LITERARY CRITICISM

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“THE FORMAL APPROACH TO
LITERATURE”

Thessalonica Elma Bergman

 RUSSIAN
FORMALISM
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AMERICAN NEW
CRITICISM
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New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that
dominated American and had an impact on English
literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th
century.

Its chief critical strategy was close reading, particularly

when discussing poetry, emphasizing that a work of
literature functions as a self-contained, self referential
aesthetic object.
New Criticism developed in the 1920s-30s and peakedin
the 1940s-50s. The movement is named after John
Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism.

New Critics focused on the text of a work of literature

and tried to exclude the author's biography and
intention, historical and cultural contexts, and
moralistic bias from their analysis.

Reader's response was not taken into account either.

New Critics often performed a "close
reading" of the text and believed the
structure and meaning of the text were
intimately connected and should not be
analyzed separately. The main aim of
New Criticism was to make literary
criticism scientific.
Studying a passage of prose or poetry in New Critical
style required careful, exacting scrutiny of the passage
itself. Formal elements such as rhyme, meter,
setting,characterization, and plot were used to identify
the Theme of the text. In addition to the theme, the
New Critics also looked for paradox, ambiguity, irony,
and tension to help establish the single best and most
unified interpretation of the text.

Such an approach has been criticized as constituting a

conservative attempt to isolate the text and to shield it
from external, political concerns such as those of race,
class, and gender.
One of the most common grievances
against the New Criticism, is an objection
to the idea of the text as autonomous;
detractors react against a perceived anti
historicism, accusing the New Critics of
divorcing literature from its place in
history.
STRUCTURALISM
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Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of
Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and
Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural
linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes
of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in
linguistics, structuralism appeared in academia in the
second half of the 20th century and grew to become
one of the most popular approaches in academic fields
concerned with the analysis of language, culture, and
society.
The structuralist mode of reasoning has been applied
in a diverse range of fields, including anthropology,
sociology, psychology, literary criticism, and
architecture.

The most prominent thinkers associated with

structuralism include the linguist Roman Jakobson, the
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan, the philosopher and historian Michel
Foucault, the philosopher and social commentator
Jacques Derrida, and the literary critic Roland Barthes.
Proponents of structuralism would argue that a
specific domain of culture may be understood by
means of a structure - modelled on language -
that is
distinct both from the organizations of reality
and
those of ideas or the imagination. In the 1970s,
structuralism was criticized for its rigidity and
ahistoricism.