Introduction to Literary Theories and Criticisms (Enla 422), 2011
Key Terms: Intentional Fallacy
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- Heresy of Paraphrase
- 2.3.3.2 Russian Formalism According to Eagleton (1983), Krishnaswamy (2001), and Siegel (n.d), the above
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Intentional Fallacy - equating the meaning of a poem with the author's intentions. Affective Fallacy - confusing the meaning of a text with how it makes the reader feel. A reader's emotional response to a text generally does not produce a reliable interpretation. Heresy of Paraphrase - assuming that an interpretation of a literary work could consist of a detailed summary or paraphrase. Close reading (from Bressler, 2003) - "a close and detailed analysis of the text itself to arrive at an interpretation without referring to historical, authorial, or cultural concerns" (263). 2.3.3.2 Russian Formalism According to Eagleton (1983), Krishnaswamy (2001), and Siegel (n.d), the above linguistic movements began in the 1920s, were suppressed by the Soviets in the 1930s, moved to Czechoslovakia and were continued by members of the Prague Linguistic Circle (including Roman Jakobson, Jan Mukarovsky, and René Wellek). The Prague Linguistic Circle viewed literature as a special class of language, and rested on the assumption that there is a fundamental opposition between literary (or poetical) language and ordinary language. Formalism views the primary function of ordinary language as communicating a message, or information, by references to the world existing outside of language. In contrast, it views literary language as self-focused: its function is not to make extrinsic references, but to draw attention to its own "formal" features--that is, to interrelationships among the linguistic signs themselves. Literature is held to be subject to critical analysis by the sciences of linguistics but also by a type of linguistics different from that adapted to ordinary discourse, because its laws produce the distinctive features of literariness (Abrams, pp. 165-166). An important contribution made by Victor Schklovsky (of the Leningrad group) was to explain how language--through a period of time--tends to become "smooth, unconscious or transparent." In contrast, the work of literature is to defamiliarize language by a process of "making strange." Dialogism refers to a theory, initiated by Mikhail Bakhtin, arguing that in a dialogic work of literature--such as in the writings of Dostoevsky--there is a "polyphonic interplay of various characters' voices ... where no worldview is given superiority over others; neither is that voice which may be identified with the author's necessarily the most engaging or persuasive of all those in the text" (Childers & Hentzi, p. 81). Saussure's ideas caught on most rapidly in Russia, where of course the Revolution had overthrown bourgeois lifestyles and conceptions. Many of the Russian critics had already been moving in a similar direction, encouraged by the acute consciousness of craft which Symbolist poets exhibited, and by technical studies of Pushkin's art. Very obliquely, the Formalists also drew sustenance from the Art for Art's Sake movement that swept Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. Both movements were anti-realist, denying that morality, philosophy or subject should be the concern of a poem. What did matter were verbal qualities: the evocative power of words for the Symbolists, their strident novelty for the Futurists. But whereas the Italian Futurists strove for a new diction to express the new age, the Russian Futurists believed that poetic speech should be an end in itself, not a medium for conveying ideas and emotions. Many schools of poetry would be extinguished by such a conception, but the Russian Futurists were iconoclastic and lived dangerously. Many poets experimented wildly, arbitrarily using words for their form and texture rather than any communicative value. Mayakovsky wrote: "Art is not a copy of nature, but the determination to distort nature in accordance with its reflections in the individual consciousness". Much that the Russian Futurists bequeathed was very valuable. They made countless studies of rhyme, metre, consonantal clusters, etc. of the Russian classics and of poems by contemporaries. They claimed, contrary to Symbolist assertions, that words and their connotations are not the most important ingredient of poetry. They replaced loose talk about inspiration and verbal magic by "study of the laws of literary production". In regarding literary history as successive revolts against prevailing canons, the young Futurists embraced a rather crude relativism, however, with results apparent even to them: Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy continued to be read for all that Mayakovsky called them period pieces. Shklovsky was not consistent in asserting that the poet's art lies in deforming reality to make it fresh. Nor did Brik really believe that the author is immaterial, that Eugene Onegin would have been written anyway had Pushkin not lived. Much of the writing was cavalierly provocative, originating in café talk, sharpened by youthful high spirits into polemic. The Russian Formalists were materialists and anti-traditionalists, who tried to reach some rapprochement with social and political concerns. At first their approach was somewhat mechanical, treating literature simply as an assembly of literary devices. Subsequently they investigated the interrelated of parts, an "organic" approach. Finally, in 1928, Tynyanov and Jakobson recast literature as a system where every component had a constructive function, just as the social fabric was a "system of systems." But the short period of comparative tolerance of the early twenties changed as Stalinism tightened its grip, and the Formalists were obliged to recant, turn to novel writing, or flee abroad. That literature should not be subordinated to narrow Marxist concerns is a theme to which Russian authors occasionally returned in the succeeding thirty years, but an aesthetic divorced from socialism remained a heresy in the Soviet Union. The Russian Formalists tried to explain how aesthetic effects were produced by literary devices, and how literary writing differed from nonliterary. Literature, as they saw it, was an autonomous product, and should be studied by appropriate methods, preferably scientific. The literary was not distinguished from the non-literary by subject matter, poetic inspiration, philosophic vision, or sensory quality of the poetic image, but by its verbal art. Tropes, particularly metaphor, were the key, as they shifted objects to a new sphere of perception, making the familiar strange, novel and exciting. Of course Aristotle had accepted unusual words as necessary to poetic diction, and the Romantics saw novelty and freshness as one of the hallmarks of true poetry. Surrealists made poems as a renascence of wonder, an act of renewal. But Jakobson deepened the interest. "The distinctive feature of poetry lies in the fact that a word is perceived as a word and not merely a proxy for the denoted object or an outburst of emotion, that words and their arrangement, their meaning, their outward and inward form acquire weight and value of their own". Now if rhythm, euphony and startling word order should converge on a word so as to throw into relief its complex texture, its density of meanings and associations that was nothing unusual. Few conscientious writers would disagree. Words, and the meanings and emotions they carry, are the material assembled into a poem by the usual devices of this art form. Exactly in the same manner, a painter takes the outside world as his raw materials rather than the given "content" which he must faithfully reproduce. But Jakobson and Zirmunsky equated this "material" with the verbal. That was the crucial difference. Words for them drew their meaning from their arrangements within the poem, not their outside referents, an attitude analogous to Saussure's closed system of arbitrary signs. Burris (1999) says that New Critics refer to the historical / biographical critic's belief that the meaning or value of a work may be determined by the author's intention as "the intentional fallacy." They believe that this approach tends to reduce art to the level of biography and make it relative (to the times) rather than universal. A formalistic approach to literature, once called New Criticism, involves a close reading of the text. Formalistic critics believe that all information essential to the interpretation of a work must be found within the work itself; there is no need to bring in outside information about the history, politics, or society of the time, or about the author's life. Formalistic critics (presumably) do not view works through the lens of feminism, psychology, mythology, or any other such standpoint, and they are not interested in the work's affect on the reader. Formalistic critics spend much time analyzing irony, paradox, imagery, and metaphor. They are also interested in the work's setting, characters, symbols, and point of view. This approach can be performed without much research, and it emphasizes the value of literature apart from its context (in effect makes literature timeless). Virtually all critical approaches must begin here. However, the text is seen in isolation. Formalism ignores the context of the work. It cannot account for allusions. It tends to reduce literature to little more than a collection of rhetorical devices. Download 333 Kb. Share with your friends:
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