The Formalist Approach

Presented By:

Clarisa T. Zuñiga
 Process of
Formalist Analysis
 This process is only complete
when everything in the work
has been accounted for in
terms of its overall form.

 The reading stands on its own.

 What are the ways to appreciate
Form?
 Intensive reading begins with a sensitivity to the words of the
text.

 The awareness of multiple meanings will offer significant

guidelines to what the work says.

 When all the words, phrases, metaphors, images, and symbols

are examined in terms of each other and of the whole, any
literary text worth our effort will display its own internal logic.
 What should we do to make ourselves
readers in a formalist way?
We must analyze the
following:
 Repeated Details
 Structure  Climax
 Interrelationship  Dénouement
 Denotations and  Balances, tensions,
Connotations rhythms and rhymes
 Context  Speaker’s Voice
 Images  A single line and even the
 Symbols words used
 Key Concepts,
Terms and Devices
A. Form and Organic Form
External Form

 In the past form means external form.

 Formalist Critics are moderately interested

in external form.
 B. Texture, Image and Symbol

 New critics focused on close analysis of

imagery and metaphor.

 The consistency of imagery became an

index to the quality of a given poem.
 When an image or incident takes on
meaning beyond its objective self; it
becomes a symbol.

 It is the nature of symbols to have

extensional possibilities, to open out the
world beyond the art object itself.
 Even in a formalist reading we must go
sometimes beyond the pure aestheticism of
the work to the extended meaning of the
work as suggested by its symbol.

 Symbol is a way of using something integral

to the work to reach beyond the work and
engage the world of value outside the work.
 C. Fallacies
Intentional Fallacy Affective Fallacy

 The critic of the work  The work is judged by its

makes the mistake of NOT effect on the reader or viewer
particularly its emotional
divorcing the literary work
effect.
from many intention that
the author have had for the
work.
 No work of literary art can be
divorced from the readers and
from the reader’s response.
 The author is not a very
reliable witness  Catharsis
 D. Point of View

 Generally considered a virtue in the work of

literary art for it preserves the internal form,
the organic quality of the work.
 What if there is a nonexistent point of
view?

 It flaws the work, for the work then may go

in several directions and therefore have no
integrity.
 In great epics and traditional novel, the
omniscient narrator possessed a godlike
quality and is narrated from a third person
perspective.

 In more restricted perspective, the author

might limit the narrator.
According to Wayne Booth, narrators can be :

 Reliable
 Unreliable

The point of view has to be recognized as a

basic means of control over the area or
scope of the action or the quality of fictional
world offered to the reader.
 In firs person Point of View, the narration is
limited to that person’s telling.

 The narrator is limited to what he sees and

reports.

 We only read the dialogue of the character

 A formalist approach must study them for the

reader to appreciate the fullness of a work.
 E. The Speakers Voice
 The tone of voice in a text will reveal the
feelings of the speaker.

 The way the reader hears the speaker will

condition the poem, give it its form and may
even make the poem into poems by varying
the voices.
 F. Tension, Irony and Paradox
 Tension is the resolution of opposites, often in
irony and paradox.

Hugh Holman and William Harmon:

“the integral unity that results from the successful

resolution of the conflicts of abstraction and
concreteness, of general and particular, of
denotation and connotation”
 Widely used by New Critics, particularly of
poetry as a pattern of paradox or as a form
of irony.