Literary Criticism
Literary Criticism
Literary Criticism
Formalism
● The decades following the early 1970s, the word "Formalism" took on
a negative feeling, denoting works of literary criticism that were so
absorbed in meticulous reading as to have no larger cultural
relevance.
● Many critics believe that formalism will make a return as it is the best
way to look at literacy in the 21st century
Authors and books
● I.A. Richards' books “Principles of Literary Criticism and Practical
Criticism” (1924)
● T.S. Eliot's essays "Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)" and
"Hamlet and His Problems (1920)"
Educated at the University of St. Petersburg, Shklovsky helped found OPOYAZ.He was also
connected with the Serapion Brothers, a collection of writers that began meeting in Petrograd (St.
Petersburg) in 1921. Both groups felt that literature’s importance lay primarily not in its social
content but rather in its independent creation of language. In O teori prozy (1925; “On the Theory of
Prose”) and Metod pisatelskogo masterstva (1928; “The Technique of the Writer’s Craft”), Shklovsky
argued that literature is a collection of stylistic and formal devices that force the reader to view the
world afresh by presenting old ideas or mundane experiences in new, unusual ways. His concept of
ostranenie, or “making it strange,” was his chief contribution to Russian Formalist theory.
He returned permanently to the Soviet Union in the year 1923 after moving to Berlin, at which time
the Soviet authorities dissolved OPOYAZ, obliging Shklovsky to join other state-sanctioned literary
organs. With his essay “Monument to a Scholarly Error” (1930), he finally bowed to the Stalinist
authorities’ displeasure with Formalism. Thereafter, he tried to adapt the theory of the accepted
doctrine of Socialist Realism. He continued to write voluminously, publishing historical novels, film
criticism, and highly praised studies of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Vladimir Mayakovsky.
Viktor Shklovsky
English Literature
I.A Richards
I.A. Richards, (Ivor Armstrong Richards), (born Feb. 26, 1893, Sandbach, Cheshire, Eng.—died Sept. 7, 1979,
Cambridge, Cambridgeshire), English critic, poet, and teacher who was highly influential in developing a
new way of reading poetry that led to the New Criticism and that also influenced some forms of
reader-response criticism.
Richards was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and was a lecturer in English and moral
sciences there from 1922 to 1929. In that period he wrote three of his most influential books: The
Meaning of Meaning (1923; with C.K. Ogden), a pioneer work on semantics; and Principles of Literary
Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929), companion volumes that he used to develop his critical
method.
During the 1930s, Richards spent much of his time developing Basic English, a system originated by
Ogden that employed only 850 words; Richards believed a universally intelligible language would help
to bring about international understanding. In 1942 he published a version of Plato’s Republic in Basic
English. He became professor of English at Harvard University in 1939, working mainly in primary
education, and emeritus professor there in 1963.
A student of psychology and philosophy along with literary forms, Richards concluded that poetry
performs a therapeutic function by coordinating a variety of human impulses into an aesthetic whole,
helping both the writer and the reader maintain their psychological well-being. He valued a “poetry of
inclusion” that was able to contain the widest variety of warring tensions and oppositions.
I.A Richards in three
minutes
Review
Works Cited
Tahir, Maria Raja. “Formalism (Literary Theory).” LinkedIn SlideShare, 9 Dec. 2012,
www.slideshare.net/mariaraja232/formalism-literary-theory
Davies, Hugh Alistair, et al. “T.S. Eliot.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 22
Sept. 2019, www.britannica.com/biography/T-S-Eliot.