1. Formalist Approaches

2. Formalist Approaches
Broadly: concerned exclusively with the text in
isolation from the world, author, or reader
Specifically:
Russian Formalism focused on literariness of
texts, defamiliarization, material & device,
story & plot, narrative voice
New Criticism focused on the text as an
object that can be analyzed independent of
author, world, or reader

3. New Criticism: The Quest for “Text-centricity”
• formalist school from 1920 – 1960
• methodology applied to yield single, correct “hidden
meaning” of literary texts
• “close readings” focused on literary devices
• looked at language-denotation, connotation, form, figures,
import, structure.
• valued complexity, oppositions, irony, paradox
• emphasized objectivity in literary criticism
• looks to language denotation, connotation, form, figures, structure
• asks for educated audience/“willing students”

4. Precursors
• Aristotle focused on elements w/ which a work is
composed.
• Romantics stressed organic unity from imagination’s
“esemplastic” power.
• Poe extolled the “singleness of effect” in poetry &
fiction.
• James made the same case for fiction as “organic
form.”

5. Other Names
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Aesthetic criticism
Textual criticism
Ontological criticism
Modernism
Formalism
Practical criticism

6. Practitioners of New Criticism
British:
I. A. Richards,William Empson,
F.R. Leavis
American:
W.K. Wimsatt, Allen Tate, Robert
Penn Warren, Richard Blackmur,
Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe
Ransom

7. Origins in early 1900s
“honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is
directed not upon the poet but upon the
poetry” (Eliot, Selected Essays 17).
Strove for scientific objectivity but of a special
nature because words enable multiple
perspectives.

8. Major Texts of New Criticism
I.A. Richards The Principles of Literary Criticism,
Practical Criticism (1920s)
The Fugitives & Southern Agrarians formed
John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism (1941):
poems as a concrete entity like any other art object
Cleanth Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn (1947):

9. Central Argument
The poem is the raison d’etre.
• to place poet or culture above the literary
expression is to move away from essential unity of
poem.
• employing biography, history or affect is an
inherently vague and unreliable basis for analysis.
• objective analysis is far more inclusive and
forgiving methodology.

10. “The Heresy of Paraphrase”
Cleanth Brooks, 1947
• from The Well Wrought Urn--treatment of ten
poems spanning historical /canonical record
from Shakespeare to Yeats.
• employs “close-reading” techniques to see
“what the masterpieces had in common”
(1354)
• Poems chosen for Brooks
• added metaphysical (Donne) and modern
(Yeats)

11. William K. Wimsatt, Jr.
(1907-75)
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Born-Washington, D.C.
Georgetown, Ph.D. Yale
Taught @ Yale-1939
Known for works on
Samuel Johnson
• Literary Criticism:
• The Verbal Icon
• w/Cleanth Brooks
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The Intentional Fallacy
The Affective Fallacy
Monroe C. Beardsley
(1915-85)
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Born-Connecticut
Ph.D. Yale, briefly in
Philosophy dept.
Mt. Holyoke, 1944
Taught literary criticism
Swarthmore and Temple
Aesthetics and
Philosophy
Joint w/ Wimsatt
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The Intentional Fallacy
The Affective Fallacy

12. What is “Paraphrase”?
The attempt to evaluate a poem by presenting a
proposition about the poem’s meaning apart
from its form; i.e. giving a “prose-sense” to the
poem.

13. Central Argument
• Structure : whole is greater than sum of parts
• Rational meaning and Emotive meaning
• Import
• Suggestion
• Reduction of “meaning”
• lowest common denominator

14. Problems inherent…
• “all such formulations lead away from the center of
the poem—not toward it…”
• Paraphrase strips poem of poetic power
• “form and content, or content and medium, are
inseparable.”(1357)
• Longinus—remark on Euripides (154)
*

15. Two other theoretical errors…
• “Intentionalism”• “Affectionionalism”*

16. The Intentional Fallacy
• Published 1946
• Objective literary criticism defended
• Criticism hampered by use of biography or
“genealogy” to evaluate the effectiveness of
poetry
• Intentionalists tend to move away from the
poem

17. What is the Intentional Fallacy?
• A confusion between the poem and its origins
(genealogy-Genetic Fallacy)
• Starts with the “causes” and ends in “biography and
relativism” (1388)
• Intention: “design or plan in author's mind” (1375)
• “Intention” not stable standard of literary criticism:
• unavailable
• undesirable

18. Unavailable Intention
• Work is “detached from the author at birth” (1376)
• Echoes Jean-Paul Sartre
• Unduly extends the author’s creative freedom.
• Completed work belongs to the public and to their
interpretations and evaluations
• Child/Parent Analogy
*

19. Undesirable Intention
• Work measured against something “outside
of the author” (1381)
• “author psychology” (1381).
• Attractive from an historical or biographical
perspective
• W & B warn against confusing “personal and
poetic studies”
• “Critical inquiries are not settled by
consulting the oracle”(1387)
• Settling a bet: Eliot
• Criticism must depend on recognition of
difference
• Internal vs. external sources of evidence of
meaning

20. Internal vs. External Evidence
• Internal evidence of meaning discovered
through “the semantics and syntax of a
poem, through grammars, dictionaries, and
all the literature which is the source of
dictionaries, [and] in general through all that
makes a language and culture” (1381)
• External evidence of meaning consists of
“revelations about how or why the poet
wrote the poem” (1381)
• One moves toward poem, one moves away

21. Essence of Objective Critical
Literary Analysis
Successful works contain all necessary and
relevant information to find meaning
• Example: Derek Walcott's “Ruins of a Great
House”

22. “The Affective Fallacy”
• Published in 1949
• Companion article to “The Intentional Fallacy”
• Recount history and results of psychological, emotiondriven conception of literary analysis
• Focus on role and function of critic
• Critic is teacher or explicator of meaning
• Arnoldian “personal fallacy”

23. What is the Affective Fallacy?
Confusing the POEM with its RESULTS
i.e. what a poem is with what a poem does
But what does that mean?
How does that represent a fallacy?
*

24. Affective Critics:
Shifting the Focus
• Critics engaged in Affective Theory will
• use emotional response as evaluative
standard
• subjugate poem to subjective emotional
response,
• Critic/reader the actual object of cognitive
focus.
• differentiate cognitive effects and emotive
affects
• In accounting for affect, reader must reengage text
• E.g. Donne’s “The Canonization”

25. Summary
The poem is the raison d’etre.
• To place poet or culture above literary
expression is to move away from essential
unity of poem.
• Employing biography, history or affect is an
inherently vague and unreliable basis for
analysis.
• Objective analysis is far more inclusive and
forgiving methodology.