ENGL 153 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Close Reading, Institute For Operations Research And The Management Sciences
11 Jan 2017
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
**formalism: practice of understanding how form shapes the meaning of a narrative** What does not appear in formalist analysis: paraphrase, intention, biography, affect. Rejects biography and social context, and instead focuses on just the work of art. Identifies how a text creates meaning by only paying attention to what is intrinsic to the text. Discovers how all the elements of a narrative coalesce to create a unified and singular meaning = the unity of the text. Focuses on a special type of language = literary language. Examines how meaning emerges from a narrative by considering it as a unified whole in which all its parts work separately and together to produce a single meaning. Only one correct interpretation literary critic becomes like a scientist, searching for the truth of text by dissecting it. Patterns of images, figures of speech, metaphors, pov, diction (denotation vs connotation), tone, structure. Formalism organizes its analysis around close reading of the narrative.
