LECTURE FIVE+SIX
The Formalist Approach
An Introduction
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears;
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
Syllables and Meter
The speaker (mother? father? lover?)
remembers the immunity of the female
figure to any earthly touch. After a gap
in time (she) is dead and buried.
The meter is unvarying.
Soft and strong syllables alternate (4)
in lines 1, 3, 5, 7 then (3) in the rest.
The rhymes are equally regular and
predictable.
Irony and Paradox
The speaker was secure (slumbering) in that the female
figure would somehow transcend earthly normalities.
The "slumber" of line (1) has become the eternal sleep of
death.
The "seal" of the "spirit" has become the coffin seal of
the body.
The life of the dynamic person in lines (3,4) where sense
perceptions of touching and feeling seem transmuted
into angelic dimensions, is now turned into unfeeling
death.
The once motion-filled person is still in motion- but of
rocks and stones, and gravestones.
Irony, Paradox and
Ambiguity
The sleep of life becomes the sleep of
death.
The sibilant sounds of "s" suggest quiet
contentment, but in the second stanza
seem mournful echoes.
"Spirit" and "seal" continue the sibilant
quality and are ambiguous terms "spirit”
(death + life), “seal” (security + finality)
The word “thing” in line (3)
Structure and Texture
The references to the senses (feel, touch in stanza1)
→ (motion +hears + sees in stanza 2) involves the
muscles in kinetics and kinesthesia
In line (7), the reality of kinetic motion without
kinesthesia
(Rolled round) alliterating “r” and the consonance of
the “d”
The two uses of "no" in line (5), if stressed will give
greater impact to the negative effect of the whole
statement.
Ebullient sound in line (7) against the finality and
slowed pace of the heavily slowed line (8)
THE PROCESS OF FORMALIST
ANALYSIS: MAKING THE CLOSE
READER
1. Be sensitive to the words of the text
(denotative + connotative) multiple
meanings, even etymologies of words.
2. Look for structural relationships and
patterns not only of sentences but of
stanzas, the tone or mood or the shifting of
moods.
3. The sequence of plot elements, or the
juxtaposition of scenes in a play.
4. probe the connotations, symbols and images
THE PROCESSO F FORMALIST
ANALYSIS: MAKING THE CLOSE
READER
Look for allusions to history or mythology,
or to another work of literature.
Words with more than one meaning
→multiple readings →irony
Structure, shape, interrelationships,
denotations and connotations, images,
symbols, repeated details, climax balances
and tensions, rhythms and rhymes sounds,
the speaker's apparent voice, a single line or
even a word.
MAKING THE CLOSE
READER
The difference between close reading and the
way most people read most of the time is that,
whereas it is generally agreed that it is the big
picture that matters, close reading emphasizes
small details. We have been trained to read a
book globally: that is, to think of the book as a
whole, identify its main idea, and understand all
of its parts as fitting together to make up that
whole. Close reading, on the other hand, is a
technique for letting the whole book, the main
argument, the global picture fade into the
background.
MAKING THE CLOSE
READER
When we close read, we zero in on details but we
do not immediately fit those details into our idea of
the whole book. Instead we try to understand the
details themselves as much as possible, to derive
as much meaning as we can from them. The
reason for this is that the detail is the best possible
safeguard against projection. It is the main idea or
the general shape which is most likely to
correspond to our preconceptions about the book.
But we cannot so easily predict the details. So by
concentrating on the details, we disrupt our
projection; we are forced to see what is really there
A Formalist View of Literature
The name of the author is not important.
The time in which the author lived is not
important.
Any cultural impact on the author’s life is
not important.
The political beliefs of the author are not
important.
The actual reader is not important.
Formalists Focus on Specific
Aspects
Formalists pay special attention to the
formal features of the text – the style,
structure, imagery, tone, and genre.
Not examined in isolation – what gives a
literary text its special status as art is how
all its elements work together to create the
reader’s total experience
Great literature is “universal.”
Specific passages in great works of
literature can be closely analyzed to
determine its message
Formalism Ignores Peripheral Aspects
Formalists believe that looking at the
psychology and biography of the author
inform the writing process, not the
composition itself.
Formalism does not evaluate or consider the
religious, moral, or political value of a piece.
Formalism strives to force literary or artwork
to stand on its own.
A Checklist of Formalist Critical
Questions
How is the work structured or organized?
How does it begin? Where does it go next?
How does it end?
What is the relationship of each part of the
work to the work as a whole? How are the
parts related to one another?
Who is narrating or telling what happens in
the work? How is the narrator, speaker, or
character revealed to readers? How do we
come to know and understand this figure?
A Checklist of Formalist Critical
Questions
Who are the major and minor characters, what do they
represent, and how do they relate to one another?
What are the time and place of the work – its setting?
How is the setting related to what we know of the
characters and their actions? To what extent is the
setting symbolic?
What kind of language does the author use to
describe, narrate, explain, or otherwise create the
world of the literary work? More specifically, what
images, similes, metaphors, symbols appear in the
work? What is their function? What meanings do they
convey?
A BRIEF HISTORY
Developed by English and American critics
in the first two-thirds of the twentieth
century.
To many students of literature during that
era, it was called the New Criticism.
In the last third of the century, it was called
by other abusive names
“formalist” will be used synonymously with
the methodology of the New Critics not
directly with the Russian formalists.
The text as language
David Lodge writes:
All good criticism is ... necessarily a response to
the creative use of language, whether it is
talking explicitly of “plot” or “character” or any
other of the categories of narrative literature.
These terms are useful–indeed essential–but the
closer we get to defining the unique identity
and interest of this plot, of that character, the
closer we are brought to a consideration of the
language in which we encounter these things
