Formalist Criticism Example of Poetic Texts
One of the criticisms leveled at formalist criticism is that it claims to be a universal method but that its practice belies those claims. Formalist criticism example can be found through skeptical commentators on the New Criticism have regularly conceded its effectiveness with a variety of poetic texts and have granted that a Cleanth Brooks might have had a few useful things to say about the poetry of well-wrought urns and other similarly small and obviously formed objects, but they have at the same time suggested that formalism was out of its depths when it tried to deal with prose.
Formalist criticism example story was found in the in the novel. This dissatisfaction is especially striking because many Russian formalists--including Shklovsky, Propp, and Bakhtin--took the novel and the tale as their special projects. How are we to understand the charge that they somehow failed to deal with the novel when their criticism occupied itself with the novel and fictional narratives more often than not? One explanation is that some Russian formalists, Shklovsky in particular, treated language as if its highest form were poetry, understood as an intense figurativeness rather than an overarching formal structure. When Shklovsky identified poetry and prose as the twin poles of literary language, poetry could be said to appear in novels whenever one released the surprise lurking in language. 'Defamiliarization' meant that the novel could be infused with such poetic moments and, indeed, that the very success of a novel at achieving such 'estrangement' seemed to militate against a consciousness of the novel as a long prose narrative.
Shklovskian formalism's ability to uncover the poetic in the novel came to appear as a denigration of the prosaic and quotidian in the novel. By contrast, Propp's account of narrative, based on the anonymous prose of the folktale, stressed the relationship between a whole narrative action and its parts, so that issues of sequence and variation loomed large. Propp's formalism explicitly argued that the anonymity of the folktale's authorship--the sense that anyone and everyone in a community had had a role in the tale's development and preservation--applied to the agents of the tales themselves: agency became such a capacious and formally empty notion that one no longer needed human actors or characters to achieve it; animals and pots and kettles could carry the narrative action as well as a human could. Action, in other words, displaced character, and any sense of characterological depth looked misplaced in an analysis in which both animals and inanimate objects might play active roles.
In conclusion, this essay argues that what formalist criticism has missed in the novel is character and, indeed, that the criticism developed in response to Foucault's work has been formalist not only in its way of identifying discourses but also in its efforts to dispatch character to the shadows. In his classic Foucauldian study The Novel and the Police and even in his earlier Narrative and Its Discontents, for example, D. A. Miller argues that the novel's self-reflexive operations that give readers the sense of entering a character's consciousness are discursive structures rather than the products of individual consciousness. Discursive regimes, that is, become the pots and kettles of Proppian analysis, the actors that make it clear that activity in no way requires actual persons. Insofar as self-consciousness is identified with policing, the project of inventorying and distribution that Adam Smith describes as a basic function of civil society, self-consciousness does not provide an independent standpoint from which to judge one's society but is instead one of that society's most flexible and effective tools. As a critique of the techniques of self-reflection that have been formalized in the social sciences, Foucauldian criticism found a new set of grounds on which to eliminate character.
