Introducing 

Prezi AI.

Your new presentation assistant.

Refine, enhance, and tailor your content, source relevant images, and edit visuals quicker than ever before.

Loading content…
Loading…
Transcript

Formalism/ Neo-Aristotelian/ New Criticism

Key Terms

Formalist Criticism: This approach regards literature as a device used to convey an entire story without the information of other stories or the time period. All the elements necessary for understanding the work are contained within the work itself.

Close reading: is the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of a text, which emphasizes the single and the particular over the general, effected by close attention to individual words, the syntax, and the order in which the sentences unfold ideas, as the reader scans the line of text.

Analytical Technique: focuses on how plot/structure, character, setting, and many other techniques are used by the author to create meaning.

Aristotelian criticism: a literary theory, approach biased by using the method used by Aristotle, implying a formal, logical approach to literary analysis that is centered on the work itself

Key Terms

New Criticism

New Criticism: suggests that the text is a self-contained entity, and that everything that the reader needs to know to understand it is already in the text.

Character- a representation of a person or entity within a story; antagonist, protagonist,antihero,dynamic, flat, round, static

Figures of speech : various expressive devices that convey several emotions and analytic devices to express detail

Imagery: Specified details in order to describe people, settings, or objects as if they are being shown in real life

Plot: A progressing story in order to explain a set of events

Point of View: A perspective on how to tell a narrative

Setting: atmospheric view of either a surrounding area, historical time period, physical setting or a surrounding mood.

Theme: major ideas withstood in between the lines of the text

New Criticism, post-World War I School of Anglo-American literary critical theory that insisted on the intrinsic value of a work of art and focused attention on the individual work alone as an independent unit of significance. It was against the critical practice of bringing historical or biographic data to carry on the interpretation of a work.

The primary technique employed in the new critical approach is close analytic reading of the text, a technique as old as poetic of Aristotle.

Websites/ Resources

Formalism

Formalism, also called Russian formalism, Russian Russky formalism, innovative 1900-century Russian school for literary criticism. It started in two groups: OPOYAZ, an acronym for Russian words which means the Society for the study of poetic language, which was found in 1916 at St. Petersburg and led by Viktor Shklovsky; And the circle of linguistics in Moscow, found in 1915. This analysis form involves the complete deconstruction of every element found within the piece of literature to have its own meaning.

Neo-Aristotelian Criticism

“Formalism.” Armstrong Education, http://www.write.armstrong.edu/handouts/Formalism.pdf.

“Critical Approaches to Literature.” CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE, home.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/spring97/litcrit.html.

"Formalism Literary Criticism." herefordhs.bcps.org/UserFiles/Servers/Server_3705599/File/Academics/English/Approaches%20to%20Lit%20Crit--brief.pdf+https://www.britannica.com/topic/Formalism-literary-criticism

Newbold, Curtis, and Alisa Scott. “NEO-ARISTOTELIAN METHOD OF RHETORICAL CRITICISM.” The Visual Communication Guy: Designing, Writing, and Communication Tips for the Soul, 1 Aug. 2017, thevisualcommunicationguy.com/2017/08/01/neo-aristotelian-rhetorical-criticism/.

Questions to Consider ?

Neo-Aristotelian Criticism, named after Aristotle, is one of the original forms of rhetorical criticism. It involves using context, the five canons of rhetoric, and the effects. It’s also referred to traditional criticism. The five canons include invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. In order to use this form of criticism, you must first select an artifact ,there’s a wide range to choose from including documents, political speeches, and public service announcements, then you analyze it using what was stated, and finally consider rhetorical concepts. The ultimate goal for using this is to find out and learn how the document or speech affected its audience.

  • What is confusing?
  • What is repeated?
  • What is familiar?
  • What is strange?
  • How do various elements of the work (plot, character, point of view) create and reinforce its meanings?
  • How are the elements related to the whole?
  • What is the work's major organizing principle?
  • What issues are raised by the work? How does the work's structure resolve those issues?

THE TELL-TALE HEART

by

Edgar Allan Poe

“The ability to identify the available means of persuasion” - Aristotle possibly

New Criticism

As the story continues along many analysis can be made. Throughout the story there is emphasis such as "Steadily,steadily" This could prove the seriousness or the movement he is going through. Maybe how his life is going or is how the main character is going to kill the old man.

PLOT:

A narrator begins the story by explaining that he's sane. The protagonist of the "The Tell-Tale Heart" is a classic example of Poe's unreliable narrator, a man who cannot be trusted to tell the objective truth of what is occurring. He tells use that his precision in killing him means that he could not possibly be insane. For 7 nights, the narrator opens the man's door - a process which takes him a whole hour. However, the old man's eye is always closed, making it impossible to do the deed.

On the 8th night, the old man wakes up and the narrator's lantern flashes in the man's vulture eye. The old man screams. He jumps onto the old man and gives him a heart attack. He smothers him in the bed and chops his body up into little pieces, then hiding it under the floorboards.

A neighbor phones the police and 3 officers come to check out the disturbance. Pleasant and courteous, the narrator is confident that they'll find no trace of murder. But soon he hears the old man's thumping heart coming from under the floor (not realizing it could have been his own nervous heart thumping). He feels that the officers must hear the sound too, so then the man confesses to killing him and tells them to tear up the floorboards in order to reveal the body.

SETTING:

The story is set sometime in the 19th century, as seen by the lack of electricity and dependence on gas lanterns. It is predominately developed in the bedchambers of the old man, most likely in some American town or city, where a murder and subsequent police investigation takes place. The mood is tense as the narrator reveals early on how he wishes to commit murder, and the continual references to the narrator’s own sanity add to the overall intensity. Because the setting seems so commonplace, and the characters so ordinary on the surface, Poe is effectively able to add to the horror of the situation.

CHARACTERS:

The central character is that of the murderer, an unnamed man who has gone mad because of his overly acute senses. His nervous condition is partially caused by his next-door neighbor, an elderly man who has what is termed “the vulture eye”, although he discloses early in the narrative that he suffered from a previous disease. Both the narrator and the old man are flat characters, and show little change in throughout the story. The police officers, too, are sketches of the real thing.

POINT OF VIEW:

The story is told from the first person point of view, through the eyes of the madman. His attempts to convince the reader he is sane–that he just suffers from acute senses– fails as the reader is forced to understand his rational for killing the man. This perspective helps develop the inherent ironies in the story, as the reader understands the truth much differently from the madman.

IRONY:

The irony in the story is in the second sentence of the first paragraph; the narrator says "The disease had sharpened my senses— not destroyed, not dulled them."(p. 151). In my opinion this is ironic, because he believed that his insanity was an asset to his situation, when really it brought about his downfall. Had he not been so self-assured that his scheme would be flawless because of his "heightened senses", he invariably would not have ended up in turmoil. This brings about the next point; it was ironic that after all of his careful planning, he ended up admitting to the police that he had killed the man.

SYMBOLISM:

Symbolism is an important aspect of the story. The major symbol is the heartbeat. The narrator believed that the sound was the beating of the old man's heart, but it was actually his own heartbeat, signifying his fear of being caught, and his guilty conscience tormenting him for killing the old man. The vultures, blue veiled eye clearly represents evil, the evil that the narrator saw in the eye that he was trying to eliminate.

THEME:

A theme of "The Tell-Tale Heart" is that human nature is a delicate balance of light and dark, or good and evil. Most of the time this precarious proportion is maintained; however, when there is a shift, for whatever reason, the dark or perverse side emerges. How and why this dark side arises differs from person to person. What may push one individual over the edge will only cause another to raise an eyebrow.

Neo-Aristotelian Criticism

As the plots goes on; the old man dies and is murdered, however this could represent the speaker in a way such as maybe the death is him loosing something such as a pet or career. In addition, As you keep reading throughout the text i get the feeling "Loneliness," due to him not being able to speak to anybody or he holds things.

Logo

Learn more about creating dynamic, engaging presentations with Prezi