The Literary Criticism Web

Beginning in the 1920's and coalescing in the 1940's, an interpretative approach emerged that did not define literature as essentially the self-expressive product of the artist nor as an evaluative reflection or illumination of cultural history. These "New Critics" opposed the traditional critical practice of using historical or biographical data to interpret literature. Rather, they focused on the literary work as an autotelic object. Early proponents of this approach included I.A. Richards (The Principles of Literary Criticism, 1924) and William Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1930). In America, seminal figures included Cleanth Brooks, William Wimsatt, and John Crowe Ransom. Ransom's The New Criticism (1941) provided an affirmative name for the critical approach, but as the years have passed and other new theories of criticism have emerged, "formalism" has become an equally common, and perhaps more descriptive, label: the New Critic explores and assesses the meaning of literature through an analysis of its internal form. From the 1940's through the 1960's formalist principles defined the mainstream standards of good criticism. These principles have been tempered and even rejected by newer critical theories, but the close reading of the text espoused by formalism remains a common mode of discourse in the literature classroom.

For the New Critic or the Formalist, the meaning of a literary work is not determined by the author's intention, nor by the reader's perception, nor by the cultural background. Rather meaning is determined by the achieved content of the text. A poem may obviously be produced within a culture milieu and by an idiosyncratic personality, and it may even allude explicitly to these external social or biographical contexts. However, for the New Critic the poem is not a cultural or biographical artifact but rather an autonomous and self-determinant art object. The meaning of literature is not dependent upon its reflection of an external cultural reality; instead literary meaning is an intrinsic attribute of the work and therefore publically accessible and verifiable. (See Wimsatt and Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy.")

The reader discovers meaning internally within the work through the experience of its organic unity. As its constituent parts juxtapose with or support one another, the literary work's unique architecture shapes its unifying theme(s). Describing the unique architecture or form of the literary work and analyzing the forces that make its parts work together -- this is how the New Critic understands and analyzes the meaning of literature.

Critical Assumptions

These basic assumptions undergird most FORMALIST CRITICISM:

1. The literary text is not a cultural artifact but a unified, self-contained and self-defining piece of art. The reader does not need specialized or detailed contextual knowledge beyond the text to understand literary meaning.
   
2. The meaning of a literary text is conveyed inherently in its unique form or structure. Thus, the primary task of criticism is to highlight and explain the organic unity of a text.
   
3. Just as a living organism contains organ systems by which it functions, so the literary text contains inter-related images and linguistic elements. These motifs are important manifestations of the organic structure of the text.
   
4. Like an animal's organs, some images or motifs are crucial to the meaning of the text. These objective correlatives reflect the thematic unity of the text and its structure.
   
5. Every piece of the text, like every cell in an organism or every brick in a building, contributes to the life or meaning of the text. Formalists ideally seek to explain and assess the function of all pieces of the text.
   
6. Frequently, key elements of the literary work dramatize a tension central to the work's conflict or theme. Describing this tension within the work often exposes an irony or ambiguity crucial to literary meaning.

These last two assumptions make possible the dynamic dialogue of formalist criticism. One reader or critic cannot identify, much less account for, all pieces of even a modest literary text. However, formalist critics believe that collectively they can articulate the stable and absolute meaning of the text. Based upon the assumptions highlighted above, a FORMALIST discussion of literature usually includes the following:

In focus and style, formalist criticism contrasts sharply with historical criticism. The latter tends to focus on the "big picture" of culture reflected in the small canvas of the text. The impulse of the historical critic is to extrapolate from the text into the "real" world that the text is "really" about. The formalist critic, on the other hand, ignores that "real" external world and instead takes a magnifying glass or even a microscope to the intricate internal structure and aesthetic reality created by the patterns of language and imagery in the text. Yet, paradoxically, in its careful study of the aesthetic objectivity of the literary work, formalist criticism nonetheless seeks an illumination of universal truths.

updated 07/30/99