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16 Cards in this Set
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School of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text.
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Formalism
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Refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. These features include not only grammar and syntax but also literary devices such as meter and tropes. This approach reduces the importance of a text’s historical, biographical, and cultural context.
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Formalism
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Rose to prominence in the early twentieth century as a reaction against Romanticist theories of literature, which centered on the artist and individual creative genius, and instead placed the text itself back into the spotlight, to show how the text was indebted to forms and other works that had preceded it. Two schools of this literary criticism developed, a Russian version, and soon after Anglo-American New Criticism. The dominant mode of academic literary study in the US at least from the end of the Second World War through the 1970s, especially as embodied in René Wellek and Austin Warren's Theory of Literature (1948, 1955, 1962).
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Formalism
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Refers to the work of the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOYAZ) founded in 1916 in St. Petersburg (then Petrograd) by Boris Eichenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky and Yury Tynyanov.
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Russian Formalism
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A movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object.
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New Criticism
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Viktor Shklovsky contributed concepts of defamiliarization and the plot/story distinction.
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Russian formalism
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*I.A. Richards
*Wimsatt & Beardsley * T.S. Eliot * F.R. Leavis * William Empson * Robert Penn Warren * John Crowe Ransom * Cleanth Brooks |
New Criticism
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Developed in the 1920s-30s and peaked in the 1940s-50s. The movement is named after a 1941 book by John Crowe Ransom. These critics focused on the text of a work of literature and tried to exclude the reader's response, the author's intention, historical and cultural contexts, and moralistic bias from their analysis.
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New Criticism
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In 1954, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published a classic and controversial essay titled "The Intentional Fallacy", in which they argued strongly against the relevance of an author's intention, or "intended meaning" in the analysis of a literary work. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the words on the page were all that mattered; importation of meanings from outside the text was considered irrelevant, and potentially distracting.
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New Criticism
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Ferdinand de Saussure
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Structuralism
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An example of such a reading might be if a student concludes the authors of West Side Story did not write anything "really" new, because their work has the same pattern as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In both texts a girl and a boy fall in love (a "formula" with a symbolic operator between them would be "Boy + Girl") despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other ("Boy's Group - Girl's Group" or "Opposing forces") and conflict is resolved by their death.
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Structuralism
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Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva.
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Post-structuralism
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Holds that the concept of "self" as a separate, singular, and coherent entity is a fictional construct. Instead, an individual comprises tensions between conflicting knowledge claims (e.g. gender, race, class, profession, etc.). Therefore, to properly study a text a reader must understand how the work is related to his or her own personal concept of self. This self-perception plays a critical role in one's interpretation of meaning.
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Post-structuralism
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The author's intended meaning is secondary to the meaning that the reader perceives. Rejects the idea of a literary text having a single purpose, a single meaning, or one singular existence.
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Post-structuralism
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A critic in this school must be able to use a variety of perspectives to create a multifaceted interpretation of a text, even if these interpretations conflict with one another. It is particularly important to analyze how the meanings of a text shift in relation to certain variables, usually involving the identity of the reader (for example: class, racial, or sexual identity).
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Post-structuralism
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Différance, Trace, Écriture, Hymen / Phallocentrism, Pharmakon
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Deconstructionism
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