In this ppt you know about how formalist do literary analysis of any text. They focus on different things like Form Diction Unity These three basic things focus on formalist analysis of any literary text especially poem. In this ppt you also find comprehensive information about reader Response Theory. And different types of reader Response Theory.

1. Literary Theory
Topic: Formalism/Reader-
response theory

2. Outline of the Lecture
• Formalist Reading of Literature
A) Form B) Diction C) Unity
• Reader-Response Theory
• Transactional Reader-Response Theory
• Psychological Reader-response Theory
• Subjective Reader-response Theory
• Affective Stylistic Theory
• Social Reader-response Theory
• Explanation of difficult terms
• Activity for reading

3. Formalist Reading
• Formalists examine how individual elements of a
text come together to create a work of art. They
are concerned with inside relations as a text for
them is ‘a self-contained entity’. They seek
governing principles that allow a text to reveal
itself.
• They make second reading and note repetition of
words, images, patterns of sounds and multiple
meanings in detail.
• They focus on form, diction and unity

4. Form
• Form contains all those organizational devices that
create the total effect i.e. recurrences, repetitions,
relationships, motifs. Form and content are
inseparable. Form is created by how parts affect each
other and fit together. Images gain significance and
create form and unity by appearing more than once
whether randomly or regularly.
• The point of view is also a shaping force. Formalists
person,
note whether the narrator is omniscient 3rd
first person or second person.
• Formalists note whether the form is traditional or not.

5. Conti…
in sequential
They note whether the events are
fashion or flashback.
They examine whether the ending of a work is
surprising or satisfying—closed or open.
They trace effects of meter rhyme, rhythm, sound
patterns, visual patterns, similes and metaphors.
• Form is however, hard to be determined in modern
works without guideposts. “However, no form is also
form.” It conveys the vision of a chaotic and
meaningless world.

6. Diction
• Words are keys to meanings. They have denotations
(literal meanings: lion: an animal)and connotations
(figurative meanings: lion: a brave person). Formalists
look at these aspects and their etymology (origin and
development). Scientists focus on directness and
singularity of meaning and use denotation for practical
purpose while poetry aims at ambiguity and richness
through suggestive, evocative, compressed and multi-
leveled language. Poetry has divergent meanings.
• Poetry has complexity resulting from multiple often
conflicting meanings woven through 4 devices.

7. Conti…
• 1-Paradox-- a statement that appears self-contradictory but
represents the actual way the things are: - Lose life to gain
it. Child is the father of man. Life’s spiritual and
psychological realities are paradoxical in nature.
• 2-Irony-- an event undermined by the context in which it
occurs:
• 3-Ambiguity—a word or an image or an event generating
two or more different meanings: Lack of clarity and
precision lends richness, depth and complexity to a work.
• 4-Tension—a literary text is created by tension—linking
together of opposites—the abstract and the concrete, the
religious and the secular.

8. Unity
• Unity—multiple meanings produced by the
text must be resolved or harmonized. Organic
unity must be established.
• “If a work has unity, all of its aspects fit
together in significant ways that create a
whole”. Each element contributes to its
totality and unifying effect.

9. Russian Formalism
• New Critics and Russian Formalist are two groups who are distantly
connected. The latter flourished in Moscow and St. Petersburg in
the 1920s, and although the principles they formulated have some
similarity to those of the New Critics, yet they are two separate
schools. In fact, because the work of the Russian formalists was
based on the theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, the French
linguist, they are probably more closely related to the structuralists,
who were to garner attention in the 1950s and 1960s. Saussure’s
influence is seen, for example, in the Russian formalists’ argument
that literature is a systematic set of linguistic and structural
elements that can be analyzed. They saw literature as a self-
enclosed system that can be studied not for its content but for its
form. Russian formalist may be termed as early Structuralist.

10. Reader Response Theory
• Reader Response critics found the Formalist slogan “The text
itself” very narrow and restrictive. The text can not be
separated from what it does. The reader concretizes the text;
otherwise it is just black marks on the page. They argued that
the text was nothing without the reader. Their extreme
position is that there is no text. The reader creates the text
during the process of reading.
• “The reader makes implicit comments, fills in gaps, draws
inferences, tests out hunches, and to do this means drawing
on a tacit knowledge of the world and literary conventions in
general.”
• Formalists had shifted the focus from the author to the text.
Reader Response Theorists(RRT onward) shift it to the Reader.

11. Conti…
• “Different readers are free to actualize the work in
different ways, there is no single interpretation which
will exhaust its semantic potential.”
• What is reader’s response? Actually if a tree falls in the
forest and none is around there to listen its voice, Does
it make a noise? In the same way, if a text sits in a shelf
in a bookstore and none is there around to read it,
Does the text have meaning ? So the practitioners of
RR theory advocate that a readers interaction with text
gives the text its meaning. The text cannot exist
without the reader. There are different schools of
thought in RR theories. They are following:

12. TRANSACTIONAL READER RESPONSE
THEORY
• Louise Rosenblatt says—reader brings ‘an
attitude’— “some personal flavour or
colouring of feeling”.
• Both the text and the reader are necessary for
the production of meaning. A text serves as a
blueprint and people respond in a personal
way influenced by their feelings, associations
and memories.

13. Conti…
• Louise Rosenblatt wrote influential books in this regard
• A) Literature as Exploration (1938)—transactional reading.
• B)The Reader, the Text, the Poem(1978)—reciprocal
relationship between the text and the reader.
• Roman Ingarden’s The Literary Work of Art (1938) regards
literary works as organic wholes. The readers are supposed
to fill the gaps to complete the harmony.
• Formalists reading is “a neutral event that occurs in an
historical or cultural vacuum”. RRT “inevitably personal
and intrinsically human quality.”

14. Conti…
“It is a kind of experience valuable in and for itself and yet or
perhaps, therefore, it can also have liberating and fortifying
effect on the ongoing life of the reader” (Rosenblatt, 1938)
• He further elaborates that Reading are of two types:
Aesthetic—what occurs during the actual reading event itself.
There can be transaction between the text and the reader
only if the text is aesthetic.
• Non-Aesthetic (efferent)—material from experience
(information, life)

15. Conti…
• Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) gives
The concept of the implied author He says
"However impersonal [an author] may try to
be, his reader will inevitably construct a
picture of the official scribe who writes in this
manner.“ In the same way an Implied Reader
who is presumed image of the reader in
writer’s mind while writing a literary work.
• Booth’s The Company We keep(1988)
introduced ethical criticism which examines
interconnections between our lives and the
literary work we consume.

16. Conti…
• Ethical value lies in poem or the reader. Of
course the value is not there, actually until it is
actualized by the reader. Nevertheless, of
course. It could not be realized if it were not
there, in potential in the poem (1988. p. 89)
• “He makes of his reader, as he makes of his
second self, and the most successful reading is
one in which the created selves, author and
reader can find complete agreement” (Booth,
1961).

17. PSYCHOLOGICAL READER-RESPONSE
THEORY
• Norman Holland argues that the reader’s motives
strongly influence the way he
interpretations reveal something
reads. Our
about our
psyche. We react to events in texts as we react to
events in real life. Our goal of interpretations is to
fulfill our psychological needs and desires.
Interpretive process has three stages or modes
that occur and recur as we read.

18. AFFECTIVE STYLISTICS
A literary text is an event that occurs in time
and comes into being as it is read. It is not an
object that exists in space. It affects the reader
when it is read line by line and word by word.
A text is not an ‘objective, autonomous
entity’. Stanley Fish asserts that a text’s
meaning can be found by analyzing how it is
structured and responded to.

19. SUBJECTIVE READER-RESPONSE THEORY
For David Bleich, reader’s response are the text.
He made distinction between real objects
(physical—printed page) and symbolic objects
(experience created by the reader—conceptual
memories). All knowledge is subjective.
world created by his experiences and
The
whole meanings lie in the mind of the Reader.

20. Social Reader-Response Theory
• Fish revised his earlier views. He denied purely
subjective responses and regarded them product of
interpretive communities to which readers belong.
The members of interpretive communities share the
interpretive strategies and bring them to texts when
they read.
Interpretive strategies result from institutionalized
assumptions of what makes a literary text. He wrote
the names of linguists and told the students that the
poem was written in metaphysical period. We find in a
text what strategies put there.

21. Conclusion
• Transactional RR Theory analyses the transaction between reader
and the text. Both are seen equally important. A reader can take an
efferent stance based on determinant meaning and aesthetic
stance based on indeterminacy of meaning.
• Affective Stylistics RR Theory examines the text in slow format in
which each line or word is studied to determine how (stylistics)
affects the reader in the process of reading
• Subjective RR Theory believes that reader’s responses are the text
and all meanings of the text lies in the readers interpretations.
• Social RR theory focuses on that a readers approach the text with
interpretative strategies that are the product of the interpretative
communities in which they belong.
• The Psychological RR theory believes that how the reader’s
motives strongly influence the way he reads. Our interpretations
reveal something about our psyche.

22. Important Terms
• Denotations/Connotations
• Aesthetic/Efferent (non-aesthetic)
• Subjective reading/objective reading
• Implied author/actual author
• Implied Reader/Actual reader
• Determinant/indeterminant meaning

23. Activity
Differentiate between Formalism and Reader-
response theories.
THANK YOU