1.

FORMALIST CRITICISM
       Formalist criticism regards literature as a unique form of human knowledge that
needs to be examined on its own terms. “The natural and sensible starting point for
work in literary scholarship,” René Wellek and Austin Warren wrote in their
influential Theory of Literature, “is the interpretation and analysis of the works of
literature themselves.” To a formalist, a poem or story is not primarily a social,
historical, or biographical document; it is a literary work that can be understood only
by reference to its intrinsic literary features—those elements, that is, found in the text
itself. To analyze a poem or story, the formalist critic, therefore, focuses on the words
of the text rather than facts about the author’s life or the historical milieu in which it
was written.

The critic would pay special attention to the formal features of the text—the style
irony in Vanity Fair; Humor in Dickens’ writing, simplicity in Sherwood Anderson or
in Hemingway, etc.）structure (sentence structure: short, long, simple, complicated,
loose sentence; repeatation, parallelism, climax, anti-climax ;oxymoron, imagery,
symbols, figure of speech, tone, and genre

A key method that formalists use to explore the intense relationships within a
poem is close reading, a careful step-by-step analysis and explication of a text.  The
purpose of close reading is to understand how various elements in a literary text work
together to shape its effects on the reader. Since formalists believe that the various
stylistic and thematic elements of literary work influence each other, these critics
insist that form and content cannot be meaningfully separated. The complete
interdependence of form and content is what makes a text literary. When we extract a
work’s theme or paraphrase its meaning, we destroy the aesthetic experience of the
work.

 
The formalist critic knows as well as anyone that poems and plays and novels are
written by men—that they do not somehow happen—and that they are written as
expressions of particular personalities and are written from all sorts of motives—for
money, from a desire to express oneself, for the sake of a cause, etc. Moreover, the
formalist critic knows as well as anyone that literary works are merely potential until
they are read—that is, that they are recreated in the minds of actual readers, who vary
enormously in their capabilities, their interests, their prejudices, their ideas.
Speculation on the mental processes of the author takes the critic away from the work
into biography and psychology. There is no reason, of course, why he should not turn
away into biography and psychology. Such explorations are very much worth making.
But they should not be confused with an account of the work. Such studies describe
the process of composition, not the structure of the thing composed, and they may be
performed quite as validly for the poor work as for the good one. They may be validly
performed for any kind of expression—non-literary as well as literary.

 
9．READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM
        Reader-response criticism attempts to describe what happens in the reader’s
mind while interpreting a text. If traditional criticism assumes that imaginative
writing is a creative act, reader-response theory recognizes that reading is also a
creative process. Reader-response critics believe that no text provides self-
contained meaning; literary texts do not exist independently of readers’
interpretations. A text, according to this critical school, is not finished until it is read
and interpreted. The practical problem then arises that no two individuals necessarily
read a text in exactly the same way. Rather than declare one interpretation correct and
the other mistaken, reader-response criticism recognizes the inevitable plurality of
readings. Instead of trying to ignore or reconcile the contradictions inherent in this
situation, it explores them.
The easiest way to explain reader-response criticism is to relate it to the common
experience of rereading a favorite book after many years. Rereading a novel as an
adult, for example, that “changed your life” as an adolescent, is often a shocking
experience. The bonjok may seem substantially different. The character you
remembered liking most now seems less admirable, and another character you
disliked now seems more sympathetic. Has the book changed? Very unlikely,
but you certainly have in the intervening years. Reader-response criticism explores
how the different individuals (or classes of individuals) see the same text differently.
It emphasizes how religious, cultural, and social values affect readings; it also
overlaps with gender criticism in exploring how men and women read the same text
with different assumptions.
While reader-response criticism rejects the notion that there can be a single
correct reading for a literary text, it doesn’t consider all readings permissible. Each
text creates limits to its possible interpretations. As Stanley Fish admits in the
following critical selection, we cannot arbitrarily place an Eskimo in William
Faulkner’s story “A Rose for Emily” (though Professor Fish does ingeniously imagine
a hypothetical situation where this bizarre interpretation might actually be possible)
poem would be forthcoming. This poem is not only a “refusal to mourn,” like that of
Dylan Thomas, it is a refusal to elegize. The whole elegiac tradition, like its cousin
the funeral oration, turns finally away from mourning toward acceptance, revival,
renewal, a return to the concerns of life, symbolized by the very writing of the poem.
Life goes on; there is an audience; and the mourned person will live through
accomplishments, influence, descendants, and also (not least) in the elegiac poem
itself. Merwin rejects all that. If I wrote an elegy for X, the person for whom I have
always written, X would not be alive to read it; therefore, there is no reason to write
an elegy for the one person in my life who most deserves one; therefore, there is no
reason to write any elegy, anymore, ever.
Reader Response Literary Criticism
 
In the reader response critical approach the primary focus falls on
the reading rather than on the author or the text.
 

Theoretical assumptions:
 Literature is a performative art and each reading is a performance. Literature
exists only when it is read; meaning is an event
 The literary text possesses no fixed and final meaning. Literary meaning is
created by the interaction of the reader and the text. According Louise
Rosenblatt a poem is “what the reader lives through under the guidance of the
text.”
 
How text govern readers:
Focus on how texts guide, constrain, control reading.
Wolfgang Iser argues that the text in part controls the reader´s responses but
contains gaps that the reader creatively fills.
There is a tension between
 the implied reader , who is established by the response-inviting structures of
the text (this type of reader is assumed and created by the work itself)
 and the actual reader, who brings his/her own experiences and
preoccupations to the text.
The Implied Reader
The author creates a relationship with a reader and enables him/her to
discover the meaning of the text.
The tone of voice or features of the narrative voice imply what kind of
reader  - in terms of knowledge and attitude is addressed, what kind of
attention the book is requesting  and what kind of relationship of the narrator
and the reader is assumed to be.
For the child- implied reader authors try to reinforce the relationship by a
very sharply focused point of view. (inthe centre of the story is a child)
Techniques”
 the author puts him/herself into the narrator (3rd person godlike all-seer) or the
1st person child character
 the way s/he comments on the events in the story
 by the attitude s/he adopts towards his/her characters
Many writers cast their tales in the form of fantasy (with animal-human
characters
4．GENDER CRITICISM   
    Gender criticism examines how sexual identity influences the creation and
reception of literary works. Gender studies began with the feminist movement and
were influenced by such works as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and
Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) as well as sociology, psychology, and
anthropology. Feminist critics believe that culture has been so completely dominated
by men that literature is full of unexamined “male-produced” assumptions. They see
their criticism correcting this imbalance by analyzing and combating patriarchal
attitudes.
       Feminist criticism can be divided into two distinct varieties.
       Feminist criticism has explored how an author’s gender influences—consciously
or unconsciously—his or her writing. It is concerned with woman as writer—with
woman as the producer of textual meaning, with the history, themes, genres, and
structures of literature by women. Its subjects include the psychodynamics of female
creativity; linguistics and the problem of a female language; the trajectory of the
individual or collective female literary career; literary history; and, of course, studies
of particular writers and works.
Eg. While a formalist critic emphasized the universality of Emily Dickinson’s poetry
by demonstrating how powerfully the language, imagery, and myth-making of her
poems combine to affect a generalized reader, Sandra M. Gilbert, a leading feminist
critic, has identified attitudes and assumptions in Dickinson’s poetry that she believes
are essentially female.
       Another important theme in feminist criticism is analyzing how sexual identity
influences the reader of a text. It is concerned with woman as reader—with woman as
the consumer of male-produced literature, and with the way in which the hypothesis
of a female reader changes our apprehension of a given text, awakening us to the
significance of its sexual codes. It is a historically grounded inquiry which probes the
ideological assumptions of literary phenomena. Its subjects include the images and
stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions of and misconceptions about women
in criticism. It is also concerned with the exploitation and manipulation of the female
audience, especially in popular culture and film; and with the analysis of woman-as-
sign in semiotic systems. The reader sees a text through the eyes of his or her sex.
        Finally, feminist critics carefully examine how the images of men and women in
imaginative literature reflect or reject the social forces that have historically kept the
sexes from achieving total equality.
Recently, gender criticism has expanded beyond its original feminist perspective.
Critics have explored the impact of different sexual orientations on literary creation
and reception. A men’s movement has also emerged in response to feminism. The
men’s movement does not seek to reject feminism but to rediscover masculine
identity in an authentic, contemporary way. Led by poet Robert Bly, the men s
movement has paid special attention to interpreting poetry and fables as myths of
psychic growth and sexual identity.
          Eg. Female Characters in Lawrence’s Literary Works;Gender Influence in the
Growth of Stephen 

Feminist literary theory and criticism have been characterized by a

number of concerns and emphases, including the following:

 An interest in discovering or “recovering” the works of women writers,

especially those who have not been part of the traditional “canon” of literary
works.
 An interest in exploring the biographical, historical, and cultural
circumstances of works produced by women writers.
 An interest in exploring how women writers have been affected (often
negatively) by the “patriarchal” assumptions of traditional cultures.
 An interest in exploring how women writers have sometimes
challenged and resisted those patriarchal assumptions.
 An interest in exploring whether there is anything distinctively
“feminine” about writings by women.
 An interesting in challenging any continuing vestiges of patriarchy in
society and culture.
 An interest in exploring how female characters are presented, not only
in works by women but in works by men as well.
 An interest in exploring how patriarchal assumptions affect female
characters in works by any kind of writer.
 An interest in exploring how the experience of being female, either as a
writer or a character, can be affected by involvement of other categories of
identity, such as race, class, and religion.
 An interest in doing the kind of basic archival research that allows us to
make new discoveries about works by women writers and about such writers
themselves.
 An interest in making sure that the works of women writers are made
widely accessible both online and in print and that such works are presented
in responsible scholarly editions.
 An interest, at least among some feminist critics, in exploring the
aesthetic riches of texts by feminist writers. (This is a project that has not
received as much attention and commitment as it deserves.)
 An effort to include many more female writers in the “canon” than has
traditionally been the case.
 An effort to study the reception of writings by women, including their
reception by women readers.
 An interest in the distinctive ways, if any, in which women read
literature.
A good brief summary of various concerns of feminist literary theory can be
found in the first paragraph of the eNotes article on this topic:

Feminist literary criticism recognizes that since literature both reflects culture
and shapes it, literary studies can either perpetuate the oppression of women
or help to eliminate it. Thus, feminist literary critics are motivated to raise
questions about literature and literary criticism that are basic to women’s
struggle for autonomy: How does literature represent women and define
gender relations? Why has literary criticism ignored or devalued women’s
writing? How does one’s gender alter the way in which one reads literature? Is
there a feminine mode of writing?

“Formalist” criticism, as the term implies, is chiefly concerned with the “form”
of a literary work rather than with its “content.” In other words, formalists tend
to be more concerned with how a work is written than with what it “says.” They
are the first to insist, however, that “form” and “content” cannot really be
separated. To take a trivial example, the phrase “let’s eat grandma!” is
significantly different in meaning from the phrase “let’s eat, grandma!” merely
because of the addition of a single comma.  This example aptly illustrates that
main formalist claim that any detail of the phrasing of a text, no matter how
apparently small, can significantly affect the meaning of the text. 

A more important example involves the famous line from William

Shakespeare’s Hamlet in which the title character refers to his “too too _____
flesh.”  Which word should fill the blank?  As Amanda Mabillard notes,

Many scholars ask whether Shakespeare intended "solid" to be actually

"sallied", a form of the word "sullied." The second quarto of Hamlet contains
"sallied", but the First Folio prints it as "solid." Modern editors have been quite
divided on the issue. Editors of The Arden Shakespeare choose to use
"sullied", while editors of The New Cambridge Shakespeare have decided
upon "solid." [see link below]

To a formalist, matters such as this – matters involving a single word or even

a single letter or single sound – are highly important. Formalists often think of
texts as “complex unities,” in which both complexity and unity are important. A
text is like a puzzle in which every part is important in making up the whole.
The chief task of any formalist critic is to show how the parts are related to the
whole, a vice versa.

It is the emphasis on “wholeness” and “unity” that has made formalism the
object of attack from so many other, more recent theories. Many of these
other theories argue that works of literature rarely display true unity, and
therefore that any unity “found” in them is actually imposed upon them. Critics
of formalism argue that formalist readings of texts are boringly predictable:
some alleged “unity” will always be the result of the process. Critics of
formalism also often argue that formalism operates in a vacuum – focusing on
“autonomous texts” while ignoring relevant economic, historical, political,
sexual, cultural (etc.) contexts.
Defenders on formalism (which seems to be in a “comeback” phase after
having been attacked for half a century) argue, in response, (1) that formalists
never neglected contexts as much as critics have claimed; (2) that in any case
formalism can work just fine (if not better) in conjunction with concerns about
contexts; (3) that formalist analyses are in fact often far less predictable than
readings offered by other schools, precisely because formalists care about the
tiniest details; (4) that formalism pays attention to the traits that make
“literature” literature (that is, the traits that make a piece of writing call
attention to itself as a piece of writing); and (5) that formalism is in some ways
simply an extension of rhetorical criticism, which has an ancient and
honorable pedigree.