Sutrismi (2013) describes formalist literary criticism as the theory or approach of literary criticism which early developed in Russia and America where by in Russia, it developed during the pre and post-revolutionary period and became a prominent literary theory in the early twentieth century as a reaction against Romanticist theories of literature which focused on the artist and individual creative talent. Also, it was the dominant mode of academic literary study in the United States from the end of the Second World War and it was called New Criticism that initiated by critics like John Crowe Ransom, C.P. Snow, and T.S. Eliot while in Europe, it began particularly in England with I.A. Richard’s Practical criticism (1929). It continued to change according to variation of decades like from 1920 up to 1960, it was so called Modernism. Although the theories of Russian Formalism and New Criticism are similar in a number of respects, the two schools largely developed in isolation from one another and should not be considered identical.
Furthermore, through formalist literary criticism, the objective of literature is regarded as “to make the stones stonier” that demonstrate the idea of literariness. In formalism the text is identified as “art” and the autonomy of the text is advocated. It focused on the internal factors of the text excluding external factors such as the author, the reader, historical context as well as cultural context of the text. Formalists believe that it is not possible to understand words without first understanding the relationship that exists between the object, emotion or experience and the symbol that denotes it. Similarly, it is the relationships that exist between words that make different interpretations of a sentence possible. They believe that every aspect of the text is integral and that the text possess all the meaning necessary for interpretation (ibid).
Moreover, formalist literary criticism deals with the internal features of the text like grammar, syntax and literary devices The formalist considers that tensions are vital to the text and are created through irony, paradox and ambiguity. One of the major concerns of formalism is unity in literature in which it comes together for various parts of the text to form a whole. For the formalists, in a successful text, they pay attention on the importance of literary form in determining the meaning of the work rather than its content.
