1. Define Formalism or New Criticism 2. Examine critical thoughts espoused by I.A. Richard, et. al. apropos to New Criticism 3. Relate the critical analysis of any literary works of art in teaching literature today. Formalism refers to a style of inquiry that focuses, almost exclusively, on features of the literary text itself, to the exclusion of biographical, historical, or intellectual contexts Insimple terms, Formalists believed that the focus of literary studies should be the text itself, and not the author's life or social class. Art is produced according to certain sets of rules and with its own internal logic. Ivor Armstrong Richards (February 26, 1893-1979) was an influential literary critic and rhetorician who is often cited as the founder of an Anglophone school of Formalist criticism that would eventually become known as the New Criticism. Richards is one of the founders of the contemporary study of literature in English As a classroom assignment, Richards would give undergraduates short poems, stories, or passages from longer works without indicating who the authors were. He discovered that virtually all of his students—even the most exceptional ones—were utterly at a loss to interpret, say, a sonnet of Shakespeare's, without relying on the clichés drawn from Shakespeare's biography and style. Inattempting to ascertain why his students had such difficulty interpreting literary texts without the aid of biographical and historical commonplaces, Richards hit upon his method of extremely close-reading, forcing his students to pay an almost captious degree of attention to the precise wording of a text. Itsadherents were emphatic in their advocacy of close reading and attention to texts themselves, and their rejection of criticism based on extra-textual sources, especially biography. According to Eichenbaum, Shklovsky was the lead critic of the group, and Shklovsky contributed two of their most well-known concepts: Defamiliarization (ostraneniye, more literally, "estrangement" or "making it strange") and the plot/story distinction (syuzhet/fabula). "Defamiliarization"is one of the crucial ways in which literary language distinguishes itself from ordinary, communicative language, and is a feature of how art in general functions: Namely, by presenting things in strange and new ways that allow the reader to see the world in a The plot/story distinction, the second aspect of literary evolution according to Shklovsky, is the distinction between the sequence of events the text relates ("the story") from the sequence in which those events are presented in the work ("the plot"). By emphasizing how the "plot" of any fiction naturally diverges from the chronological sequence of its "story," Shklovsky was able to emphasize the importance of paying an extraordinary amount of attention to the plot—that is, the form—of a text, so as to understand its meaning. Both of these concepts are attempts to describe the significance of the form of a literary work in order to define its "literariness." For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the words on the page were all that mattered; the reader has no privileged access into the author's mind to determine what the author "intended" to say. The importation of meanings from outside the text was quite irrelevant, and potentially distracting. This became a central tenet of New Criticism. Nevertheless, close reading is now a fundamental tool of literary criticism. Such a reading places great emphasis on the particular over the general, paying close attention to individual words, syntax, even punctuation, and the order in which sentences and images unfold as they are Inlater times, the excruciatingly exact style of reading advocated by New Criticism has been jokingly referred to as "analyzing the daylights out of a poem before thirty stupefied undergraduates." The major premises of New Criticism include: "art for art's sake," "content = form," and "texts exist in and for themselves." These premises lead to the development of reading strategies that isolate and objectify the overt structures of texts as well as authorial techniques and language usage. Shklovsky's (quoted by Trotsky) that "Art was always free of life, and its color never reflected the color of the flag which waved over the fortress of the City" Formalists value poetry rich in ambiguity, irony, and intention, and want to make literary criticism a science. This last projection introduces the concept of expert readers into interpretive theory. Happy Relearning! -the presenter