Formalism

 A method, style, way of thinking, etc., that shows very careful attention to traditional
forms and rules

 Marked attention to arrangement, style, or artistic means (as in art or literature) usually
with corresponding de-emphasis of content
In literary criticism, Formalism refers to a style of inquiry that focuses, almost exclusively, on
features of the literary text itself, to the exclusion of biographical, historical, or intellectual contexts.
The name "Formalism" derives from one of the central tenets of Formalist thought: That
the form of a work of literature is inherently a part of its content, and that the attempt to separate
the two is fallacious. By focusing on literary form and excluding superfluous contexts, Formalists
believed that it would be possible to trace the evolution and development of literary forms, and
thus, literature itself.
Literary Theory

"Literary theory" is the body of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of literature. By
literary theory we refer not to the meaning of a work of literature but to the theories that reveal
what literature can mean. Literary theory is a description of the underlying principles, one might
say the tools, by which we attempt to understand literature. All literary interpretation draws on a
basis in theory but can serve as a justification for very different kinds of critical activity. It is
literary theory that formulates the relationship between author and work; literary theory develops
the significance of race, class, and gender for literary study, both from the standpoint of the
biography of the author and an analysis of their thematic presence within texts.

History
There is no one school of Formalism, and the term groups together a number of different
approaches to literature, many of which seriously diverge from one another. Formalism, in the
broadest sense, was the dominant mode of academic literary study in the United States and
United Kingdom from the end of the Second World War through the 1970s, and particularly the
Formalism of the "New Critics," including, among others, I.A. Richards, John Crowe Ransom,
C.P. Snow, and T.S. Eliot. On the European continent, Formalism emerged primarily out of the
Slavic intellectual circles of Prague and Moscow, and particularly out of the work of Roman
Jakobson, Boris Eichenbaum, and Viktor Shklovsky.

Russian Formalism
"Russian Formalism" refers primarily to the work of the Society for the Study of Poetic Language
founded in 1916 in St. Petersburg (then Petrograd) by Boris Eichenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky, and
Yury Tynyanov, and secondarily to the Moscow Linguistic Circle founded in 1914 by Roman
Jakobson. Eichenbaum's 1926 essay "The Theory of the 'Formal Method'" (translated in Lemon
and Reis) provides an economical overview of the approach the Formalists advocated, which
included the following basic ideas:
 The aim is to produce "a science of literature that would be both independent and factual."
 Since literature is made of language, linguistics will be a foundational element of the science
of literature.
 Literature is autonomous from external conditions in the sense that literary language is
distinct from ordinary uses of language, not least because it is not entirely communicative.
 Literature has its own history, a history of innovation in formal structures, and is not
determined by external, material history.
 What a work of literature says cannot be separated from how the literary work says it, and
therefore the form and structure of a work, far from being merely the decorative wrapping
of the content, is in fact an integral part of the content of the work.
Although the Formalists based their assumptions partly on the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de
Saussure and partly on Symbolist notions concerning the autonomy of the text and the
discontinuity between literary and other uses of language, the Formalists sought to make their
critical discourse more objective and scientific than that of Symbolist criticism. Allied at one point
to the Russian Futurists and opposed to sociological criticism, the Formalists placed an “emphasis
on the medium” by analyzing the way in which literature, especially poetry, was able to alter
artistically or “make strange” common language so that the everyday world could be
“defamliarized.” They stressed the importance of form and technique over content and looked for
the specificity of literature as an autonomous verbal art. They studied the various functions of
“literariness” as ways to separate poetry and fictional narrative from other forms of discourse.
Although always anathema to the Marxist critics, Formalism was important in the Soviet
Union until 1929, when it was condemned for its lack of political perspective. Later, largely through
the work of the structuralist linguist Roman Jakobson, it became influential in the West, notably in
Anglo-American New Criticism, which is sometimes called Formalism.

Victor Erlich’s Russian Formalism (1955) is a history; Théorie de la littérature (1965) is a

translation by Tzvetan Todorov of important Russian texts. Anthologies in English include L.T.
Lemon and M.J. Reis, eds., Russian Formalist Criticism (1965), L. Matejka and K. Pomorska,
eds., Readings in Russian Poetics (1971), and Stephen Bann and John Bowlt, eds., Russian
Formalism (1973)

What is formalism? Any introductory study into formalism relies on looking at the historical and
social movements that were shaping such an emergent mode of criticism. Though considering the
historical context of the birth of formalism seems contrary to the movement itself, it is important
to signal that formalism was a reaction to and against Marxist literary theory. Marxist theory,
consistent with Marxist political thought, was preoccupied with the roles of society in the text and
the text in society (Bennett 16). Prior to formalism, literature had often been viewed as a product
of political or social origins, a product which was always attached to its creator. Formalism
departed from the Marxist perspective completely. The formalists did not wish to apply any other
theoretical constructs—sociological, historical, psychoanalytic—to the reading of a text; rather,
the text should, in their view, stand alone and be able to be understood on its own terms. To this
end, the formalists proposed a method for reading a text in such a way; literary works became
machines that could be tinkered with and understood if the component parts and their respective
functions were known (Shklovsky 5).
Ultimately, the formalists addressed all of the questions that are of interest to all literary theorists,
though there are obviously those who reject the formalists’ particular set of arguments and
approaches. Nonetheless, and despite the brevity of their movement, the formalists’ questioning
of some of the basic and most fundamental assumptions of literary theory had a lasting impact on
literary studies in general. With respect to literary production, the formalists introduced the
notion of art for art’s sake, as opposed to art as a political, social, or cultural tool with specifically
articulated goals. With regards to literary interpretation and theory, the formalists offered a
framework for decoding and understanding texts based on the information that they contained.
Various schools of literary theory continue to debate whether the formalists were justified, so to
speak, in their assertions; however, the fact that these two aspects of literary theory continue to
be points of unresolved contention signifies that the formalists identified fundamental literary
concerns that will continue to be examined and debated for some time to come.