As we have been discussing Formalism in class this week, I can’t help but begin to assess our own learning that happens in our very own department at our very own college. I’ve been asking myself all week if Formalist ideas influence the way we learn, and the ways that our professors teach.
The reason that I ask this question has stemmed from Eliot’s idea that when you read a poem, you are not in touch with the poet, and from Wimsatt and Beardsley’s idea that the object of reading a poem is to pay attention to the poem itself, not the author’s psyche or history.
Dr. Powers first brought up this notion of the poet being separate from the voice of the poem when we were asked to read “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar and figure out what it meant before and after we knew part of Dunbar’s biographical history. Dr. Powers said that, when reading poetry, most readers will assume that the poet is the narrator within the poem, that readers tend to assume that the voice within the poem is that of the poet’s.
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So immediately we are asked to infer meaning from the poem, and, right now in Poetry Workshop, it is a rule that, when we are workshopping, we are not allowed to assume that the voice of the narrator in the poem is the author of the poem; we must read the poem assuming that the voice or experience in the poem is separate from the poet.
To me, this is blatantly Formalist because, as Dr. Powers explained, Wimsatt and Beardsley argue in “The Intentional Fallacy” that the poem is not ascribable to the poet, and that the quest after author’s intent is wrong.
I can certainly see how studying poetry in a Formalist light can strengthen the mind of the reader because you are forced to critically read a poem and become a student of the poem. However, I’m not sure if I agree completely with Formalism because if the poet authored the poem in the first place, then they wrote it with intent and within a certain context, and, because of the poet’s own experience, their words and meaning cannot help but to be affected; experience affects everything, so I have a hard time just discounting it.
So is it wrong to study poetry just through the lenses of Formalism? I would like to get some responses on this, and I’m curious if people have had a similar experience to mine, or just thoughts in general.
Just for a reference, here's the English Department's Mission Statement.
1 comment:
Hey Leanne. I agree with you that Formalism is useful, but I also agree that it doesn't provide a very complete way of understanding poetry. I also think I've had a kind of half-and-half experience as far as Messiah's English department goes. Dr. Downing's classes have (obviously) leaned toward Postmodernism, situatedness, and understanding a poem within its historical context. Part of that's because of the nature of the courses she teaches (Victorian, Romanticism, etc.) and part of it's because of her own intellectual interests. On the other hand, I think you're right that Matt Roth may lean a little more toward Formalism, maybe because he's a big fan of Vladimir Nabokov and Nabokov thinks that "We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know" (sounds vaguely Wimsatt-and-Beardsley-ish to me). So probably the degree of Formalist influence varies from professor to professor. But I think overall my experience at Messiah has leaned more toward interpreting literature within its historical context ... while, at the same time, trying to understand the literature on its own terms rather than jumping to conclusions merely because it is written during a certain time or by a certain kind of person. Maybe people's experiences in the department would vary based on their emphasis ... I don't know.
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