Formalism (literature)

Formalism, in literary theory, refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent structural features of a particular text.

In the study of a text, no outside influence should be taken into account. Formalism rejects or sometimes simply brackets—that is, ignores for analysis purposes—the notions of culture or social influence, authorship, or content, focusing instead on modes, genres, discourses, and forms.

Features

Its features include not only grammar and syntax, but also literary aids such as meter and figures. The formalist approach downplays the historical, biographical, and cultural context of a text.

Formalism rose to prominence in the early 20th century as a reaction to romantic theories of literature, which focused on the artist and individual creative genius, once again placing the text itself in the spotlight to display that it was indebted to the forms and other works that had preceded it. In particular, close reading (particularly in poetry) was emphasized to discover how a literary work functioned as an independent, self-contained book.

Mainly three schools of formalist literary criticism developed, Russian Formalism of the 1920s, Anglo-American New Criticism in the 1940s and 1950s and the French Nouvelle critique of the 1960s. Formalism was the dominant mode of academic literary study in the United States, at least from the end of World War II until the 1950s. 1970, especially as embodied in the Theory of Literature by René Wellek and Austin Warren (1948, 1955, 1962).

Pedagogy

William H. Thelin criticizes Maxine Hairston's approach to teaching composition from a current-traditional point of view, which mixes with the political. He asserts that "No matter how sound the policy is... the student would have no choice but to regurgitate that dogma in the clearest possible terms and shift attention to questions of structure and correctness."

Writes Mary Ann Cain that "formalism asserts that the text stands on its own as a complete entity, apart from the writer who produced it." Furthermore, Cain says that "one may regard textual products as teachable and even thus holding that being a writer is a 'natural' act, one that is not subject to instruction. Composition, like creative writing, has flourished on the assumption that students are already writers, or have the ability to write. ability to learn, and that everyone should be a writer. However, the questions that composition tends to raise within this assumption are not so much about what aspects of writing can or cannot be taught, but how writing can be taught, and under what conditions.

Regarding formalist composition, one must ask: “To what extent is this 'necessity' real? of 'academic discourse', more than is the need for more 'imaginative writing' real, except to perform some function, to do something? ?”.

Research

Formalism research involves studying the ways students present their writing. Some ways formalism research is conducted involve allowing the text to speak to readers rather than removing unintended meaning in it. a written piece.