Literary Criticism.pdf

Literary Criticism Schools, Assumptions,
and Critics
The Who, What, Where, When, and
Why of Formalism
How It All Got Started
Two groups of guys got together in Russia in the 1910s. Yes, groups
of guys get together all the time of course (in Russia and elsewhere),
and nothing usually comes of it except maybe a game of beer
pong—or vodka pong if you're in Russia. However, in the 1910s in
Moscow and St. Petersburg, it wasn't just any guys getting together.
It was a bunch of super clever, almost terrifyingly well-read guys.
The first group of dudes formed the Moscow Linguistic Circle in
1915. They included Roman Jakobson (whom we'll learn more about
soon). These guys basically sat around thinking and chatting and
writing about linguistics mostly, but also literature when they felt like
a day off.
The second group, OPOYAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic
Language—yeah, don't ask us how that's abbreviated into OPOYAZ,
we're going Russian to English here), was founded in St. Petersburg
in 1916. It included people like Boris Eikhenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky,
and Yuri Tynyanov. These guys thought and chatted and wrote,
usually about poetry, but also linguistics when they needed a break.
These two circles were kind of independent of one another—Moscow
and St. Petersburg are a whole overnight train ride away from each
other, after all—but the groups also collaborated. And their founding
marked the beginning of Formalism as a theoretical movement. It
was the members of these two circles who developed some of the
most important Formalist concepts and ideas.
The Big Names in Formalism
When we talk about Formalism, we can't not talk about Viktor
Shklovsky. Even if his name is kind of hard to say. He started out as
part of the St. Petersburg OPOYAZ circle and came up with some
seriously big Formalist ideas. He's the guy who first made the
distinction between "plot" and "story," and he also came up with the
notion of "defamiliarization." If those sound de-familiar to you now,
just you wait—this guy's ideas were huge.
Lev Jakubinsky didn't come up with as many big ideas as Shklovsky
(seriously, he doesn't even have his own Wikipedia page). But he did
come up with one very important idea: he's the guy who first tried to
explain the difference between "poetic" and "practical" language.
Jakubinsky's distinction between poetic and practical language
became really, really important to other Formalists, like Yuri

Tynyanov and Osip Brik, who ran with it (and did such a good job
that they earned their own Wikipedia spots).
Boris Eikhenbaum, also part of OPOYAZ, is important mainly
because of an essay he wrote called "Theory of the 'Formal
Method,'" which summarizes Formalism as a theoretical movement.
Sure, he wrote a bunch of other things too. But the point is that this
essay gives us a "big picture" of Formalism by explaining the
different concepts and methods that developed within this school and
the relationship of different theorists to each other. Which makes
things a heck of a lot easier for us. Thank you, Boris.
Then there's this guy Roman Jakobson, who was part of the Moscow
Linguistics Circle. In the wonderful world of Formalism, pretty much
everywhere we turn we'll find Roman Jakobson. That's because he
stands at the crossroads of a whole bunch of different disciplines and
theoretical schools, and not just Formalism, even though that's
basically his hometown.
So Jakobson: this guy was a linguist. He was also a Formalist literary
theorist. He also developed the concept of "literariness." He was a
"structuralist." It was largely thanks to Jakobson—who emigrated to
the United States during World War II—that all of these wonderful
Formalist and Structuralist ideas reached us way over here in
America. Think of him as "The Bridge."
Watch out for literary critics. They
can get feisty.
A big reason the Formalists got together in the first place was
because they were sick and tired of the state of literary criticism in
Russia in the early 1900s (and let's face it, people in Russia were
pretty sick and tired of everything in the early 1900s—at least, they
were until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917).
As far as the Formalist fellas were concerned, though, everywhere
they turned, they found literary critics talking about how this or that
poem was an emanation of the author's "soul," or how this or that
novel reflected a certain "philosophical" or "psychological" viewpoint.
Pretty dry, huh?
So the Formalists asked, why the borsht are we looking outside the
text to try to explain it? We shouldn't have to do psychology or
philosophy to explain a work of literature. We should be
doing literary criticism. Which means, they argued, that the focus
should be brought back to the text itself. Throw all that other stuff—
authorial biography, cultural context, philosophical context, politics—
out the window. Let's just look at the text, ladies and gentlemen.
Which is exactly what they went on to do. Of course nowadays we're
used to looking very closely at a text as soon as we start studying for
the SAT in second grade, but back when the Formalists started
doing it, it was new. What was especially new was the Formalists'

really rigorous focus on language and the linguistic components of a
text. These guys were obsessed with studying syntax, grammatical
construction, and the sounds of words, and how all that stuff
functioned in poetry.
For them, literature was made up of a sum of "devices." Does a
machine pop into your head when you hear the word "device"? Well
they meant that, but in books.
A literary "device" might be anything from metaphor to repetition
to parallelism and beyond. The Formalists said that we need to
identify these devices and investigate how they're operating or
functioning in a given text. And by doing that, we can
understand any literary text, without having to go off and research
the author's biography or some obscure philosophical theory that he
or she was really into.
The Formalists took their literary investigation so seriously that they
thought of it as a "scientific" endeavor. They believed that they were
the equivalent of those scientists in white coats doing experiments in
labs. Okay, so maybe they weren't working
with chemical or biological elements. They were working
with literary elements. But hey, what's the difference anyway?
Does anyone still read this stuff?
Formalism is dead. Long live Formalism!
That about sums up the state of the theory. That's because, on the
one hand, Formalism is Really Dead. It began dying not long after it
was born. Once dictator-extraordinaire Joseph Stalin, not to mention
Stalinism, rose in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, the Formalists
didn't fare too well. They were accused of being too artsy-fartsy, too
detached from the realities of politics and class warfare and good
proletarian struggle that were a part of the dominant communist
ideology of the time. (Not up to date on your timeline of Soviet
history? No time like the present.)
But. Even as Formalism was dying in the USSR, it found new life
through its sister theoretical school of Structuralism, which,
beginning in the 1940s, would become all the rage in Europe and
America. And a number of the early Structuralists (like our buddy
Roman Jakobson) started off as Formalists, which is how Formalist
ideas found their way out of Russia/the USSR and into Europe and
America.
Formalism was also the forerunner to "New Criticism," which is more
or less the Euro-American version of Formalism (and yes, here we're
sending you to go have a look at the Shmoop learning guide on New
Criticism).
Today, Formalism has been eclipsed by newer theories like New
Historicism, and even beyond that, Cultural Studies, which are all

about understanding the historical context of a literary work (and
we know the Formalists would frown on that).
But the fact of the matter is, Formalist ideas are still hugely influential
in the way that we study literature. The "close reading" that we do in
English class is one example of an approach we've inherited from
the Formalists. And concepts like "defamiliarization," and the
distinction between "story" and plot"—which the Formalists first
developed—are still widely used by literary critics today.
So, long live Formalism!
Every theory has its pet names.
What does Formalism think of
literature, authors, and readers?
What is literature?
A work of literature is made up of a whole bunch of literary "devices"
that function to defamiliarize the familiar. Literature gives us a fresh
pair of eyes to see the world with. Yahoo!
What is an author?
An author is someone who makes the familiar unfamiliar. But if we're
Formalists, we're not interested in who an author is. We're just
interested how they write. Who cares about the author's psychology
or history or physiognomy? Let's get down to language.
What is a reader?
A reader is someone who analyzes the form of a literary text. We pay
attention to what devices a writer uses to make us laugh, or cry, or
hold our breath. And we never look beyond the text itself to find
answers to our questions. That is a big no-no. As long as you stick
with the forms of defamiliarization that make the text come to life and
the world look shiny and new, you're succeeding as a reader,
Formalism-style.
How It All Went Down
1915: Moscow Linguistics Circle is
founded
Roman Jakobson and his buddies start getting together to talk about
some really complex questions in linguistics. They did it in Moscow
and they usually sat in a circle, so they decided to call their gang
the Moscow Linguistics Circle. Clever, huh?

1916: OPOYAZ (Society for the
Study of Poetic Language) is
founded in St. Petersburg
Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, and their buddies start getting
together to talk about poetry. Boy, do these guys love poetry. And
this group was in St. Petersburg, which is way up north from
Moscow, so they needed a whole new name, too. And they came up
with the oh-so-catchy… OPOYAZ?
Here's why: in Russian you say "Society for the Study of Poetic
Language" like this: " Obschestvo po
izucheniyu poeticheskogo yazyka." Which with a nice abbrev
obviously sounds like "Opoyaz," just like the English would sound
like "Socpolang." Gotcha? Totes.
1916: Lev Jakubinsky's "On the
Sounds of Poetic Language"
Finally! Someone explains what "poetic" language is all about.
Which is, "Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow,"
instead of "Mary's pet sheep was white and on the small side."
1917: The February Revolution in
Russia
What starts as a peaceful demonstration with old women asking for
bread blows up into the Revolution of the century with the February
Revolution in Russia. The upshot is that Russians rise against Tsar
Nicholas II (and that creepy guy who's always trailing him, Rasputin)
and kaboom! Adios, Russian monarchy (or should we say do
svidaniya?).
1917: The October Revolution in
Russia
No way. Two revolutions in one year?! That's right. The February
one is what got rid of the tsar. Then a bunch of normal folk (normal
aside from wanting to overthrow the government and being really
well-read on Marxism) scuffle amongst themselves for a bit, until
October when the Bolsheviks take charge.
Are all communists Bolsheviks? No. That was just the most popular
group, and it was headed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who was like, the
head cheerleader of socialism. And after that—communism was
here, comrades.
1917: Viktor Shklovsky's "Art as
Technique"

That's right, 1917 was a big year. Did he write this as a response to
the revolution? No, he cared way more about literature than about
ousting some lousy tsar.
But did someone say "defamiliarization?" Shklovsky did, in this
famous essay.
1921: Roman Jakobson's "On
Realism in Art"
This essay is where Jakobson talks about that magical thing,
"literariness." Yep, people could still pay attention to that kind of stuff
in the middle of all the Bolsheviks and snow swarming around
Russia just then.
1922: The Union of Socialist Soviet
Republics is officially formed
Yes, now we know what "USSR" actually stands for.
1924 (ish): Joseph Stalin becomes
leader of the Soviet Union
Uh-oh. The despot with the bushy mustache rises to power. Here
come the gulags.
1924: Lev Trotsky's Literature and
Revolution
Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Communist Party (at least until Stal
Stal wanted all the leading to himself and sent his comrade trotting
away), rants against the Formalists in this essay. According to him,
they're just a bunch of intellectuals living in an ivory tower, totally
disconnected from the political realities on the red ground. Who
cares about a metaphor unless it's helping the communist cause?
1926: Boris Eikhenbaum's "Theory
of the 'Formal Method'"
Eikhenbaum is annoyed at how much bad press the Formalists are
getting in the Soviet Union. Why is it that all anyone wants to talk
about is politics, not art? And so he writes an essay defending
Formalism.
So Formalism wins the day? Well, maybe that day, but stuff started
getting way stricter under Stalin, so most of the Formalists ended up
arrested or quietly fled the country. The theory wasn't exactly dead,
but it had definitely passed its heyday by the end of the 1920s.
These are the folks who made it all
happen.

Boris Eikhenbaum Quotes
Quote :"The Theory of the 'Formal Method'" Quote 1
My chief purpose here is to show how the formal method, by
gradually evolving and broadening its field of research, spread
beyond the usual "methodological" limits and became a special
science of literature, a specific ordering of facts. Within the limits of
this science, the most diverse methods may develop, if only because
we focus on the empirical study of the material. Such study was,
essentially, the aim of the Formalists from the very beginning.
In a nutshell, Eikhenbaum's saying that the Formalists are elevating
the study of literature to a science. Yes, you heard right. Science.
You thought literature had nothing to do with science? Think again.
In other words, we will investigate a poem or a novel just like a
biologist investigates some icky bacteria in a petri dish. We'll ask:
What's this stuff made of? How does it work? Why does it work that
way? Just as there are certain conclusions that a biologist can
deduce by studying his petri-dish bacteria, so there are certain
conclusions that we literary scientists can deduce by studying a
poem or a novel.
What's important about Eikhenbaum's statement here is that it's
showing how seriously the Formalists took themselves as scientists.
These literary theorists really thought of themselves as the
equivalent of those dudes in white lab coats with stuff bubbling away
in test tubes. All they need is some thicker glasses and singe marks
on their shirts.
[T]he Formalists did not look, as literary students usually had,
towards history, culture, sociology, psychology, or aesthetics, etc.,
but toward linguistics, a science bordering on poetics and sharing
material with it, but approaching it from a different perspective and
with different problems. Linguistics, for its part, was also interested in
the formal method in that what was discovered by comparing poetic
and practical language could be studied as a purely linguistic
problem, as part of the general phenomena of language. The
relationship between linguistics and the formal method was
somewhat analogous to that relation of mutual use and delimitation
that exists, for example, between physics and chemistry.
We Formalists don't like sociology, history, psychology, and all those
other social science-y disciplines (sound familiar?). In case you
haven't noticed already, we think they're all rubbish. The one field
we do have the stomach for is linguistics. And that's because
linguists, like us Formalists, focus on language—some linguists
even are Formalists! Crazy, right?
Also—and here's another familiar tune—linguistics is a real science.
So Formalism and linguistics have a lot in common: they're
interested in the same thing, which is language. And they're both
very "scientific."

Eikhenbaum is laying out the very important relationship between
Formalism and linguistics here. The Formalists approached literature
from a linguistic point of view, looking at things like syntax, meaning,
and sound. And linguists are all about language too, of course, as a
system of communication and meaning, whether that meaning was
poetic or not. See the overlap?
The Formalists' emphasis on linguistics was a brand spanking new
thing at the time. Nowadays it seems obvious to us that when we
study a work of literature, we look at its linguistic aspects. How's this
writer putting together his or her sentences? What's she or he doing
with sound? Why does this sound pretty but not make very much
sense?
But literary critics before the Formalists weren't asking those
questions. They were more interested in the historical references of
a text, or its philosophical outlook, or its politics. The Formalists
insisted on looking within the text, at the language, to understand it.
Forget about what's going on outside it. And they drew inspiration
from the field of linguistics to do this, thanks in part to the brilliant
ideas of Mr. Eikhenbaum.
And the phrase "I like Eikh" was born.
The notion of form here acquires new meaning; it is no longer an
envelope, but a complete thing, something concrete, dynamic, self-
contained, and without a correlative of any kind. Here we made a
decisive break with the Symbolist principle that some sort of content
is to shine through the form.
The literary critics who came before the Formalists (for example,
some guys called the "Symbolists"), privileged content over form.
These guys believed that the "form" of a poem, or a novel, is just like
an envelope. According to them, what's important isn't the envelope,
but what's inside it: the "content," or meaning underneath the words
used to enclose it.
You know how when we get a card in the mail, we open the
envelope, pull out the card, and then throw the envelope in the
trash? Well, according to Eikhenbaum, the Symbolists take the same
attitude towards form. They throw "form" in the trash: they just don't
pay any attention to it.
We Formalists, on the other hand, take a completely different
attitude. For us, form isn't less important than content—it's the most
important thing. In fact, it's everything. For us, there is no
"card" inside the envelope. The "card" is the envelope. Kind of like a
postcard. In other words, form is content. What matters isn't what a
poem is saying, it's how it's saying it. It's how a writer says things,
not what they're saying, that really counts.
So this is another big idea that's come down to us from the
Formalists: form = content! Got that? If we're not paying attention to

how a writer is saying things, then we are totally missing the point of
literary criticism, according to the Formalists.
It matters whether a writer chooses to write in first-person or third-
person. It matters if a poet capitalizes the first letter of every line in a
poem or doesn't. It matters if a writer uses really long sentences or
really short sentences. It matters if a novel is broken up into four
chapters or forty. It matters if the word "matters" is italicized five
times in a row. Matters!
The Formalists were the first theorists to insist on the importance of
paying attention to form. And a testament to their influence is the fact
that, today, we do actually pay a lot of attention to form when we
study literary works. And we wouldn't be doing that if the Formalists
hadn't woken us up to it.
Roman Jakobson Quotes
Quote :"On Realism in Art"
The object of a science of literature is not literature, but literariness—
that is, that which makes a given work a work of literature. Until now
literary historians have preferred to act like the policeman who,
intending to arrest a certain person, would, at any opportunity, seize
any and all persons who chanced into the apartment, as well as
those who passed along the street. The literary historians used
everything—anthropology, psychology, politics, philosophy. Instead
of a science of literature, they created a conglomeration of
homespun disciplines.
Literary critics and historians have been getting the study of
literature way wrong. That's because they try to explain literature by
looking at it through the lens of a whole bunch of totally unrelated
fields—which is like, the opposite of science. Why would we need to
know philosophy in order to understand literature? Why do we need
to know psychology to read a poem? Why do we need to have a
good grasp of politics or anthropology, for shmoop's sake? Hello.
These things have nothing to do with literature.
In order to understand literature, we need to throw all of these other
things out of the window. Instead, we need to focus on something
called "literariness." Which is what, again? It's what makes a text
"literature" and not just some words someone threw on a page.
We probably all agree that there's a difference between a news
article and a poem, right? Well, what makes a poem different from a
news article is that it possesses this special, magical, magnificent
thing called "literariness," which a news article does not have.
So our job as Formalists is to study this thing "literariness," and
figure out what it's made of and how it works—forget going and
reading a whole bunch of philosophy or politics or anthropology to try
to help explain a work of literature. Explain how? Pshah!

Jakobson's doing something here that the Formalists totally love
doing. And that is the high exalted act of "bringing the focus back to
the literary text." In other words, he's saying that we just need to
focus on the poem, or novel, or play. And that's it. We need to read
closely. For what? That's right: "literariness." That thing that makes a
text "literature."
Notice how Jakobson, like Eikhenbaum, is talking about literary
criticism as "a science" of literature. Didn't we tell you these guys
were obsessed with being scientists? It's those white lab coats
they're envious of. They all want to be stylin' that lab coat, yo.
Lev Jakubinsky Quotes
Quote :"On the Sounds of Poetic Language"
The phenomena of language must be classified from the point of
view of the speaker's particular purpose as he forms his own
linguistic pattern. If the pattern is formed for the purely practical
purpose of communication, then we are dealing with a system
of practical language (the language of thought) in which the linguistic
pattern (sounds, morphological features, etc.) have no independent
value and are merely a means of communication. But other linguistic
systems, systems in which the practical purpose is in the background
(although not entirely hidden) are conceivable; they exist, and their
linguistic patterns acquire independent value.
First thing's first: don't get Jakobson confused with Jakubinsky. One
is a "son" and one is a "sky." One is way famous in lots of branches
of literary theory and the other is only sort of within the nearly dead
branch of Formalism. Just cuz they both start in "Jak" doesn't mean
they're equally jacked up in the theory world.
That said, they believe in basically the same stuff. There are two
types of language: practical and poetic language. Practical language
is all about communication. If we're sitting at dinner, and I want to
spice up my bland chicken, and I ask you, "Pass me the salt," that's
practical language. The words serve one purpose: to communicate
something we want or need.
On the other hand, if we're sitting at dinner and I burst into song,
chanting, "Puh-lease puh-paasss me the sweet yummy tasty salty-
salt, you friend full of wonder and enchantment," that's poetic
language (well, more or less).
Sure, maybe we do actually want the salt. But there's a lot more
going on here than just practical communication. We're playing with
language. We're alliterating. We're adding more information than is
necessary. Not to mention syllables. The words and sounds aren't
just there to communicate our need for salt—they're doing tons more
than that. Got it?
Jakubinsky's distinction between practical and poetic language was
super important for the Formalists. This was the first time that

someone had actually tried to explain how language is used
differently in a literary or poetic context.
And yes, while we may all know there's a difference between
everyday speech and poetic speech, however salty that speech may
be, no one had done such a good job of explaining the difference
between the two until Jakubinsky came along.
Osip Brik Quotes
Quote :"Sound Repetitions"
No matter how one looks at the interrelationship of image and sound,
there is undoubtedly only one conclusion possible—the sounds, the
harmonies, are not only euphonious accessories to meaning; they
are also the result of an independent poetic purpose.
Is a euphonious accessory like a Gucci purse? Um, sure, if it goes
nice with the other stuff you're wearing (euphonious means it sounds
pretty).
But basically, says Brik, we have this very bad tendency when we
read poetry to pay more attention to meaning than sound. We think
the meaning of words in a poem is more important than
the sounds of words. Which actually is total baloney.
Not only are sounds just as important as the meaning of the words—
sounds in a poem are often completely independent of meaning. A
poet puts in certain words because they just sound nice. Poetry is
music, people! It ain't just about making sense. This emphasis on
sound (as opposed to sense) is a hallmark of poetic language.
So pretty much the Formalists were obsessed with sound. They sat
there reading poems aloud to themselves and thinking about how
each little line sounded. And they came to the conclusion that sound
in poetry is super important. In fact, one of the things that makes
poetic language "poetic" is that it puts at least as much emphasis on
sound as it does on sense—if not more!
Viktor Shklovsky Quotes
Quote :"Art as Technique"
If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as
perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for
example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconscious
automatic…[Art] exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it
exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose
of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and
not as they are known. The technique of art is to make an object
"unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and
length of perception because the process of perception is an
aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of
experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.

We're all probably familiar with being defamiliarized from things we're
familiar with. Totes clear, right? Basically, says Vik, when we look at
the same thing over and over, we stop really seeing it. It becomes so
familiar that we pretty much stop noticing it, unless something sort of
forces us to look at it through fresh eyes. What art does, is that it
makes familiar objects unfamiliar.
For example. Let's say we drink coffee every morning. We need it to
be awake. We prefer the hipster independent coffee shop on the
corner. But one day we have a visitor from out of town who doesn't
know about coffee (so maybe they're from out of planet) and they
say: "What's that sludge you're drinking? Is it sewage water? It looks
like sewage water, maybe with sand floating in it. I didn't know
hipsters drank sand."
We look down into our personalized ceramic mug as if we're seeing
coffee for the first time. And we think seriously about changing our
morning beverage habits (but then we get sleepy and we don't).
That martian's comment about the coffee is kind of like what good
writers do. They defamiliarize the familiar. They make us see things
in a fresh way. And this is important because this is what art
is all about. It doesn't matter what a writer is describing. What
matters is how that author describes it, and how successful she or he
is in making it new for us, no matter whether we want to keep
drinking it after.
Shklovsky is defining one of the key concepts of Formalism
here: defamiliarization. This concept is super important—so make
sure you get really familiar with it before you start defamiliarizing.
Because this wasn't just important for the Formalists: it became a
really big concept in literary criticism generally. In fact, it's influential
to this day.
We now take it for granted that a really good writer is someone who
makes us look at things with new eyes. Someone, in other words,
who "defamiliarizes" things. So think about that next time you drink
your morning sludge.
Quote :"Sterne's Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary"
The idea of plot is too often confused with the description of events—
with what I propose provisionally to call the story. The story is, in
fact, only material for plot formulation. The plot of Eugene Onegin, is,
therefore, not the romance of the hero with Tatyana, but the
fashioning of the subject of this story as produced by the introduction
of interrupting digressions.
Story is a completely different thing from plot. How so? Let's take an
example. Here's a story: A guy breaks into a house, kills an old
couple, and escapes. A detective investigates. A series of clues lead
him to the killer, and the detective arrests him. Tah-dah!
Here's a plot of this story: A detective is handcuffing a dude and
leading him to a police car. At the police station, the detective

interrogates the dude. Through the interrogation, we get flashbacks
to this really grisly break-in where a couple was murdered. All the
while we're not sure if the dude being interrogated is the killer or not.
Slowly, we see what clues led the detective to this dude. And, oh
my! we realize the dude is the killer. Oh, the suspense.
See how in the plot above, the events of the story are all scrambled?
The plot begins with the end of the story: with the killer being
arrested. Then we go back and see what happened. The story just
shows us the events as they happened in time (dude breaks into
house, kills couple, is tracked down and arrested).
That's what Shklovsky's getting at when he talks about the difference
between "story" and "plot." He uses the novel-in-verse Eugene
Onegin (by the Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin, who most Russians
think of as pretty much equal to God) as an example. It's a novel
about this Russian dandy living in St. Petersburg and his relationship
with Tatyana. The story is very simple, but the plot of the novel is
complicated, thanks mainly to a whole bunch of digressions, letters
from one protagonist to the other, unrelated philosophical ponderings
by the narrator, and plays with language of all sorts.
Shklovsky is elaborating something totally earth-shattering here
(seriously, we're not exaggerating). He was the first literary critic to
make the explicit distinction between "plot" and "story." Nowadays,
we take it for granted that these two things are different. But it took
good ole Vik to make us see that.
Quote :"The Relationship between Devices of Plot Construction and General Devices
of Style"
[A] work of art is perceived against a background of and by
association with other works of art. The form of a work of art is
determined by its relationship with other preexisting forms… All
works of art, and not only parodies, are created either as a parallel or
an antithesis to some model. The new form makes its appearance
not in order to express a new content, but rather, to replace an old
form that has already outlived its artistic usefulness.
Here we go obsessing about form and content again. But this time is
different, because it's also talking about individual literary texts in
relation to other literary works. Don't get us wrong—what defines a
literary work isn't its historical background. Or its philosophical
outlook. Or the author's biography. What defines a literary work is
how it's similar to or different from literary works that came before it,
and that does have something to do with looking outside the text.
And you know how forms change? Like, Dickens wrote differently
from Hemingway who wrote differently from Woolf, not just because
they were different folks but because literary styles were different in
the times when they each lived. Well, all those crazy changes don't
have anything to do with new content. Changes in form are about

expressing old content in a new, fresh way. Yeah, that's right. The
content is always (well, usually) the same.
How many literary texts or works do we have about star-crossed
lovers? Like, loads. Romeo and Juliet. Catherine and Heathcliff
in Wuthering Heights. Lancelot and Guinevere in all those King
Arthur legends. Buffy and Angel in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (ok
maybe that last one's not "literature" exactly, but you get the point).
See, the story of star-crossed lovers is an old story. But through the
ages it's been told in new ways. In other words, it's the form that
changes, not the content.
Shklovsky, that superstar Formalist, is saying that the only thing that
matters about a literary work (aside from all that language stuff, obvi)
is its relationship to other literary works. The literary critics who came
before Shklovsky and his pals weren't looking at the relationship
between texts in this systematic way.
As much as the Formalists get flak for not paying attention to
historical context, they were the first to emphasize the importance of
looking at how form and types of language used in storytelling
changed over time. Take that, all ye who doubt!
Roman Jakobson and Yuri
Tynyanov Quotes
Quote :"Problems in the Study of Language and Literature"
The history of literature (art), being simultaneous with other historical
series, is characterized, as is each of these series, by an involved
complex of specific structural laws. Without an elucidation of these
laws, it is impossible to establish in a scientific manner the
correlation between the literary series and other historical series.
There are specific laws that govern the development of literature.
Think of it as the constitution of the land of books and poems. If we
don't study and understand these laws, say Roman and Yuri, then
don't get no illusions about understanding literature.
Not to mention how literature relates to history. First we need to
figure out what these "literary laws" are that are involved in the
development of literature, and then we can relate what's going on in
literature with what's going on outside it. The point is, we have to
study literature and understand it first.
Jakobson and Tynyanov really believed that literature was like this
organism with its own skeleton and set of particular laws. Again, here
we're seeing the Formalists' emphasis on a "scientific" point of view.
Also, notice that word "structural"? Well, that's very important.
Because the Formalists and the Structuralists had tons in common.
Here we're seeing Formalist and Structuralist ideas coming together.
And that is how Formalism still breathes in literary theory today.

Why of New Criticism
New Criticism wasn't the most organized of movements. Different
groups of critics in the U.S. and in Britain were blazing trails on their
own, and they hadn't exactly sat down to figure out a road map. So
we can't point to one manifesto that shook everything up.
But we can find a whole bunch of sparks that fed the fire—sparks
like T.S. Eliot's introduction to The Sacred Wood (1920), Ezra
Pound's Pavannes and Divisions (1918), I.A. Richards's Practical
Criticism (1929), and John Crowe Ransom's The New
Criticism (1941). They all had their own individual foci, but they were
all a call to readerly action. These writers believed it was time for a
new and practical approach to analyzing literature—as well as
discriminating between "good" and "bad" literary works.
These New Critics all believed in a close analysis of form, literary
devices, and technique. Their new emphasis on the text was a
reaction to the old style of scholarship, which was all about history
and the evolution of languages—stuff that took you outside of a
poem into whole other worlds of information. The New Critics wanted
to stay inside the poem, and to explain why it was good or bad.
The Big Names in New Criticism
New Criticism's heavy hitters primarily batted for two teams: Team
U.S.A. and Team U.K. On the U.S. side, we have John Crowe
Ransom, who was a professor at Vanderbilt University, and who
gave New Criticism its name with the title of one of his books. His
students ended up being some of the most important new voices on
the block (and since this was back in the 1930s, we're afraid these
guys' names really do read like a boy band): Randall Jarrell, Allen
Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks.
Warren and Brooks wrote the book that actually
became the textbook for college students studying poetry.
Their Understanding Poetry (1938) taught the techniques that
students would need if they were going to study the poem, the whole
poem, and nothing but the poem.
As it turns out, if you want to get a theory off the ground, it's a good
idea to get your book in the backpacks of English majors
everywhere. (Take note, Shmoopers.)
Other key players in the U.S. are Yvor Winters—who used New
Criticism to give moral readings of literature—Kenneth Burke, R.P.
Blackmur, William K. Wimsatt, and Monroe Beardsley. Wimsatt and
Beardsley became famous for their intense hatred of critics who
talked about authors' personal lives; for a dose of this medicine,
check out their essay, "The Intentional Fallacy."

Over on the other side of the pond, I.A. Richards was leading the
charge in his own classroom. He was interested in how people
interpret literature. So he got scientific about the problem: he handed
out thirteen poems, without so much as telling his students the
names of the authors. And then he asked students to analyze
them—What do the poems mean? How do you know?
Not surprisingly, this little experiment showed how very difficult it was
to analyze a poem without any context, even if you were at the top of
your class at Cambridge. One of Richards's students, William
Empson, went on to offer an answer to this difficulty: his Seven
Types of Ambiguity is a tour de force of ways to read closely, without
any history books on your desk.
All of these critics actually had a lot in common—and not just how
quickly they'd roll their eyes if you argued that Shakespeare left clues
in The Tempest to explain why he left his second best bed to his
wife. The New Critics all wanted to spend days picking apart a text
word by word. And they all had poetry in common: they analyzed it,
and wrote quite a bit of it too.
It's probably not a coincidence that so many of the New Critics were
hard-writin' poets themselves, not just poetry scholars. Part of why
they could so closely analyze the devices in a poem was because
they were thinking like writers. John Crowe Ransom, Randall
Jarrell, Allen Tate, I. A. Richards, William Empson, and Yvor
Winters all published poetry. How do you like them apples?
can get feisty.
The New Critics weren't afraid of controversy. Really, the whole
movement arose because they wanted to contradict the methods of
previous critics, and forge a new path. This Crew o' Lyrical
Superheroes believed that literature wasn't getting enough attention
as literature, and it was time to put the lit first.
But what about everything else that scholars had been busying
themselves with for centuries? Like, um, the bearing of the whole of
human history on a given text? So, a lot of the New Critics' big
debates revolved around how much they were willing to abandon in
their pursuit of a purely text-based method for literary analysis. The
usual debates went something like this…
You Gotta Put Your Behind in the Past
"Old" criticism was all about history. First, people would study the
history of how the words in a given text were used way back when—
etymologies up the wazoo, without the convenience of your up-to-
date Oxford English Dictionary. Then there was the history of the
work. Who was the first to read it? What did its early drafts look
like? Sigh.

And finally, there was the history of the author. Like: Did he like
peanut butter and jelly sandwiches when he was little? Can you see
evidence of his youthful peanut butter and jelly fanaticism, even in
this late-career poem of his? And so on.
The "old" critics would gather all of this information together, mix it up
in a great big bowl o' analysis, and offer up an understanding of a
text's major themes. Now, even though the New Critics didn't sign a
manifesto in blood saying they'd never consider anything outside of
the text ever again, they did agree that history had become a major
distraction.
The New Critics wanted to set history aside for a moment and just
look at the lit. What would happen, they wondered, if you put the text
first—and everything else second?
Now, despite some extremists' interpretation of this move, the New
Critics didn't want to throw out all of history with the bathwater. They
didn't shy away from using extra-textual facts to make a point. But
they always made everything outside of the text take a backseat to
the text itself.
For example, if you read "They Flee from Me," the real intellectual
and emotional payoff isn't learning more about Anne Boleyn's love
life. Though obvi, we're always interested in other people's love lives.
The really cool part is figuring out how Wyatt's sonnet works to
create meaning—from its metaphors and paradoxes, to
its meter and rhyme.
What About That Closeted Love of Peanut
Butter and Jelly Sandwiches?
Remember when we said that "old" critics were really into
reading every fact about an author into her work? Well, nothing riles
up a New Critic like one of those biographically driven analyses. The
New Critics believed that the author's life just isn't that important
compared to the text itself, because the text will always transcend
the author.
Let's say we suddenly unearthed more of Jane Austen's letters. Even
if we found real-life equivalents for every single character in Sense
and Sensibility, would that really help us read Sense and
Sensibility in a more sophisticated way? Probably not.
These insights into authors' lives are just like tabloid gems about our
favorite celebrities; they're delicious little "human interest" treats, but
they're neither particularly meaningful nor particularly enduring. And
a text will be around long after the author's death.
Wimsatt and Beardsley took a special beef with people who
studied authorial intent in "The Intentional Fallacy." They argue
against studying what the author intended to say, in favor of just

sticking to what they actually said. After all, there's likely a lot of stuff
in the text that the author wasn't even consciously aware of writing.
(As writers ourselves here, we at Shmoop have to admit: we end up
writing a lot of stuff that we don't even mean to. It happens. We'd like
to call it "accidental genius," but we'll allow you your own readings.)
A key example from Wimsatt and Beardsely's essay relies on John
Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning." W&B quote a couple
lines of the poem in which the speaker wonders why people get so
scared of earthquakes ("moving of th' earth"). After all, they never
bother to think about how the entire universe is full of planets on the
move (the "trepidation of the spheres/ Though greater far, is
innocent").
Then W&B take down the latest, scholarly analysis of the text. Some
Poor Professor Who Shall Not Be Named had tracked down all of
Donne's references to astronomy. And That Dude said something
like: "Guys! Look here! Donne was reading Kepler and Galileo when
he wrote 'A Valediction.' So he must have been trying to make some
commentary about the progress of astronomy as a science in this
piece, right?"
Wrong. W&B were having none of that. Sure, these New Critics
wrote, we could reconstruct an author's reading list and go crazy
reading between its lines. Maybe we could even rebuild their library.
But after all that work, we'd just add "another shade of meaning, an
overtone to the stanza in question." In other words, that sort of
criticism isn't really helping us to understand the poem better.
Biography-driven analyses are often just a series of fanciful,
improvable insights—fun to make, but usually frivolous.
Bells and whistles are, in the end, just bells and whistles.
That Little Thing Called "Relevance"
Some critics were worried about paying too much attention to the
text. If you were reading literature purely as literature, were you
relegating potentially revolution-starting works to the dusty shelves of
mere "art"?
And what if a good poem contains a terribly immoral message?
Should we still ask whole classrooms of students to read it—and tell
them to just ignore the moral of the story? These are the kinds of
questions that kept our beloved New Critics up at night. (They clearly
never had Werner Herzog read them a bedtime story.)
To be honest, though, a lot of their concerns were directed more at
straw men than at any practicing New Critic. Most New Critics didn't
want to entirely ignore social relevance, ethics, and politics—though
some of their detractors accused them of desiring exactly this.
In fact, one critic associated with the movement, Yvor Winters, was
committed to closely analyzing literature and morality (or: the

balance between reason and emotion). The thing was, he wasn't on
an Easter egg hunt for a moral that could be conveniently lifted out of
a poem and applied elsewhere. Instead, he wanted to explain how a
whole poem—from its meter to its rhyme to its word choices—was
working to construct a particular brand of morality.
From New To Outmoded
New Criticism fell out of favor in the 1960s and '70s, as other
theories stepped up to the lit crit plate. Sure, many of these theories
would use the same analytic tools as New Criticism, but to different
ends. Just like many other thinkers of the '60s and '70s, literary
theorists in those days were lookin' to shake up the existing social
order.
So, feminist and new historical readings both wanted, once again, to
widen the scope beyond the text. But this time, they wanted to
incorporate more cultural context and information about society's
changes over time into their analyses as a way of raising questions
like: Hey, why does Western culture worship the phallus? Or, Why is
the literary canon so dominated by white people?
You catch our drift.
There was also this other new movement, known as Reader-
Response Theory, that put an analytic emphasis on readers. This
group of scholars believed the key to a text's meaning lay in how
different readers reacted to it. Because, unlike the New Critics—who
thought that a text had inherent meaning, which could be uncovered
through close reading—Reader-Response Theorists believed the
text had no inherent meaning.
A work's central themes, they thought, were really created in the
dynamic interactions between the text and readers' subjective
interpretations of that text.
Heavy.
Now, even though just about all of these new theories used close
reading to examine texts, they were all aiming at something bigger
than literature. Their focus was broader. Post-New Criticism scholars
wanted focus on the text and its context in order to see how each
little work fit into a whole cultural network of people and philosophies.
(Deconstruction opened a different can of worms altogether. That
movement was all about destabilizing norms, and playing with
readers' expectations of literature. These guys weren't as interested
in uncovering texts' meanings as they were in proving that meaning
itself was uncertain. But that's another story…)
Retrofit New Crit—As Fashionable As Peg Leg
Pants

So some other theories became more popular than New Criticism in
the '60s and '70s. That doesn't mean New Crit ever got shelved
entirely. We still use a lot of the tools developed by the New Critics
when we consider literary works today.
Close reading is sort of like the Swiss army knife of literary theory.
No matter what you analyze, young Shmoopers—a text in isolation,
or a text in relation to the history of women's writing, or a text in
relation to readers' interpretations of it—you're going to be working
with the text's language and form.
Plus, some critics are still writing about the way this movement has
forever changed the way we read texts. To this end, a couple of
books have come out that have tried to give New Critics their dues,
including The New Criticism and Contemporary Literary
Theory (1995) and Praising it New: The Best of the New
Criticism (2008).
A "new" New Criticism, known as New Formalism, also emerged in
the early 2000s. And you know that any time a movement enjoys a
renaissance, that's because there was something great about it to
begin with. Like, if pink is the new black, we know that little black
dresses have always been pretty rad.
New Formalism has gained some academic ground with today's
professors, including Marjorie Levinson. In her 2007 article, "What is
New Formalism?", Levinson surveyed this field and noted that all of
its different brands "seek to reinstate close reading both at the
circular center of our discipline and as the opening move."
That is, the New Formalists (much like the New Critics, actually)
don't want to ban history or culture from literary analysis. They just
want to analyze the text first, before taking a critical stance on it.
After that, everything's fair game.
What does New Criticism think of
literature, authors, and readers?
What is literature?
According to the New Critics, literature is something to be read
closely. To be laboriously analyzed. To be pored over with a
cappuccino in hand.
See, a text is made up of form, words, and devices, and we can
examine these things up-close in order to understand what makes a
text great. We can look at a poem's ambiguities, paradoxes, ironies,
tensions, harmonies, and more.
All of these elements work together to make the text whole. But we
must never forget that this whole is greater than its parts. Plus,
not all literature is good; we have to compare an individual poem

against humanity's long tradition of poetry, and figure out if it
measures up to The Canon.
What is an author?
An author is a craftsman—sometimes a genius craftsman—who
constructs works of art. These works are supposed to hold up across
time and cultural contexts; we should be able to read them at any
moment in history, and derive meaning from them.
Crucial, however, is that to understand authors' work, we shouldn't
have to consult the genius-oracles themselves. Each work of
literature should have all the answers contained within its very lines,
if only we read it closely enough.
(Besides, we really can't trust the author to tell us what she meant
when she wrote a poem. Maybe what she actually wrote is far
smarter than what she thinks she wrote.)
What is a reader?
A reader puzzles out a piece of literature's many meanings, in all of
their glorious complexities and ambiguities. The ideal reader gets up
close and personal with each text. If poems were those Magic
Eye illusions, New Critics would tell you to start out with your nose
pressed up against 'em. Then slowly, very slowly, walk backwards
until—bam. Suddenly, a whole new 3D meaning pops out at you.
1920: T.S. Eliot's The Sacred Wood
In his introduction, Eliot takes a classic idea—studying
literature as literature—and argues that it needs a revival. This might
seem like such an old idea that wouldn't need repeating. But
apparently it did. So he and Ezra Pound, the Poet-Critic
Extraordinaire himself, usually get the credit for kicking off New
Criticism.
1929: I.A. Richards's Practical Criticism: A Study
of Literary Judgment
Richards has been called the father of New Criticism. He was one of
the first to study literary interpretation as a kind of science. He
wondered: What techniques do we use when reading a text? And
how can we study those techniques? Imagine you show up for
English class one morning and your teacher drops a packet of
poems in front of you. Then he says, "You've got four hours to write
an analysis of each poem." Oh, and you don't have the luxury of
knowing who actually wrote the poems, or when. You don't even
have the poems' titles to give you any clues. (And there's no
Googling allowed, obviously.) This cruel experiment is actually
exactly what Richards did in his own English classroom; Practical
Criticism is his write-up of how it all went down. Fascinating. We're

on the edges of our seats. Really. (That and we're just really glad we
weren't in Richards's class…)
1930: William Empson's Seven Types of
Ambiguity
This was one of the big books that brought New Criticism across the
pond to the U.S. In it, Empson argues that poetry is full of
ambiguity—poems don't have any one meaning. Painfully detail-
oriented but massively impressive, this work lays out seven types of
ambiguity that can occur in poetry, including the kind that comes
from a word having more than one definition, and the kind that
comes from a poem having multiple (and sometimes even
conflicting) messages.
1937: Yvor Winters's "The Morality of Poetry"
Winters is all about using the tools of New Criticism, like close
reading, to see how poems address moral questions. As he puts it,
"Poetic morality and poetic feeling are inseparable; feeling and
technique, or structure, are inseparable." His work explains how
different poetic techniques both reflect and construct different moral
worldviews.
1938: Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn
Warren's Understanding Poetry
Brooks and Warren literally wrote the book on Understanding Poetry.
It's like a guidebook for how to use New Criticism (or how to closely
analyze a poem's form and language). Is there any better way to
promote your literary theory than to get it in the hands of every
college English major? Score 1 for New Criticism.
1938: Allen Tate's "Miss Emily and the
Bibliographer"
Tate argued that professors shouldn't just be scholars of literary
history. Instead, he believed they should be critics of
past and present literature. This meant that professors had to teach
practical methods for analyzing books and poems; they couldn't just
lecture on who wrote a text, when, and who the author had dinner
with afterward. Burn.
1941: John Crowe Ransom's The New Criticism
The whole movement gets its name from this book's title. Ransom
was on the hunt for a new type of criticism—something more
scientific, more methodical than "I like this poem" and "That poem
makes my eyes bleed." So in The New Criticism, he actually
reviewed the critics of his age, and identified which ones he thought
were moving in the right direction. Talk about blazing a new path.
Ransom had gusto, that's for sure. (And a great last name, if we do
say so ourselves.)

1947: Cleanth Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn
Brooks's book is full of intense close readings of the greatest hits of
English poetry,
from Shakespeare and Donne to Keats and Wordsworth. His point?
That you can analyze poems without just saying they were a product
of their society/times. Instead, Brooks argued that you can pseudo-
scientifically analyze what's really and truly good about a poem, even
when you pluck it out of its historical and biographical contexts. So,
rather than reading Keats as a spokesperson for the Romantics, you
can just read Keats as poet who used techniques X and Y to
accomplish Z.
1954: William K. Wimsatt and Monroe
Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy"
This is one of the most famous texts to emerge from the New
Criticism movement. In it, Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that scholars
shouldn't Sherlock Holmes every context-driven detail of poem. Like,
as interesting as it might be to speculate about what T.S. Eliot really
intended with all the allusions in The Waste Land, that's not the point
of literary criticism. If The Waste Land works as a poem, then we
should be able to figure out its meaning just by reading the text—we
shouldn't have to consult pages of footnotes, or track down clues in
Eliot's copies of his books.
happen.
T.S. Eliot Quotes
Quote :The Sacred Wood
It is part of the business of the critic to preserve tradition—where a
good tradition exists. It is part of his business to see literature
steadily and to see it whole; and this is eminently to see it not as
consecrated by time, but to see it beyond time; to see the best work
of our time and the best work of twenty-five hundred years ago with
the same eyes.
Eliot's insights helped inspire the New Criticism movement. Here, he
gets at one of the central ideas that would characterize the theory:
the critic needs to see literature not as some historical artifact, but as
a timeless art. As a bundle of meaning-laden words that can be
picked up any place, at any time, and fully appreciated.
For example, we're not supposed to view Hamlet as some antique of
the Renaissance, but as one of the best pieces of literature to ever
come out of the Western tradition. As Eliot puts it, we need to see
the best work—regardless of when and where it came from—"with
the same eyes."
Just because you're reading Elizabethan drama doesn't mean you
need to wear Tudor-rose colored glasses.

BTW, Eliot was writing before New Criticism was a thing (or even a
proper name). But his ideas were super important to starting the
movement. The New Critics agreed with Eliot: literary criticism
should be all about studying the best works across time, not about
getting caught up in what those different times were like.
Why are certain works so great? What makes them last? These were
the questions that really lit the New Critics' fires
Allen Tate Quotes
Quote :"Miss Emily and the Bibliographer"
[A graduate student in English] cannot discuss the literary object in
terms of its specific form; all that he can do is to give you its history
or tell you how he feels about it. The concrete form of the play, the
poem, the novel, that gave rise to the history of the feeling lies
neglected on the hither side of the Styx, where Virgil explains to
Dante that it is scorned alike by heaven and hell.
Burn. In this passage, Tate skewers on the way people were doing
literary study before the New Critics came along. Since Tate wrote
this little gem back in 1938, of course, the system is totally changed
now. But according to Tate, back in his day, the universities were full
of professors who were basically studying literary history.
If you asked one of these old school professors about, say, The
Tempest, all he would do is "give you its history or tell you how he
feels about it."
Never fear, young Shmoopers. Tate has a solution. It's time to
discuss "the literary object in terms of its specific form." We have to
start with the form before we talk about feelings, he says. And,
ideally, the two should be linked.
We should study how "the concrete form" of a poem gives rise
to readers' evaluations of a work. So if you want to talk about how
you were on the edge of your seat while reading Edgar Allan's
Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, don't just describe your
suspense to us. Tell us about how the story builds that suspense.
To do a reading à la New Criticism, just imagine Allen Tate standing
on your shoulder with a pipe and asking: "Ah yes—but how?"
(Not that we've ever done that… Um…)
Although Tate doesn't get into tons of specifics in this quote, he does
give us a roadmap for how to approach poems anew. Literary study
was at a crossroads in 1938, and Tate didn't want it to go down the
rabbit hole of history, or to languish on the other side of the Styx. He
wanted lit crit to go up the heavenly path, that's paved with well-
founded, text-based analyses of famous works.
To each his own heavenly path, are we right?

John Crowe Ransom Quotes
Quote :"Criticism Inc"
Studies in the technique of the art belong to criticism certainly. They
cannot belong anywhere else, because the technique is not peculiar
to any prose materials discoverable in the work of art, nor to anything
else but the unique form of that art. A very large volume of studies is
indicated by this classification. They would be technical studies of
poetry, for instance, the art I am specifically discussing, if they
treated its metric; its inversions, solecisms, lapses from the prose
norm of language, and from close prose logic; its tropes; its fictions,
or inventions, by which it secures "aesthetic distance" and removes
itself from history; or any other devices, on the general
understanding that any systematic usage which does not hold good
for prose is a poetic device.
A device with a purpose: the superior critic is not content with the
compilation of the separate devices; they suggest to him a much
more general question. The critic speculates on why poetry, through
its devices, is at such pains to dissociate itself from prose at all, and
what it is trying to represent that cannot be represented by prose.
This is a dense quote, but it boils down to the same old bit: the "old"
critics have been doing it all wrong. Ransom criticizes the existing
way of analyzing literature, and those scholar-dinosaurs who
continue to insist on studying literary history.
Then he argues for a new direction for literary criticism: the study of
technique and form. And he gives us an example of what the New
Critic should do. In a nutshell, Ransom wants criticism to be "more
scientific, or precise and systematic." Hear, hear.
In that first sentence, Ransom talks about the "technique" of art.
(And by "art" Ransom often means "poetry"—the New Critics are a
tad bit biased like that.) But what does he mean by technique? Let
him count the ways: meter, inversions of syntax, tropes or figures of
speech… Basically: anything that separates poetic language from
plain prose.
But a good literary scholar must do more than simply list a poem's
techniques. If you give a mouse a list of poetic devices, then she'll
ask why poetry uses language in these special ways. In kind, the
"superior critic" will want to address questions like: Why are poems
so dead-set on being different from prose in the first place? Can
poetry do something that prose can't? Is poetry uniquely well suited
to representing the human experience?
Ransom's essay is important because he wasn't just criticizing the
old way of doing literary study. He was proposing a new plan of
attack for future literary analysts. He was as interested in doing as he
was in undoing. In fact, we think the questions he was asking about
poetry back in 1937 are just as important today as they were then.
Quote :The New Criticism

It is my feeling that we have in poetry a revolutionary departure from
the convention of logical discourse, and that we should provide it
with a bold and proportionate designation. I believe it has proved
easy to work out its structural differentiation from prose. But what is
the significance of this when we have got it? The structure proper is
the prose of the poem, being a logical discourse of almost any kind,
and dealing with almost any content suited to a logical discourse.
The texture, likewise, seems to be of any real content that may be
come upon, provided it is so free, unrestricted, and large that it
cannot properly get into the structure. One guesses that it is
an order of content, rather than a kind of content, that distinguishes
texture from structure, and poetry from prose. At any rate, a moral
content is a kind of content which has been suggested as the
peculiar content of poetry, and it does not work; it is not really
peculiar to poetry but perfectly available for prose; besides, it is not
the content of a great deal of poetry. I suggest that the differentia of
poetry as discourse is an ontological one. It treats an order of
existence, a grade of objectivity, which cannot be treated in scientific
discourse.
Ransom simply had to know what makes poetry different from prose.
He thought that if we could elaborate on those differences, we could
better understand what makes individual poems powerful. So in this
passage, he takes a stab at defining the Great Poetry-Prose Divide.
He proposes that poems have two main elements: First, there's the
content of a poem. Second, there's the thing that makes a poem a
poem—its "texture." This poetic texture, or form, is what's "free,
unrestricted, and large."
But then things take a left turn into Head Scratch Territory. Ransom
thinks that the texture isn't just a type of content, like morality or
emotion or philosophy. Just because you write about morality doesn't
mean you're going to write a poem. Nope, texture has to do with how
you structure the content.
In this view, there is an "ontological" difference between poetry and
prose. In other words, poetry is a particular way of being, and this
way of being is just as objective as a plant's way
of photosynthesizing light.
Careful though, Shmoopers. Ransom argues that the objectivity of
poetry cannot be accessed using the same kinds of scientific tools
and talk that exist in other academic disciplines. The job of New
Criticism, in Ransom's mind, was to be scientific in a literary way: a
way that helps us to understand how poetry is, in its unique fashion,
objective.
Wimsatt and Beardsley
Quotes
Quote :"The Intentional Fallacy"

Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One
demands that it work. It is only because an artifact works that we
infer the intention of an artificer. "A poem should not mean but be." A
poem can be only through its meaning—since its medium is words—
yet it is, simply is, in the sense that we have no excuse for inquiring
what part is intended or meant. Poetry is a feat of style by which a
complex of meaning is handled all at once. Poetry succeeds
because all or most of what is said or implied is relevant; what is
irrelevant has been excluded, like lumps from pudding and "bugs"
from machinery.
How is a poem like a pudding? As much as this sounds like a riddle
from Lewis Carroll's cutting room floor, we promise that Wimsatt and
Beardsley are going somewhere with this one. Both puddings and
poems are made by someone, and for some purpose.
If you ate a pudding and you couldn't figure out what flavor it was,
then the pudding was probably a failure. You wouldn't track down the
chef and ask them what they were going for, and then slap your
forehead and sigh, "Oh, of course. Silly me: This was supposed to be
a pudding that didn't taste like a pudding."
Ya see? If you read a poem and can't figure out what it means, then
the poem is a failure. And readers shouldn't have to consult a Ouija
board to figure out what the dead author was trying to say with that
failure. Even if the author is still alive, we shouldn't have to write her
a letter to figure what the heck is happening in the poem.
As W&B put it, "Critical inquiries, unlike bets, are not settled in this
way. Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle." In
other words, critics should be able to figure out the poem's
meaning from the poem.
Granted, we might have to stare at the poem for a while and have
some deep thoughts about it. But to get the poem, all we need is its
language—and our wits.
To sum up: it's the poem, not the author, that means anything at all.
We'd like to stress the fact that this is a truly radical passage in
literary theory. It puts pressure on the text, and on us in reading the
text. The text needs to work it, and we need to figure out how the
text's cogs are a-turning.
Brooks and Warren Quotes
Quote :Understanding Poetry
Was this, then, the attitude of Andrew Marvell, born 1621, sometime
student of Cambridge, returned traveler and prospective tutor,
toward Oliver Cromwell in the summer of 1650? The honest answer
must be: we do not know. We have tried to read the poem, not
Andrew Marvell's mind. That seems sensible in view of the fact that
we have the poem, whereas the attitude held by Marvell at any

particular time must be a matter of inference, even though we grant
that the poem may be put in as part of the evidence from which we
are to draw inferences. True, we do know that Marvell was capable
of composing the "Ode" and one must concede that that very
fact may tell us a great deal about Marvell's attitude toward
Cromwell. We think it probably does. But we shall not claim that it
tells us everything: there is the problem of the role of the
unconscious in the process of composition, there is the possibility of
the poet's having written better than he knew, there is even the
matter of the happy accident. It is wise to maintain the distinction
between the total attitude as manifested in the poem and the attitude
of the author as man and private citizen.
This chunk from Brooks and Warren's textbook Understanding
Poetry takes on Andrew Marvell's "An Horation Ode upon Cromwell's
Return from Ireland." That poem declares up front that it's all about
reality: a real person (Cromwell) and a real event (returning from
Ireland).
So, it shouldn't be surprising to you that scholars of this ode have
speculated a lot about what Marvell really thought about Cromwell.
And about Ireland. And about all of the politics of that day and time.
Brooks and Warren are okay with this reading of the poem—but only
up to a certain point. In the first line of the quote, they're
wondering: Well, then, was this how Marvell felt about Cromwell
back in 1650? But their answer to this question's a big shocker: "The
honest answer must be: we do not know."
Really, they say, it was a silly question to ask of the poem to begin
with. As critics of the poem, they're not trying to get at what Marvell
thought: "We have tried to read the poem, not Andrew Marvell's
mind." Yep, Brooks and Warren know how to get sassy.
Then our boys B&W explain why we need to distinguish between the
poem and Marvell's mind. See, the relations between the two are
actually quite complex. First of all, the process of writing a poem is
mysterious, even to the poet himself. Who knows what role the
unconscious might play in writing?
Second, poets can write something deeper than they realize at the
time. A poet might just have a "happy accident" and write something
brilliant off-the-cuff. (Hey, it happens.) So Brooks and Warren draw a
hard line between the poem's attitude toward Cromwell,
and Marvell's attitude toward Cromwell.
Right. There's a poem-'tude, and a Marvell-'tude. Got it.
William Empson Quotes
Quote :Seven Types of Ambiguity
Most of the ambiguities I have considered here seem to me beautiful;
I consider, then, that I have shown by example, in showing the
nature of the ambiguity, the nature of the forces which are adequate

to hold it together. It would seem very artificial to do it the other way
round, and very tedious to do it both ways at once. I wish only, then,
to say here that such vaguely imagined "forces" are essential to the
totality of a poem, and that they cannot be discussed in terms of
ambiguity, because they are complementary to it. But by discussing
ambiguity, a great deal may be made clear about them. In particular,
if there is contradiction, it must imply tension; the more prominent the
contradiction, the greater the tension; in some way other than by the
contradiction, the tension must be conveyed, and must be sustained.
Empson's 250-page book is basically a long list of literary
ambiguities. But in this passage, he explains why he's interested in
ambiguity. Ambiguity implies that something is open to multiple
possible interpretations.
So, the existence of ambiguity implies the existence of
contradictions. And if contradictions are afoot in a poem, then
there's tension.
Stay with us now: poetry is a work of art that maintains the tension of
ambiguity. Poems say a bunch of stuff without restricting their
readers to any single interpretation of the text. Wow. Imagine doing
that tightrope walk for the whole length of King Lear.
In any case, Empson was trying to point out that ambiguity's kinda at
the heart of poetry—and of why poetry is beautiful.
Cleanth Brooks Quotes
Quote :The Well Wrought Urn
We tend to say that every poem is an expression of its age; that we
must be careful to ask of it only what its own age asked; that we
must judge it only by the canons of its age. Any attempt to view it sub
specie aeternitatis, we feel, must result in illusion.
Perhaps it must. Yet, if poetry exists as poetry in any meaningful
sense, the attempt must be made. Otherwise the poetry of the past
becomes significant merely as cultural anthropology, and the poetry
of the present, merely as a political, or religious, or moral instrument
[…] We live in an age in which miracles of all kinds are suspect,
including the kind of miracle of which the poet speaks. The positivists
have tended to explain the miracle away in a general process of
reduction which hardly stops short of reducing the "poem" to the ink
itself. But the "miracle of communication," as a student of language
terms it in a recent book, remains. We had better not ignore it, or try
to "reduce" it to a level that distorts it. We had better begin with it, by
making the closest possible examination of what the poem says as a
poem.
In this preface to The Well Wrought Urn, Brooks justifies his whole
approach to reading poetry. He says we have a knee-jerk reaction to
what poems are about; we just "say that every poem is an

expression of its age." And then we just keep on blindly walking that
interpretive path.
Like, Pope's Rape of the Lock gets framed as a great poem that
expresses the 18th century's idea of what poetry should be. So then
old-school scholars asked questions like: What does The Rape of
the Lock tell us about 18th-century culture? And about 18th-century
hairstyles?
But wait, says Brooks. If we ask questions like that, we're only
looking at Rape of the Lock as a great 18th-century poem—not as
just a great poem period.
Brooks warns us that we tend to do the same thing with our own
age's poetry: poems are just a sophisticated outlet for political and
moral messages. Right? Wrong.
Brooks is against this way of thinking about poetry because it
reduces this complex, ambiguous, beautiful thing to one little moral.
But he doesn't stop at bellyaching. He suggests how he's going to
change literary analysis by studying "what the poem says as a
poem."
Quote :The Well Wrought Urn (2)
It is important to see that what "So wore the night" and "Thus night
passed" have in common as their "rational meaning" is not the
"rational meaning" of each but the lowest common denominator of
both. To refer the structure of the poem to what is finally a
paraphrase of the poem is to refer it to something outside the poem.
To repeat, most of our difficulties in criticism are rooted in the heresy
of paraphrase. If we allow ourselves to be misled by it, we distort the
relation of the poem to its "truth," we raise the problem of belief in a
vicious and crippling form, we split the poem between its "form" and
its "content"—we bring the statement to be conveyed into an unreal
competition with science or philosophy or theology. […] By taking the
paraphrase as our point of stance, we misconceive the function of
metaphor and meter. We demand logical coherences where they are
sometimes irrelevant, and we fail frequently to see imaginative
coherences on levels where they are highly relevant.
Brooks starts this passage with a line from a Robert Browning poem:
"So wore the night." (This is also the line that his fellow New
Critic, Yvor Winters, had previously analyzed in depth: see our
"Texts Through the Looking Glass" Section for more.)
Here, dude explains that we could easily sum up the action of the
line, "So wore the night," as, "Thus night passed." But this kind of
"translation" of poetry only captures what Brooks calls the "lowest
common denominator" of meaning. The poetic line is obviously doing
something more than relating that basic meaning of "night
happened."
That's what makes it poetry.

Brooks uses this tiny example to talk about a way bigger problem
with literary analysis. He says scholars' tendency to paraphrase
poetry in a straightforward manner is exactly what's wrong with the
literary criticism of his time. He even gives this practice a name: "the
heresy of paraphrase."
According to Brooks, when we paraphrase, we split the poem into
two elements: content (what it says) and form (how it says it). And
this division leads to trouble. It privileges content, even though, as
we've just said, what really makes poetry an art form is its form.
So, if we look at a poem and just immediately start hunting for its
moral message, it's like we're saying, "Hey, this poem is okay and
all. But what we're really after is the moral." And what happens to the
poem after we've extracted that moral? Is it like wrapping paper for a
present, thrown away as soon as we take out the gift that's inside?
Here, Brooks rightly argues that we need to pay attention to the stuff
that makes poetry a unique literary genre, like metaphors and meter.
As a poet himself, this guy knew that a poem is far more than its
central themes. Poetry is all about how the message is conveyed—in
all of its "imaginative coherences."
Why of Reader-Response Theory
Officially, Reader-Response theory got going in the late 1960s, when
a group of critics including Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, and Norman
N. Holland started asking questions about how a reader's response
to a literary text actually creates that literary text.
But the real roots of Reader-Response theory can be traced further
back to 1938. That's the year that Literature as Exploration, a book
by scholar Louise Rosenblatt, was published. In this book,
Rosenblatt deals at length with how the reader's response to a text is
fundamental to the understanding of a literary work. These ideas
didn't catch on until the 1960s, but when they did, they became the
theory we know and maybe love today.
The Big Names in Reader-
Response Theory
We've said it before, and we'll say it again: it all started with Louise
Rosenblatt and her book Literature as Exploration. That's the first
work of literary criticism that set out in detail a Reader-Response
perspective.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, a whole crop of critics emerged who
focused on analyzing readers' responses to texts. The most
important of these critics was a dude called Stanley Fish. He applied
a Reader-Response perspective to works like John Milton's epic

poem Paradise Lost, and he argued that we just can't understand a
literary work like Milton's epic without considering the reader's
reaction to it.
A second important theorist is Wolfgang Iser, a German scholar who
wrote a lot about how the meaning of a literary text isn't in the text
itself but can be found in the interaction between the reader and the
text. Iser also had a thing for "blanks," gaps in a text that force the
reader to fill in with his or her own imagination.
Norman N. Holland and David Bleich were two guys who were into
psychoanalytic theory. They were influenced by the ideas of the
psychoanalyst and theorist Sigmund Freud, and they argued that
understanding literary texts is all about understanding the
psychology of the person who's actually reading the texts.
For instance, if you're a reader who has hang-ups about mommy and
daddy—and who doesn't?—then you're probably going to project
those issues onto the text you're reading. So when you analyze a
text, you not only have to understand the words on the page, you
have to understand the mind of the person reading those words.
can get feisty.
Reader-Response theorists really don't like the New Critics, a bunch
of mostly dudes who were all about the text. The New Critics They
thought that the meaning of a literary work could be found in the
work itself. According to them, you don't need to know anything
about the social or cultural context of the work, or about the author's
biography. And the reader? Who cares about the reader?
For the New Critics, the reader wasn't important, because in their
New Critic-y minds, the reader had nothing to do with the actual
meaning of the text.
According to Reader-Response critics, though, meaning isn't
something that's just sitting there inside a literary text, waiting to be
discovered. For them, meaning is something that's made as a result
of the interaction between the reader's mind and the text. Reader-
Response theorists argue that the reader is actually as important as
the author.
One criticism Reader-Response theorists often get is this: if
everyone reads differently, then how the heck can we come to any
consensus about a literary work? If everyone has a different
interpretation of the same text, that means that we can never agree
about what the text's saying or doing, right?
Different Reader-Response critics would answer this criticism
differently. There are those, like Norman N. Holland, who'd say:
"Yes, we're all different, and yes, our readings are all going to be
different. But that's okay. Why do we have to agree on what a text is
telling us? There's no need for agreement."

And then there are other Reader-Response critics, like Wolfgang
Iser, who'd argue that texts guide our responses to some extent.
Yes, we each respond differently to texts, but our responses can't
be that drastically different. To go back to the cake analogy: we can't
make a carrot cake if we are given the ingredients for a cheesecake.
Yes, we might each make the cheesecake differently, but at the end
of the day it will be a cheesecake – our response as readers is
determined, to some extent at least, by the ingredients that a
text gives us to work with
Okay, we'll be honest here: Reader-Response theory isn't exactly the
most visible theory around today. Sure, the ideas of Reader-
Response theorists have been incorporated by a whole lot of
different schools, like Poststructuralism and New Historicism. But the
Reader-Response school isn't as flashy and sexy as some of these
other schools are.
We kind of take it for granted nowadays that different readers will
have different responses to a literary work, and that there isn't just
"one" objective meaning that can be found in a text. How you read a
text depends on who you are and what your perspective is.
Just because Reader-Response theory is low-profile, though, doesn't
mean that it hasn't got a lot to offer.
What does Reader-Response
Theory think of literature, authors,
and readers?
What is literature?
Literature provides us with texts, and we make meaning out of those
texts by interacting with them as readers.
What is an author?
An author gives us a text that we readers then re-create through our
own interpretations. An author gives us the outline, but it's the reader
who colors in that outline.
What is a reader?
A reader actively constructs a text through the process of reading. A
reader is as important as the author in making a literary text because
each reader remakes a text through his or her interpretation.

1900-1933: The psychoanalyst and theorist
Sigmund Freud lectures and publishes
extensively
He's the father of psychoanalysis, and he had a boatload of things to
say about how we interpret symbolism in dreams and art. Is it any
wonder that a number of later Reader-Response theorists would find
inspiration in this dude's ideas?
1938: Louise Rosenblatt publishes Literature as
Exploration
Rosenblatt was way ahead of the game when she published this
book in 1938. It's the first work of literary theory that systematically
lays out a Reader-Response perspective.
1940s-1960s: New Criticism reigns supreme
Reader-Response theorists reacted, in part, against the doctrines
of New Criticism. Literary criticism is all about the text, you say?
Reader-Response theorists might have a few things to say about
that.
1967: Stanley Fish publishes Surprised by Sin:
The Reader in Paradise Lost
Fish gives us a new perspective on an old classic, by focusing on
how Milton's poem plays with us readers by making us—surprise!—
like Satan.
1970: Stanley Fish publishes "Literature in the
Reader: Affective Stylistics"
"What does literature do to us?" This, says Fish, is the one question
we all need to be asking ourselves if we want to undertake any kind
of literary criticism.
1972: Wolfgang Iser publishes The Implied
Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose
Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett
Thanks to Iser, we now know that every text has an implied reader.
1975: Norman N. Holland publishes The Nature
of Literary Response: 5 Readers Reading
Holland analyzes five readers reading and shows how they all
respond in very different ways to the same literary texts.
1978: Wolfgang Iser publishes The Act of
Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response
In this follow-up to The Implied Reader, Wolfgang shows us how
meaning is to be found in the act of reading rather than in just the
text itself.

1978: David Bleich publishes Subjective
Criticism
Forget about analyzing the text—let's psychoanalyze the reader! Er,
something like that.
1980: Stanley Fish publishes Is There a Text in
this Class? The Authority of Interpretive
Communities
Fish is fishing in new waters in this book. He shows us how we need
to take into account not just the reader but actually the
entire interpretive community the reader is part of when we're
studying a literary text.
happen.
Louise Rosenblatt Quotes
Quote :Literature as Exploration
Through the medium of words, the text brings into the reader's
consciousness certain concepts, certain sensuous experiences,
certain images of things, people, actions, scenes. The special
meanings and, more particularly, the submerged associations that
these words have for the individual reader will largely determine what
the work communicates to him. The reader brings to the work
personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and
preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment, and a particular
physical condition. These and many other elements in a never-to-be-
duplicated combination determine his response to the peculiar
contribution of the text.
Let's say you're reading a book. The author's describing a nice
house on a lake somewhere: windows, water, trees, the works.
Okay, so as you're reading this description, you suddenly remember
this vacation you took with your parents to Florida when you were a
kid. You remember the house you were staying in by the beach, and
you remember how much fun you had there.
Tl;dr: reading some description of a fictional house can totally make
you think about things you've experienced yourself.
Okay, great. But when someone else reads that description, that
person might have a completely different reaction. Maybe they'll
remember their ex's living room, or something like that. Chances are
pretty good that they're not going to have the same sense of
pleasure reading this as the reader who remembers childhood
vacations to Florida.
What Rosenblatt's getting at here is that each reading experience is
unique to each reader. Not only that, but the same person can read
the same passage twice and have a completely different experience
reading it the second time. If you're happy one day, that passage

about the beautiful house on the lake might make you feel even
happier. If you're sad the next day and reread the same passage,
you might feel worse, because you might be thinking: Man, my life is
a toilet compared to this pretty book.
Rosenblatt was one of the first theorists to think really hard about
how each reader responds differently to the text he or she reads.
We're all unique, right? Well, that means that we'll all have different
perspectives on the texts we read.
Stanley Fish Quotes
Quote :Is There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities
It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of
attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in
the emergence of poetic qualities. […] Interpretation is not the art of
construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not decode
poems; they make them.
Let's say you're sitting at home one day reading
Shakespeare's Hamlet. But you're not just doing that. You also
happen to be sitting in front of your laptop glancing up every two
minutes to check your Facebook newsfeed. At the same time, your
phone's buzzing, and you're texting with a friend, and you're trying to
make dinner plans.
Yeah, if you're doing all that stuff while trying to read Hamlet, you're
probably not going to get much out of it. Can you really understand
the use of language, the themes and motifs that are popping up, or
the structure of the play if you're worrying about all this stuff at once?
Probably not.
But if you lock yourself in a quiet room, shut down your laptop, clear
your desk, put your phone on silent, and just sit there and read
Hamlet really closely, you'll probably get a whole lot out of it. You'll
find things in the play—images, symbols, themes—that you wouldn't
find if you weren't paying close attention.
Basically, Hamlet is only as great as the attention you pay to it.
Those words on the page are just ink unless you, the reader, decide
to make them more than that.
Quote :"Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics" Quote 1
[The] method [is] rather simple in concept, but complex (or at least
complicated) in execution. The concept is simply the rigorous and
disinterested asking of the question, what does this word, phrase,
sentence, paragraph, chapter, novel, play, poem, do?; and the
execution involves an analysis of the developing responses of the
reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time.
Words on a page don't just sit there: when we read them,
they do something to us. They might make us laugh. They might

make us angry. They might make us cry. They might confuse the
heck out of us.
Okay, well, that's all great, but in order for words to evoke all of these
crazy different reactions, there needs to be a reader reading them. In
order to understand what the words are doing, we need to
understand what we, as readers, are feeling and thinking when we
read those words. A critic's job is to analyze how a reader responds
to words as they unfold in sentences.
Stanley Fish is asking a whole lot of us here. Does he seriously want
us to sit there and analyze how we respond to each word that we
read?
Yup.
Well, Fish thinks it's totally worth the effort. We'll take his word for it.
Word by word by word by word.
Quote :"Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics" Quote 2
[T]he value of such a procedure is predicated on the idea of meaning
as an event, something that is happening between the words and in
the reader's mind, something not visible to the naked eyes, but which
can be made visible (or at least palpable) by the regular introduction
of a "searching" question (what does this do?). It is more usual to
assume that meaning is a function of the utterance, and to equate it
with the information given (the message) or the attitude expressed.
That is, the components of an utterance are considered either in
relation to each other or to a state of affairs in the outside world, or to
the state of mind of the speaker-author. In any and all of these
variations, meaning is located (presumed to be embedded) in the
utterance, and the apprehension of meaning is an act of extraction.
In short, there is little sense of process and even less of the reader's
actualizing participation in that process.
Traditionally, we tend to think of meaning as something embedded in
the words on a page. In this view we readers have to find or extract
that meaning. But according to Fish, meaning isn't just sitting there
on a page. Meaning happens, and it only happens when a reader
interacts with a text and participates in making meaning.
Basically, Fish thinks that meaning is something that exists between
the words on the page and the reader's mind. It's not totally in the
text, and it's not something the reader totally makes up, but it's a sort
of creative engagement between the two.
Wolfgang Iser Quotes
Quote :The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan
to Beckett Quote 1
[Texts] not only draw the reader into the action, but also lead him to
shade in the many outlines suggested by the given situations, so that
these take on a reality of their own. But as the reader's imagination
animates these "outlines," they in turn will influence the effect of the
written part of the text. Thus begins a whole dynamic process: the

written text imposes certain limits on its unwritten implication in order
to prevent these from becoming too blurred and hazy, but at the
same time these implications, worked out by the reader's
imagination, set the given situation against a background which
endows it with far greater significance than it might have seemed to
possess on its own. In this way, trivial scenes suddenly take on the
shape of an "enduring form of life." What constitutes this form is
never named, let alone explained, in the text, although in fact it is the
end product of the interaction between text and reader.
Reader-Response theorists love that word "interaction."
This is how it works: a work of literature provides you with a certain
outline of a character, or a scene. It's like the text is a coloring book:
you get all these cool outlines you're supposed to color in. And as
you know if you've ever given a bunch a kids the same picture to
color in, they're all going to do it a little bit differently.
Well, that's basically how a reader interacts with a work of literature:
the reader colors in the outlines that the text gives with his or her
own impressions, thoughts, and emotions. The words on the page
act on the reader's mind, and the reader's mind acts on the words on
the page.
Quote :The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan
to Beckett Quote 2
[T]he possible reader must be visualized as playing a particular role
with particular characteristics, which may vary according to
circumstances. And so just as the author [Thackeray] divides himself
up into the narrator of the story and the commentator of the events in
the story, the reader is also stylized to a certain degree, being given
attributes which he may either accept or reject. Whatever happens
he will be forced to react to those ready-made qualities ascribed to
him.
So, we're talking about the implied reader here. What's that, you
ask? Well, each text constructs its readers, at least to a certain
extent. If a novel is using really fancy-pants vocabulary ("one would
not expect such concupiscence in a woman of such puritanical
habits," anyone?), then the implied reader is someone who is also
kind of fancy-pants: he or she is someone with a big vocabulary,
someone learned and intellectually elite.
If a narrator of another novel keeps saying, "I know you won't believe
me, but I swear this happened," then the implied reader is someone
who is untrusting, or someone who isn't taken in easily—that's why
the narrator has to keep proving that what's being said is actually
true.
So a text puts us, as readers, in a certain position: it assumes we're
super clever, or we're super stupid, or we're super skeptical. Then
we as readers either live up to those expectations, or we don't. But if
you ask Iser, there is always an implied reader.

Iser is explaining to us one of his big concepts. Texts always imply a
reader. And that's significant because it points up just how important
readers are. A text can't really exist without readers. Texts are
written to be read by someone, after all, even if that someone is just
our imaginary friend Bubbles.
Quote :The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response
By impeding textual coherence, the blanks transform themselves into
stimuli for acts of ideation. In this sense, they function as a self-
regulating structure in communication; what they suspend turns into
a propellant for the reader's imagination, making him supply what
has been withheld.
You know how when you read a book, sometimes there are these
great big gaps? You know: let's say you finish a chapter, and then
the next chapter is suddenly set ten years later. You're like, wait a
minute, what the heck's happened in those ten years? What's with all
this jumping around in time?
Or let's say you've been following this one character around for 60
pages, and you're really into him or her. Then suddenly that
character disappears, and a new character pops up out of nowhere.
You get confused. Where did the first character go? What
happened?
According to Iser, these "gaps" or "blanks" are way important in
literature. They may confuse the bejesus out of you, but they
stimulate your imagination. If there's a blank of ten years in the
middle of a novel, you're forced to think about what could have
happened in those ten years—and to come up with all kinds of
theories. If the character you like suddenly disappears from the book,
you start trying to explain that character's disappearance: Were they
kidnapped? Murdered? Did they run away?
Iser's ideas about the "blanks" in texts are important because he's
showing how literary texts force us to become active readers who
have as much a part to play in the telling of the story as the author
does. We create the stories that we read by filling in the "blanks" that
texts give us.
Norman N. Holland Quotes
Quote :"Unity Identity Text Self" Quote 1
The unity we find in literary texts is impregnated with the identity that
finds that unity. This is simply to say that my reading of a certain
literary work will differ from yours or his or hers. As readers, each of
us will bring different kinds of external information to bear. Each will
seek out the particular themes that concern him. Each will have
different ways of making the text into an experience with a
coherence and significance that satisfies.

Literary Criticism.pdf

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Literary Criticism.pdf