog notion.
• Carnivalesque involves no distinction in play, with binaries, freedom by equality, and overturning hierarchies for a democratic counterculture.
• Polyphony is a multiple perspective with multiple voices expressing reality of consciousness.
• "Rabelais and His World" (1968) focuses on carnival and grotesque elements.
• "The Dialogic Imagination" (1982) focuses on Chronotope and Heteroglossia.
• Essays in "The Dialogic Imagination" include:
  • "Epic and Novel” (1941).
  • "From the Pre-history of Novelistic Discourse" (1940).
  • "Forms of time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" (1937-38).
  • "Discourse in the Novel" (1935) discusses the novel's constitution through multiplicity of divergent social voices.
• "Speech Genres and Other Late Essays" (1986).
• "Toward a Philosophy of the Act" (1993), written in the USSR between 1919-21, decentralizes Kant's work.
• Chronotope involves time and space in language from Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
• Heteroglossia uses a variety of voices in language, prioritizing context over text.
• Multiple meanings underlie everything, using diverse languages in epics.
• Dialogism is variety in dialogue, favoring dialogic prose over monologic poetry, opposing absolute authorial control.
• Polyglossia/Polyphony denotes language's hybrid nature, expressing multiple voices in music.

Viktor Shklovsky

• He is the author of “Art as Technique” (1917) in “Theory as Prose.”
• Shklovsky's theory focuses on ‘Defamiliarisation'.

"On Poetry and Nonsense Language"

• Meaningless words are significant in poetry.
• The difference between ordinary and poetic language provides uniqueness to literary works.

Boris Eikhenbaum

• “Theory of the Formal Method.”
• Eikhenbaum's concept involves Narratology and 3rd person narration.

Yuri Tynyanov

• Yuri Tynyanov "Thesis on Language" with Roman Jakobson.
• Tynyanov's theory explores 'structuralism’.

Roman Jakobson

• Jakobson's 'Structuralism' explains language functions.
• Jakobson's “Functions of Language” (1960) explores 6 primary functions:
  • Referential (Marxism): conveying information.
  • Expressive/Emotive (Romantic): expressing feelings or emotions.
  • Directive/Conative (Reader-oriented): making requests/commands.
  • Phatic (Structuralist): opening, closing, or maintaining conversation.
  • Poetic (Formalistic): message focus and communication.
  • Metalingual (Metalinguist): using language to describe itself.
• “Two Aspects of Language & Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances” (1956) - Jakobson introduces 'Metaphor and Metonymy'.
• Language has a bipolar structure, oscillating metaphor /romanticism/symbolism) and metonymy realism.
• The notion of binary opposition also informed Bakhtin's dialogic criticism and Levi-Strauss' Structural Anthropology.
• "Linguistics and Poetics" (1958) states poetry is metaphoric, prose is metonymic.
• Other concepts include:
  • Selection (Defamiliarisation – Paradigm).
  • Combination (word order change – Syntagm).
  • Metaphor for poetry.
  • Metonymy prose substitutes part for whole in bipolar language.
• Jakobson founded the Moscow linguistic society in 1915 with Flipp Fedorovich Fortunatov, R Jakobson.
• In 1926, he established the Prague Linguistic Circle, critiquing Saussure's works, with Nikolai Trubetzkoy, René Wellek, Jan Mukarovsky, and Boris Johnson.
• In 1916, he was involved in the OPOJAZ with Viktor Shklovsky and Boris Eikhenbaum to study poetic language.
• Jakobson co-founded the linguistic circle of New York in 1943.
• Jakobson defined the study of literary science as the "literariness" that makes a verbal message a work of art.
• “Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays” by Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Tomashevsky, and Boris Eichenbaum, edited by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, showed the influence of Marxism.

New Criticism (1940s)

• John Crow Ransom coined the term in 1941.
• It is classified as ‘Critical Formalism,' emphasizing close-reading the text.
• It differentiates between literary and scientific uses of language.
• Key elements include paradox, ambiguity, irony, tensions, rhyme, meter, setting.

F.R. Leavis (1895-1978)

• He was part of American school of New Critics. Called New Criticism ‘the words on the page.'
• Archetypal British Liberal Humanist.
• Leavis believed "Poem is not self contained/sufficient."
• His works include:
  • “New Bearings in English Poetry” – He praises G.M. Hopkins, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Ronald Bottrall.
  • “For Continuity” 1933 - Scrutiny Essays with wife Q.D. Rodd attacked the Bloomsbury group.
  • "Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry” (1936).
  • “Education and the University” (1943).
  • “The Great Tradition” 1948 Novel Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence. Leavis considered them great English novelists.
  • “Culture and Environment" (1950) with Denys Thompson.
  • “To Mill on Bentham and Coleridge” publication edited by him in 1950 and added essay "The Common Pursuit” (1952).
  • “Two Cultures? The Significance of C.P. Snow” 1962 lecture in Downing College.
  • “English Literature in our time & the university” 1969.
  • "Dickens the Novelisť 1970.

Allan Tate

• Works include:
  • “Miss Emily and the Bibliographer" 1940.
  • “The Present Function of Criticism" 1940.
  • “Man of Letters in the Modern World” 1955 essay.
• Two kinds of meaning/tensions in poetry:
  • Denotative: Surface meaning (Plato's realm - Extension).
  • Connotative: Hidden Meaning (Art realm - Intension).
  • Also differentiated between structure and texture. Tension is life of a poem; both tensions contribute to a successful poem.

I.A. Richards

• Richards pioneered Close Reading = Close analysis of text in isolation.
• “Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgemenť (1929) - coined term 'practical criticism', noting four kinds of meaning i.e., Sense, Feeling, Tone, Intention.
• “The Meaning of Meaning” (1923) - Close analysis of text in isolation.
• “Principles of Literary Criticism” (1924) - two uses of language i.e., Scientific and Emotive
• “Science and Poetry" (1926).

“The Philosophy of Rhetoric”

• This 1936 work states that metaphor consists of two parts: tenor (subject with ascribed attributes) and vehicle (object with borrowed attributes).
• It was criticised by Allan Tate and William Empson for overusing psycho-affective poetic.

Cleanth Brooks (1906-94)

• Brooks served as the cultural attaché at the American embassy in London from 1964 to 66.
• He believed in ambiguity and paradox.
• Works included:
  • “Modern Poetry and the Tradition” (1937).
  • “Understanding Poetry” (1938).
  • “The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry" (1947).
    • Essay - "Keats Sylvan Historian: History Without Footnotes"
    • Chapter - 'Heresy of Paraphrase'
    • "A true poem is a simulacrum of reality”; “The language of poetry is a language of paradox."
  • “The Language of Paradox” 1947 essay: poetry in Wordsworth and Donne.
  • “The New Criticism” 1979 essay.
  • “In Search of the New Criticism” 1984.

William Empson

• He is the author of “Seven Types of Ambiguity” (1930).
• The first type of ambiguity states when two different things are said to be alike which have different properties, similar to metaphysical conceit.
• More types:
  • Two meanings resolved into one via different metaphors.
  • Context connects ideas in one word simultaneously.
  • Disagreeing meanings combine for a clear authorial mindset.
  • Author discovers idea while writing; simile halfway between statements.
  • Statement says nothing; readers invent conflicting ones
  • Contextually opposing words expose author's division, aligning with Aporia.
• Other works:
  • "Some Versions of Pastoral" (1935).
  • "Milton's God' (1961).
• Empson was associated with 'close reading'.
• Richards was his pupil.

Robert Penn Warren (1905-89)

• Warren made 'The Southern Review' (1935) – Journal with Cleanth Brooks.
• He won the Pulitzer Prize for "All the King's Men" (1946) and is the only one to win for both fiction and poetry.

Further Key Figures

• Poetry:
  • “Theory of Literature” with Wellek.
  • “Pure and Impure Poetry” essay.
  • “Understanding Fiction.”
  • “Promises.”
  • "Now and Then."
• C.P. Snow
  • "Two Cultures" (1959).
  • “Nor Shall my Sword (1972).
  • “The living Principle” (1975).
  • “Thoughts, Words and Creativity” (1976).
  • Quotes “The humanities and the sciences were in fact 'two cultures'."

William Kurtz Wimsatt & Monroe C. Beardsley

• Authors of “The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry" 1954.

Wimsatt & Beardsley's Concepts

• The Intentional Fallacy regards author's intentions are not important
• The Affective Fallacy discounts the reader's feelings.
• "Text is 'what it is' not 'what it does’,” meaning text is independent of both author and reader.
• René Wellek coined the term 'Southern Critics' for JC, Ransom, Allan Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren (for looking only at text).
• Author of “Concepts of Criticism” 1963.

John Crowe Ransom

• Ransom started the movement in his book "The New Criticism" (1941).
• Ransom stated "A text shall be objective, shall cite the nature of the object” and shall recognize “the autonomy of the work itself as existing for its own sake."
• (Auto-telic text: every text is independent. Has a unified identity.)
• Ransom founded 'Kenyon Review'
• He also founded a group of 16 South American writers 'Fugitives'. Including Allan Tate, and R.P. Warren, etc.
• Some of his other works:
  • “Criticism, inc.” stating criticism must be objective, scientific, systematic.
  • “The Ontological Critic.”
  • "Poems About God."
  • "Essay: New Criticism.”
  • "Poetry: A Note on Ontology.”
• Types of poems include physical/visual, platonic, metaphysical (physical + platonic + reason + feelings).

Continued Investigation

• E.D. Hirsch:
  • “Validity in Interpretation” (1967).
  • Authors intentions are irrelevant; opposed ‘The Verbal Icon'.
• R.P. Blackmur:
  • "A Critic's Job of Work” (1954).
  • A text is a hole in itself. Immature critic > professional critic. As they are confined to their own thoughts, and they murder their insights.
• Gustave Lanson:
  • “French Literary Study” – associated with ‘close reading'
• Extra:
  • TE Hulme and TS Eliot- Textual Analysis - structure is important.

Cambridge Critics

• I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis, Q.D. Leavis, and William Empson.
• They focused on the close examination of literary text and the link between literature and social issues.

Neo-Aristotelians (School)

• Against new criticism
• Chicago School of criticism (founded by R.S. Crane)
• Manifesto "Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern"
• Members included RS Crane, Norman MacLean, Elder Olson, and Richard Mckeon.
• Emphasised on plot, character, and tone.
• R.S. Crane criticised of Tom Jones.

Structuralism (1950-70s)

• Term - Structuralism - 1929
• Challenged New Criticism, rejected Sartre's existentialism and focuses on how human behaviour is determined by cultural, social, and psychological structures, moving from particular to general.
• Argues "Things cannot be understood in isolation; they have to be seen in the context of larger structures they are part of.”
• Properties: wholeness, transformation, and self-regulation.
• Semiotics/Semiology involves study of signs and is the foundation of literary theory.
• Example works:
  • Rene Magritte’s painting “This is Not a pipe” 1929
  • M. Foucault's book of the same name.
  • Berlin Holocaust Memorial, and Bank of China Tower architecture.

Ferdinand De Saussure

• He is the Father of Semiology.
• He states language isn't naming pre-existing things, constructs the world.
• Saussure viewed myth as semiological.
• De Saussure influenced Geneva school and Prague school.
• “Course in General Linguistics” 1916 - meanings are arbitrary and relational through binary opposites or dyads.
• Further aspects -Paradigm axis deals with selection, and Syntagmatic axis with combination, with onomatopoeic words as exception.
  • Langue: abstract system, language as a system
  • Parole: actual speech using the language (interior to langue)
  • Signifier: sound image imprint, written equivalent
  • Signified: concept evoked. Relation of signifier and signified is conventional and arbitrary.
  • Synchronic: language as a system is a particular state.
  • Diachronic: historical, evolution of language.
  • Syntagmatic: phrases, sounds, clauses, sentences combination. Relationship of units or words in linear pattern.
    • Paradigmatic: relationship which holds existing units with potential units. Interchangeable units.
• Speech/Writing -Speech is superior

Charles Sanders Pierce

• He is the Father of Pragmatism. Introduced semiotics.

Pierce’s Triadic Model of Sign

• Icon resembles signified, e.g., map with a direct link.
• Index links significant and signified like cause/effect, e.g., smoke/fire.
• Symbol relation, arbitrary, established socioculturally, e.g., red light/stop and uses unlimited semiosis.

Claude Levi-Strauss

• He is the Father of structural anthropology.
• He gave the concept of ‘binary opposition' inspired by Hegel's thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
• Terms associated with Hegel include ‘Zeitgeist' or 'spirit of the age.'
• He is known for myth analysis, exploring ‘Mythemes' synchronically or diachronically.
• Myth contains opposing elements that 'mediate' or resolve oppositions.
• In myth PoV, he read Oedipus Rex from Thebes city.
• Langue all myths share similarities with Whole cycle, Parole individual variation Tale.
• Key works:
  • “Sad Tropics” 1955 - memoir on the native tribes of America.
  • “Tristes Tropiques" 1955.
  • “Structuralist Anthropology” 1958 - myths have universal laws.
  • “The Savage Mind” 1962 - Includes Bricoleur/bricolage (creating something new by recombining) that connects savage mind (Mythology) and Engineer (craftsman dealing with projects) which is his scientific mind/Modern science.
  • “The Raw and the Cookeď” 1964 concept of ‘reference myth/bororo myth'” and The Elementary Structures of Kinship” 1971, on kinship as blood or marriage.
  • "The Way of the Masks" 1975
• 'Myth' is a concept where every religion has same structure.

Jonathan Culler

• Works include: -"Structuralist Poetics" 1975. -“The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction” 1981 -“Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction” 1997
• Use of structuralism in various aspects: -Linguist Roman Jacobson

Other Structuralists and Semiotics

• Psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan.
• Philosopher, Foucault.
• Social commentary, Jacques Derrida.
• Further notable works:
  • Robert Scholes "Structuralism in Literature" 1974
  • Terence Hawkes "Structuralism and Semiotics" 1977 - in Metheun's 'New Accents'
  • Michael Riffaterre “Semiotics of Poetry” 1978 concept of ‘Superreader'.
  • David Lodge “Working with Structuralism” 1980
  • Frank Kermode
  • “The Living Milton” 1960
  • “The Sense of an Ending” 1967 -"An Appetite for Poetry” 1989 -Autobiography “Not Entitled” 1995 -“Pleasure and Change: The Aesthetics of Canon" 2004
• Other Structuralist: Colin MacCabe
• American structuralists: Jonathan Culler, C.S. Pierce, Charles Morrisz, Noam Chomsky

Roland Barthes

• Started as Structuralist but later became post-structuralist.
• The author is “the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology"
• He saw ‘meaning' as an effect of interconnections among linguistic codes.
• He identified various codes in the structuration process.
• Barthes questioned literary criticism, dismissing its act of uncovering the author's truth.
• Myth is depoliticised speech in bourgeois society.
• Works include: -"Writing Degree Zero” (1953).
  • "Mythologies” (1957 essay): Myth transforms history into nature, ideological critique mass bourgeois culture, character neutrally innocent, empties reality for 'depthless' world, neutralizes history, consists of two systems.
  • Denotation = first order signification.
  • Connotation = Second order signification.
  • “Elements of Semiology” semiotics (Signs and Symbols)
  • “The Photographic Message” 1961
  • “The Rhetoric of the Image” 1964
  • "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” 1966 & 1977 where narrative structures include i.e., Functions, Actions, Narration.
  • "The Death of the Author" (1968): Text has multiple meanings, relates close reading, deconstructionist view, anti-humanistic for reader birth relates impersonality.
  • “Text is a multidimensional space where writings blend”.
  • Text’s unity lies in itsdestination, made from innumerable cultural centres, not personal experience. -"“S/Z"(1970) book: Balzac short story analyzed short story ‘Sarrasine' 561 units five codes narratives structuralism to post: -Proairetic voices with empirics sequence, -Hermeneutics voices of truth puzzles, -Cultural/Referential voices that share knowledge, -Semic voices that denote self and -Symbolic voices of a binary opposition. -Readerly vs. writerly
    • Readerly only consumption traditioinal/
    • Writerly is metonymic, investigates to active participation for meaning-making
• "Empire of Signs" 1970
  • Poststructalism
  • Pleasure of text
  • Distinguishes between pleasure and joy

More recent works include:

- "The Pleasure of the Texť" (1973): distinguished between pleasure and joy. Where:
     - Horizontal reading - text is a transparent story.
     Vertical is language heavy and joy ensues
- “Image-Music-Texť(1977) anthology with text as objects for consumptions

"Camera Lucida" (1980) about photographs and nature

Myth Criticism/Archetypal Criticism

• Northrop Frye (Canadian)

Frye's Works and Concepts

• Works include: -“Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake” (1947). -“Anatomy of Criticism” (1957) where myths encompass deluge and trickster motifs, combining Bible's typological interpretation and William Blake's imagination, revealing magic, dreams (collective unconscious) i.e:
  • Four Essays: ‘Historical Criticism: Theory of Modes', ‘Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols', ‘Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths’, ‘Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres’
  • Summer that is romance depths of heroism -Mythophoeic which has equivalent of Archetypes -Autumn tragedy -Winter is mockery, satire and delusional -Spring comedy wish completion and fantasy
• Used Centripetal moves toward the text) and Centrifugal (moves away from the society).
• His other works include:
  • “The Well-Tempered Critic” 1963
  • “The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society” 1970
  • “The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination” 1971 -"The Great Code: The Bible and Literature" 1982 -“Northrop Frye on Shakespeare” 1986: His ideas related about comic/tragic and iron
• Term is Mentality and Art Science and Art

Other key figures

• Sir James George Frazer wrote “The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion” 1890 while Maud Bodkin made “Archetypal Pattern in Poetry” 1934.

Carl Jung.

• Had four components shadow self

People and Works

• Richard Chase, Leslie Fiedler, Daniel Hoffman, Philip Wheelwright, Robert Graves, and Francis Fergusson.

Socioculturalist/Sociocultural Linguistics

• It concerns Language, Culture, Society.

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

• It includes relativity, determinism.
• Linguistic (Structuralist) conduct.

Dell Hymes

• Explores ethnographic study.

Studies and Reports

• Includes:
• New Bolt Report: teaching English 1921
• BASIC English Report British scientific Richard 1930 with 850 words,
  • Noam Chomsky:
  • Father of Modern Linguistics,

Key Concepts

• Mentality against theory of language acquisitionLAD/universal grammar theory for innate capacity.
• Syntactic structures 1957 foundations laid in the deep
• Asp theory: knowledge/fr
• Reflect: language
• Knowl of law Term Compete Parol

Narratology

• Meaning develops from language's structure instead of individual themes, originating in Vladimir Propp's “Morphology of the Folk Tale” and Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of Heteroglossia.

Vladimir Propp

• He was involved with Narrative elements in Folktales.
• The author of “Morphology of the Folk Tale” 1928.
• Includes 31 narratames and eight characters (hero, helper, villain, false hero, donor, dispatcher, Princess, Princess' father), and has fabula and syuzhet.

Tzvetan Todorov

• The author of “The Typology of Detective Fiction” 1966
• Also "Grammar of Decameron": narratives.
• The science that studies narratives with comprising action narrative and discursive
• The terms and concepts that involve fantastic , Gerard Genette

Transversial

• Cuts across varies genres/ JM Coetsee with concepts including Isotrophy:
  • structural semantics with action and
• Performative Disjunctive is his focus

Post Structuralism

• Structural was is critic ahistorical, Key: to be constructed by Derrida, or one will enter a chajn There are facts; inter _ poetics for express

Jacques Derilla

• Metaphysics concept and ecutre concept against opposition presence contains
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• Mean defers by text express

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