Formalism Texts

It's a novel that begins with a description of the narrator's parents having sex. Need we say more? So cogitate this: How does Sterne use digression in this novel? How do Tristram's endless digress...

Imagine waking up as a huge icky bug one morning. Would you just hop out of bed, brew your coffee, and dash to catch the bus? Follow Gregor Samsa's odyssey in the Metamorphosis to find out whether...

Toomer vividly and poetically depicts African-American life in the south during the Jim Crow era. And there's lots of imagery of sugar cane in this book. Sweeeet! (Yes, the sugar part. The vestiges...

Don't we all want to talk to our pets? Well, Murray makes birds, cows, bats, and other favorites of the animal kingdom talk in this book of poetry about nature and animals. And he makes them do it...

Two minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet take center-stage in this play. And they're pretty clueless. Lots of comedy (and of course, tragedy) ensues. Why does Stoppard write a whole play fro...

Shklovsky was only 24 years old when he wrote this essay that would revolutionize literary criticism. Did we mention he was only 24? Yeah, we can't get over it. According to Shklovsky, why is "defa...

This Vik was an ambitious guy—not only did he get through the thousands-page tomes of Tolstoy; he also plodded through the nine volumes of Sterne's digressive masterpiece. Watch Shklovsky in acti...

Jakobson tries to define that vague, magical thing, "literariness," which he says is the true object of literary "science." Isn't that some kind of oxymoron?First thing's first. What is the differe...

Jakobson and Tynyanov talk about the laws governing the evolution of literature. It's written in bullet points. And it's super complicated. Got it? Got it. Why is it so important to understand the...

Formalism summarized and explained in one essay. Yes. Warning: it's still pretty dense. What trends in literary criticism were the Formalists reacting against when they began theorizing about poet...