Critique of Formalism detailed discussion

Critique of Formalism

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Formalism is a literary theory that focuses mainly on the elements that constitute a piece of literature to make an analysis on the piece. It excludes the biographical, historical, and intellectual aspects of the piece. It uses elements of the piece such as similes, paradox, characters, plot, tension, ambiguity, and metaphor to understand the specific work. Formalists do not consider the author’s intent for the piece as important, neither do they spare a though for the circumstances that led the author to produce the piece. They exclude all forms of external influences that may have contributed to the work. They aim to separate the work from the author as much as they possibly can and carefully analyze it to discover the relationship between its elements that comes together to cohesively make a piece of work what it is. Formalism is an outdated method of literary analysis that fails to tie the author to the work itself and is therefore a misrepresentation of the literal piece.

Formalists closely read the work they need to analyze to understand how the various elements contribute to the flow and the cohesiveness of the work. They work on the premise that once they understand the individual elements of the literary work and how the elements work on the specific piece, they will understand the piece as a whole. Formalists believe that a specific piece of work is self-contained and self-referential. All that they need to do is a correct analysis of the work which is contained in the work itself; and they do not need to go outside the realm of the work to make an analysis.

Formalists use this method of literary analysis for a number of reasons. First, they believe that people have certain biases when studying a literary piece. Some biases include author biases and place of origin biases. If readers and analysts know the author and their style of writing, their critical analysis decisions will depend on past works of the author and general known facts about them. If an author is famous for preference of specific themes and writing styles, then the analysts tend to assume these known facts for every piece the author writes. This hinders a critical analysis of a literary piece. Second, there are stereotypes that are associated with certain literary pieces. Some critics consider authors from some geographical areas better than those from other areas. This clouds the judgment of some critics and their analysis of a literary piece may not be objective. In addition, when formalists analyze a piece of literature, they aim for the truth of the literary piece. Once they establish the truth, them the piece is less prone ideological changes in future interpretation based on its background and that of the authors.

Structuralism is a form of formalism that sees the literature piece as part of a system of signs. It lays emphasis on the fact that the elements that make up a piece get their full meaning only when analyzed in relation to each other and to the system in which they belong. Thus, to come up with the meaning of a given literal piece, structuralists examined the underlying aspects of the piece such as the plot, the characterization and related the patterns and similarities drawn to other literal pieces of the same genre. For instance, a structuralist does not analyze a poem in a vacuum. He or she considers the features that make the poem to be a poem. They rhyme, repetition, metaphors and similes found in one poem and drew parallels with other poems in order to draw conclusions on the poem.

Structuralists work under the assumption that a specific literal piece does not stand alone. The piece is part of a larger system and thus studies the work to identify and understand the elements of the piece and how they come together to contribute to the piece’s structure. Structuralists make connections between different elements of a literal piece of work so that they understand how each individual element contributes to the complete work. They take a step further from a literal piece they are analyzing to compare similarities in the piece to other pieces that bear similarities to them.

Structuralists consider a literal piece as part of a larger system. It is dependent on other pieces that make up a system. Therefore, they do not simply analyze the piece alone but also the larger system that the piece is part of. The structuralist uses the system to identify underlying elements of pieces of literature that are similar and produce a pattern. The pattern helps the structuralist to identify place the work into a larger system that they are part of and therefore, correctly analyze a literal piece by putting it in perspective.

Tzvetan Todorov in his work, Structural Analysis of a Narrative published in 1969 gave “an abstract description of what I believe to be the structural approach to literature.” (Todorov 70).  He gives a series of points that he deems important when analyzing a literary piece. He narrowed his analysis to that of a narrative. In his opinion, the first decision to make in the structural analysis of literature is whether the narrative has a descriptive attitude or a theoretical attitude (Todorov 70). He notes that the theoretical aspect of the narrative takes precedence, as it is not the “description of the work” that the analyst is interested in, but rather the way the piece manifests itself as part of an “abstract structure” (Todorov 70). The work does not exist in a vacuum but as part of a broader system to which it belongs.

The second consideration for the analyst is to differentiate between the “internal approach” and the “external approach” to literature (Todorov 70). He insists that the analyst use the internal structuralism as opposed to the external structuralism. Though he does not advocate for the use of biographical aspects that affect the text in its analysis, he writes that structuralism requires the analysis of the system from which the specific text originates as a whole (Todorov, 71). He regards it “not as an individual aspect but as part of a greater system” and therefore must be analyzed as such.

Todorov suggests that analysts should use Meta language to provide a “visual image” of the literature under analysis. He writes that the image helps in the understanding of the piece by relating it to objects that the readers of the analysis understand and relate to. He also disagrees with the analysis of some literature critics such as Henry James who consider literature a science.  He contends that most literature readers understand a piece in terms of its plot and narration and are therefore unconcerned with “theoretical problems”. He insists that the way that a piece of literature and the way that the artist puts it together is important in the structural analysis of literature. He writes that in the structural analysis of literature, “discussion of methodology is not a minor area of a larger field, a kind of accidental by-product but rather its very centre, its principal goal” (Todorov, 76).

Sigmund Freud gives his input on the analysis of a narrative. His theory states that the energy people put into tasks is at its very nature sexual. However, it is not purely expressed sexually but can manifest itself through personality disorders, dreams and fantasies that come about when the instinctual drives were limited to manifestation by the external surroundings. This he named the pleasure principle the reality principle. Freud writes that the motivation of an artist to produce a creative work is driven by desire to achieve some degree of status of the desire to own something. However, with few resources that an artist can use to acquire their desire, they result to art and literature, believing that its appreciation will bring out the recognition that they desire. To analyze a piece of literature, Freud advocates for the understanding of the author’s conflict with himself and to construct his reasons for a literal piece based on what he reveals about himself from the work.

In his book, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud focuses on dreams of some of his patients as the literary pieces of analysis. He seeks to analyze the dream based on the dreamer’s life and happenings that could have in one way or the other contributed to the dreams. He writes that dreams occur for different reasons and signify different desires for the dreamers. Freud and his team discovered that dreams are not abstract and a series of factors come together to constitute a dream. These he referred to as the ‘peculiarities in the dream’ – the events of the previous day or days leading up to the dream that were of significant importance to the dreamer. The second is the fact that dreams pick not what is important and elaborate in a dreamer’s life but those aspects that the dreamer trivializes and subordinates. The dream implies their magnitude and effect, known or otherwise. Third, the dreams are composed of those memories that make up the earliest part of the dreamers childhood. These may be issues the dreamer trivializes ad may have long forgotten their existence (Freud 57).

Freud interprets that the content of a dream is based on the premise of remnants of events that took place in the life of the dreamer a long time ago. This he terms as a manifestation of the dream-distortion (Freud 61). Dreams mostly constitute events of the day. However, “If the day has brought us two or more experiences which are worthy to evoke a dream, the dream will blend the allusion of both into a single whole: it obeys a compulsion to make them into a single whole” (Freud 61).  Some of the dreams the sources of which Freud interpreted were the embarrassing dreams of being naked, the dreams that contain the death of a loved one, and the examination dreams. All these he contends stem from the psyche of the dreamer.

Freud identified levels needed in interpreting a dream. The first is condensation. Here, several images combine to form a composite image. The second is displacement. This occurs when another that is more important to the life and meaning of the dream replaces an image in a dream. The third is representation. Hers, the thoughts that represent the dream take the presence of images and appear to the dreamer as images. In order for an analyst to interpret a dream correctly, they need to understand all these ways that a dream manifests itself and break down the individual components that will help to understand the meaning of the dream (Freud 93).

Non-formalists contradict the literary analysis beliefs of the formalists. In their opinion, a literary piece is dependent of other factors that came into play during its creation. Formalists believe that in addition to the different elements of a literary piece constitute a literary piece, analysts should consider extrusive elements of the piece.  They insist that a piece of literature is the outcome of the of an author’s belief system, their historical, biographical and intellectual background and their mind frame at the time of writing the piece. Non-formalists believe that art of any kind, including literal art, is a result of the artist’s emotional being at the time that the artist creates the art.

Freud therefore embraces more of the non-formalist approach to the interpretation of dreams to analyze literal pieces. He sees a dream not as an individual entity but as part of a wider system that contributes to the life of the dreamer. He uses the dreamer’s back-story (who in this case is the author) to try and identify the reasons for the dream and give it a correct interpretation. Though the formalist approach is a good approach to the analysis of a literal piece, it fails to take into account the authors and their contribution into the literal piece. This in my opinion is a gross misrepresentation of the piece because, without the authors and their experiences leading up to the specific moment, the piece of literature cannot exist.

Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. The interpretation of dreams. New York: Modern Library, 1900. Print.

Todorov, Tzvetan. Structural analysis of a narrative. New York: Thousand Oaks, 1969.     Print.

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