Toward a new formalism

the intrinsic and related problems in criticism and theory

Fredric V. Bogel

pp. 29-53

in: Verena Theile, Linda Tredennick (eds), New formalisms and literary theory, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

One of the defining tasks of any New Formalism is to break decisively with problematic assumptions central to the older formalist project of the New Criticism: assumptions about the unity of a text, about its total meaningfulness, about the intrinsic nature of textual meaning, about the distinguishability of literary from non-literary language by specifiable features, and more. Theorists like John M. Ellis, Stanley Fish, and others have gone some way to revise such assumptions, in most cases by replacing a rhetoric of the intrinsic with a rhetoric of assumptions about the social uses of texts or the attitudes and procedures of communities of interpretation. Such rewriting of the intrinsic — "the language of paradox," "the language of poetry," "literary language" — as a relation between text and reader is a characteristic move of recent formalist criticism. It is, for one thing, a way of revising and thus extending a number of the most valuable insights of the New Critical era without endorsing its more problematic assumptions.