Formalism and New Criticism represent 20th-century critical movements that revolutionized literary studies by shifting analytical focus away from authorial biography, historical context, and reader psychology toward the internal properties of the literary text itself. Emerging across Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism (associated with figures like Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, and Viktor Shklovsky), these schools championed “close reading,” treating poetry and prose as autonomous, self-contained aesthetic objects. They famously introduced foundational theoretical concepts such as the “intentional fallacy,” the “affective fallacy,” and the “heresy of paraphrase,” emphasizing how formal elements like irony, paradox, and meter generate unified meaning.
1. Which early 20th-century critical movement emerged in Russia, emphasizing the autonomy of poetic language and literary form over content?
Correct Answer: a) Russian Formalism
Explanation:
Russian Formalism, flourishing in the 1910s and 1920s with figures like Shklovsky and Jakobson, treated literature as a specialized linguistic structure.
2. Which American critical movement dominated academic literary studies from the 1940s to the 1960s, focusing on close reading and textual autonomy?
Correct Answer: a) New Criticism
Explanation:
New Criticism treated the literary text as a self-contained verbal object independent of authorial intention or historical background.
3. What term did Viktor Shklovsky coin to describe the artistic technique of making familiar things strange in order to restore sensory perception?
Correct Answer: a) Defamiliarization (Ostranenie)
Explanation:
Shklovsky argued that art defamiliarizes objects to strip away habitual perception and force readers to experience them afresh.
4. What is the distinction between 'fabula' and 'syuzhet' in Russian Formalist narratology?
Correct Answer: a) Fabula is the raw chronological story; syuzhet is the artistic plot arrangement.
Explanation:
Formalists separated the chronological sequence of events (fabula) from how the text actually structures and presents those events (syuzhet).
5. Which New Critic wrote 'The Well Wrought Urn' (1947) and championed irony and paradox as central to poetry?
Correct Answer: a) Cleanth Brooks
Explanation:
Cleanth Brooks was a leading New Critic who argued that the structure of poetry is one of paradox, irony, and internal reconciliation.
6. Which essay by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley argued against judging a literary work based on the author's intended meaning?
Correct Answer: a) The Intentional Fallacy
Explanation:
Wimsatt and Beardsley contended that an author's design or intention is neither available nor desirable as a standard for evaluating literary success.
7. Which essay by Wimsatt and Beardsley cautioned against judging a text by its emotional effect on the reader?
Correct Answer: a) The Affective Fallacy
Explanation:
The affective fallacy confuses the literary work itself with its psychological or emotional results in the audience.
8. Who coined the term 'New Criticism' by using it as the title of his 1941 book of essays?
Correct Answer: a) John Crowe Ransom
Explanation:
John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book 'The New Criticism' gave the movement its formal name and outlined principles of ontological textual analysis.
9. Which British critic wrote 'Practical Criticism' (1929), pioneering close reading by analyzing students' anonymous responses to poems?
Correct Answer: a) I.A. Richards
Explanation:
I.A. Richards stripped poems of titles and authors to test students' interpretive abilities, laying groundwork for New Critical close reading.
10. Which student of I.A. Richards wrote 'Seven Types of Ambiguity' (1930), analyzing verbal complexity and nuance in English verse?
Correct Answer: a) William Empson
Explanation:
William Empson demonstrated how multiple nuances, ambiguities, and puns enrich poetic language.
11. What is the primary method of analysis used by New Critics and Formalists?
Correct Answer: a) Close reading (explication)
Explanation:
Close reading involves careful, sustained analysis of a text's diction, syntax, imagery, tone, and formal structure.
12. Which Russian Formalist theorist founded the Moscow Linguistic Circle and analyzed phonological sound patterns in verse?
Correct Answer: a) Roman Jakobson
Explanation:
Roman Jakobson was a leading Russian Formalist who later influenced structuralism and the study of poetic functions.
13. What did New Critics mean by the 'heresy of paraphrase', a term coined by Cleanth Brooks?
Correct Answer: a) The false belief that a poem's core meaning can be separated from its exact formal language and paraphrased
Explanation:
Brooks argued that a poem's meaning is inextricably bound to its specific formal structure; summarizing it destroys its artistic essence.
14. Which early 20th-century Anglo-American poet and critic emphasized tradition, impersonality in art, and formal rigor, heavily influencing New Criticism?
Correct Answer: a) T.S. Eliot
Explanation:
T.S. Eliot's essays in 'The Sacred Wood' championed formal discipline, impersonality, and the objective correlative.
15. Which Russian Formalist explored how literary history evolves through the perpetual 'defamiliarization' of old formal canons?
Correct Answer: a) Yuri Tynianov
Explanation:
Yuri Tynianov viewed literary evolution as a dynamic system where forms continually mutate and replace one another.
16. What is 'literaryness' (literaturnost) according to Roman Jakobson and Russian Formalists?
Correct Answer: a) The specific set of formal and linguistic properties that makes a given work a work of literature rather than ordinary speech
Explanation:
Formalists sought to isolate the intrinsic formal features (literaturnost) that distinguish literary language from practical communication.
17. Which American New Critic wrote 'The Language of Poetry' and edited the journal 'The Fugitive'?
Correct Answer: a) John Crowe Ransom
Explanation:
John Crowe Ransom was a foundational New Critic and leader of the Southern Agrarian movement.
18. Which co-author of Cleanth Brooks wrote 'Understanding Poetry' (1938), a textbook that revolutionized American literature education?
Correct Answer: a) Robert Penn Warren
Explanation:
Robert Penn Warren collaborated with Brooks on 'Understanding Poetry', teaching generations of students to practice close reading.
19. What is 'tension' in New Critical poetry analysis, as popularized by Allen Tate?
Correct Answer: a) The internal equilibrium and interplay between the literal (extension) and metaphorical (intension) meanings in a poem
Explanation:
Allen Tate defined poetic tension as the vital unity achieved by holding opposing literal and figurative forces together.
20. Which American poet and critic stood apart from mainstream New Criticism by insisting on strict moral evaluation and rationalism in poetry?
Correct Answer: a) Yvor Winters
Explanation:
Yvor Winters combined formalist textual analysis with rigorous moral and rational judgment, differing from purely aesthetic New Critics.
21. What is the primary difference between Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism?
Correct Answer: a) Formalism relied heavily on linguistic and scientific poetics, whereas New Criticism focused on moral irony, paradox, and organic unity.
Explanation:
While both prioritized form over context, Russian Formalism was more linguistic and systemic, while New Criticism emphasized organic unity and irony.
22. Which Czech structuralist linguist bridged Russian Formalism and later Prague School structuralism?
Correct Answer: a) Jan Mukarovsky
Explanation:
Jan Mukarovsky developed aesthetic function, norm, and value theories within the Prague Linguistic Circle.
23. What term did New Critics use to describe how all parts of a successful literary work work together to form a seamless whole?
Correct Answer: a) Organic unity
Explanation:
Organic unity posits that form and content are inseparable, and every element of a text contributes to its total meaning.
24. Which critical school fiercely attacked New Criticism in the 1970s and 1980s for assuming texts possess stable, unified internal meanings?
Correct Answer: a) Deconstruction
Explanation:
Deconstruction (associated with Derrida) challenged New Critical organic unity by exposing internal contradictions and unstable signifiers.
25. What did Russian Formalists call the raw, unorganized materials of a story prior to artistic plotting?
Correct Answer: b) Fabula
Explanation:
Fabula represents the chronological sequence of events, whereas syuzhet is the artistic arrangement and plotting of those events.
26. Which New Critic wrote 'The Verbal Icon' (1954), a collection of essays defending objective textual study?
Correct Answer: a) W.K. Wimsatt
Explanation:
W.K. Wimsatt co-authored influential New Critical essays collected in 'The Verbal Icon', emphasizing the poem's concrete verbal existence.
27. What was the name of the avant-garde artistic and literary society in St. Petersburg that launched Russian Formalism in 1914?
Correct Answer: a) OPOJAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language)
Explanation:
OPOJAZ in St. Petersburg, alongside the Moscow Linguistic Circle, formed the twin epicenters of Russian Formalism.
28. Which Russian Formalist wrote 'The Theory of the 'Formal Method'' (1925), summarizing the movement's core tenets?
Correct Answer: a) Boris Eichenbaum
Explanation:
Boris Eichenbaum provided a definitive retrograde overview of Russian Formalist methodology and history.
29. What did New Critics view as an illegitimate distraction when analyzing a poem?
Correct Answer: a) The author's biography and historical context
Explanation:
New Critics bracketed out external history and biography, focusing strictly on the words on the page.
30. Which American New Critic wrote 'Anatomy of Criticism' (though later moving toward mythic criticism, his roots were formalist)?
Correct Answer: a) Northrop Frye
Explanation:
While Frye developed archetypal criticism, his structural taxonomy of literature shared formalist interest in internal literary systems.
31. What term did Viktor Shklovsky use to denote the mechanical, habitual perception of the world that art aims to disrupt?
Correct Answer: a) Automatization
Explanation:
Automatization refers to the numbing effect of habit where objects become familiar and unperceived; art breaks this habit through defamiliarization.
32. Which literary theorist, though associated with rhetorical and dramatistic criticism, shared formalist attention to internal textual dynamics in 'A Grammar of Motives'?
Correct Answer: a) Kenneth Burke
Explanation:
Kenneth Burke analyzed literature as symbolic action and dramatistic strategy, bridging formalist text study with rhetoric.
33. What is the primary focus of 'intrinsic' criticism, as opposed to 'extrinsic' criticism, according to René Wellek and Austin Warren?
Correct Answer: a) Analyzing the internal elements of the text (sound, rhythm, imagery, plot) rather than external biography or sociology
Explanation:
In 'Theory of Literature' (1949), Wellek and Warren distinguished intrinsic study (the work itself) from extrinsic study (context).
34. Which influential New Critical journal, founded at Vanderbilt University, championed southern agrarianism and formalist aesthetics?
Correct Answer: a) The Fugitive
Explanation:
Published between 1922 and 1925, 'The Fugitive' magazine was edited by Ransom, Tate, Warren, and other Southern formalist poets.
35. What did New Critics mean by 'irony' in poetry?
Correct Answer: a) The contextual modification of meaning by which a statement is qualified, balanced, or undermined by surrounding elements
Explanation:
For New Critics, irony was the general principle of internal qualification whereby a poem holds conflicting attitudes in balance.
36. Why did Russian Formalists object to traditional 19th-century biographical literary history?
Correct Answer: a) Because it treated literature as a mere byproduct of psychology and biography rather than an autonomous linguistic art
Explanation:
Formalists argued that literary history has its own internal laws of evolution, independent of authors' personal lives.
37. Which Russian Formalist analyzed the structure of folktales, identifying repeating character functions that influenced structuralist narratology?
Correct Answer: a) Vladimir Propp
Explanation:
Vladimir Propp's 'Morphology of the Folktale' (1928) mapped the formal recurring functions and roles in Russian fairy tales.
38. What is the primary role of the reader in New Critical theory?
Correct Answer: a) To patiently uncover and analyze the objective meaning encoded within the self-contained structure of the text
Explanation:
New Criticism viewed the text as an objective artifact whose meaning is discovered through rigorous formal analysis, not subjective creation.
39. Which prominent British critic associated with Cambridge University championed close reading and rigorous moral evaluation of English fiction and poetry?
Correct Answer: a) F.R. Leavis
Explanation:
F.R. Leavis edited 'Scrutiny' and promoted close textual analysis combined with strict moral seriousness in 'The Great Tradition'.
40. What term did Russian Formalists use to refer to the literary devices, such as rhyme, meter, and tropes, that shape raw material into art?
Correct Answer: a) Device (Priem)
Explanation:
Formalists focused on 'priem' (device), examining how specific linguistic and structural tools operate mechanically within texts.
41. Which American New Critic wrote 'The New Apologists for Poetry' (1956), defending formalist poetics against sociological criticism?
Correct Answer: a) Murray Krieger
Explanation:
Murray Krieger was a prominent theorist of New Criticism who defended the aesthetic autonomy of the poetic medium.
42. What is the New Critical concept of 'texture' as defined by John Crowe Ransom?
Correct Answer: a) The particularity, imagery, and local sensory details of a poem that distinguish it from its abstract logical meaning (structure)
Explanation:
Ransom distinguished between a poem's 'structure' (logical argument) and its 'texture' (concrete imagery and details).
43. Which Russian Formalist introduced the concept of the dominant (dominantny), the focalizing component of a work of art that rules all other elements?
Correct Answer: a) Roman Jakobson
Explanation:
Jakobson defined the dominant as the aesthetic feature that distorts, rules, and transforms all other formal elements in a text.
44. What did Cleanth Brooks argue was the primary structural principle holding a successful poem together?
Correct Answer: a) Paradox
Explanation:
Brooks asserted that the language of poetry is the language of paradox, reconciling diverse and contradictory elements into unity.
45. Which early American journal published foundational New Critical essays by Ransom, Tate, and Brooks?
Correct Answer: a) The Southern Review
Explanation:
Co-founded by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks at LSU, 'The Southern Review' was a major organ of New Criticism.
46. How did New Critics view the relationship between a poem's form and its content?
Correct Answer: a) Form and content are completely fused; form constitutes the content.
Explanation:
New Critics rejected the dualism of form vs. content, arguing that how something is said is precisely what is said.
47. Which Russian Formalist wrote about Sterne's 'Tristram Shandy', analyzing its systematic subversion of plot chronology as 'laying bare the device'?
Correct Answer: a) Viktor Shklovsky
Explanation:
Shklovsky famously analyzed how 'Tristram Shandy' lays bare its own narrative devices by making the process of plotting explicit.
48. What did New Critics mean by 'autonomy' of the text?
Correct Answer: a) The text exists as an independent, self-governing aesthetic object requiring no external historical or authorial explanation.
Explanation:
Textual autonomy means the work contains all necessary clues within its own verbal structure for complete interpretation.
49. Which New Critical scholar wrote 'The Armour of Letters' and contributed significantly to formalist stylistics?
Correct Answer: a) R.P. Blackmur
Explanation:
R.P. Blackmur was a prominent American New Critic known for meticulous close readings of poetry and modern fiction.
50. Why did Russian Formalists eventually face severe suppression in the Soviet Union during the late 1920s and 1930s?
Correct Answer: a) Because Soviet ideology demanded Marxist sociological realism and collective propaganda rather than autonomous formalist aesthetics.
Explanation:
Stalinist cultural policies condemned Formalism as bourgeois, decadent, and insufficiently attentive to proletarian class struggle.
51. What is the primary function of metaphor in a New Critical poem?
Correct Answer: a) To establish complex networks of local ironies and unifying tensions that resist simple paraphrase
Explanation:
New Critics analyzed metaphors not as decorative ornaments, but as structural engines creating tension and paradox.
52. Which critic's essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' (1919) provided the theoretical cornerstone for New Critical impersonality?
Correct Answer: a) T.S. Eliot
Explanation:
Eliot argued that poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from personality through historical tradition.
53. What did Russian Formalism share with 20th-century structuralism?
Correct Answer: a) A scientific, systematic approach to analyzing cultural artifacts through internal linguistic and structural laws
Explanation:
Russian Formalism directly paved the way for structuralism by treating literature as a structured system with internal rules.
54. Which New Critic wrote 'The Modern Poet' and contributed to defining formalist criteria for lyric poetry?
Correct Answer: a) Allen Tate
Explanation:
Allen Tate was a leading architect of New Critical poetics, emphasizing intellectual rigor, tension, and form.
55. What is the New Critical view of ambiguity?
Correct Answer: a) Ambiguity is a positive poetic virtue that enriches meaning through multiple simultaneous layers of irony and nuance.
Explanation:
Far from being a defect, carefully controlled ambiguity (as Empson showed) is central to poetic complexity.
56. Which concept did Viktor Shklovsky use to explain how poetic rhythm disrupts normal prosaic speech patterns?
Correct Answer: a) Rhythm as a retarding, defamiliarizing device
Explanation:
Shklovsky viewed verse rhythm and meter as obstacles that slow down perception, heightening our awareness of language.
57. Why did New Critics reject 'extrinsic' approaches like biographical and historical criticism?
Correct Answer: a) They believed external data diverted attention from the actual verbal structure of the literary work.
Explanation:
Extrinsic approaches were dismissed because they evaluated things outside the poem rather than the poem itself.
58. Which New Critic wrote 'The New Criticism' (1941) and proposed that poetry is 'ontology' because it presents a unique mode of knowledge?
Correct Answer: a) John Crowe Ransom
Explanation:
Ransom argued that poetry offers a distinct ontological structure that science and philosophy cannot replicate.
59. What is 'laying bare the device' ( обнажение приема ) in Russian Formalism?
Correct Answer: a) An artistic strategy where a work transparently exposes its own constructed, artificial literary mechanisms to the reader
Explanation:
Laying bare the device prevents illusionism by reminding readers that the text is an artificial artistic construction.
60. How did New Critics handle the emotional impact of a poem?
Correct Answer: a) They analyzed how emotion is formally and objectively structured inside the text, rejecting subjective reader tears.
Explanation:
Through the affective fallacy, they argued emotion must be studied as an objective property of the text's formal balance.
61. Which Russian Formalist wrote on film theory, montage, and the formal composition of prose narratives?
Correct Answer: a) Viktor Shklovsky
Explanation:
Shklovsky applied formalist principles to cinema and prose, pioneering montage and narrative construction analysis.
62. What is the primary objective of a New Critical explication of a text?
Correct Answer: a) To unfold how every formal element, trope, and sound pattern contributes to the total ironic unity of the work
Explanation:
Explication in New Criticism is a detailed microscopic unpacking of formal parts to reveal organic structural unity.
63. Which New Critical concept describes the way disparate ideas or images are yoked together by violence in metaphysical poetry?
Correct Answer: a) Metaphysical conceit
Explanation:
New Critics (following Eliot) celebrated metaphysical conceits for uniting disparate intellectual and sensory experiences.
64. Why did Russian Formalists study verse meter and phonology so intensively?
Correct Answer: a) To demonstrate how acoustic sound patterns function as autonomous formal devices independent of prose meaning
Explanation:
Formalists analyzed sound and rhythm (phonological orchestration) as primary building blocks of poetic artistry.
65. What did Cleanth Brooks mean when he stated that poetry is the 'language of paradox'?
Correct Answer: a) Poetry communicates complex, contradictory human truths that can only be resolved through subtle formal poetic structures.
Explanation:
Paradox captures the paradoxical nature of experience, which poetry alone among discourses successfully unifies.
66. Which literary theorist famously declared that 'the poem itself' is the only valid object of critical attention?
Correct Answer: a) New Critics collectively
Explanation:
The rallying cry of New Criticism was 'the poem itself', divorcing the text from history, author, and reader psychology.
67. What is the significance of the term 'verbal icon' in Wimsatt and Beardsley's criticism?
Correct Answer: a) It signifies that a poem is a concrete, objective verbal structure with iconic, self-contained aesthetic presence.
Explanation:
The 'verbal icon' emphasizes that poetry is a physical, crafted object of words possessing intrinsic iconic value.
68. How did Russian Formalists view the evolution of literary genres over time?
Correct Answer: a) As a dynamic process of mutation, canon-reversal, and the replacement of worn-out devices by new ones (literary evolution)
Explanation:
Formalists viewed literary history dialectically: old forms become automatized and are overthrown by marginalized or new formal devices.
69. Which New Critic wrote 'The Implicit Wordsworth' and contributed to formalist evaluations of Romantic poetry?
Correct Answer: a) Cleanth Brooks
Explanation:
Brooks applied New Critical close reading to canonical Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Keats to demonstrate their formal complexity.
70. What did New Critics argue was the relationship between a poem's 'truth' and its formal coherence?
Correct Answer: a) A poem's truth is validated solely by its internal formal coherence and poetic tension, not by scientific or historical fact.
Explanation:
New Critics maintained that poetic truth is aesthetic and internal, achieved through the resolution of formal conflicts.
71. Which Russian Formalist worked closely with the avant-garde artist Mayakovsky and analyzed linguistic rhythm?
Correct Answer: a) Osip Brik
Explanation:
Osip Brik was a key OPOJAZ member who studied sound repetition, verse rhythm, and avant-garde futurism.
72. What did New Critics seek to rescue literary studies from?
Correct Answer: a) Pedantic historical scholarship, biographical gossip, and impressionistic reviewing
Explanation:
New Criticism rebelled against 19th-century academic habits of treating literature as mere historical data or subjective emotional fluff.
73. Which concept from Cleanth Brooks emphasizes that poetry achieves its effect by reconciling disparate and hostile elements?
Correct Answer: a) The unity of the poem achieved through reconciliation of opposites
Explanation:
Brooks argued that poetry unifies discordant tones, ironies, and images into a harmonious aesthetic structure.
74. How did Russian Formalists define the evolution of prose fiction plots?
Correct Answer: a) As formal devices designed to delay, retard, and complicate the fabula (retardation of the motif)
Explanation:
Shklovsky emphasized that plotting (syuzhet) uses delay and retardation devices to stretch and artisticize narrative time.
75. What was the ultimate legacy of Formalism and New Criticism on modern literary education?
Correct Answer: a) They institutionalized 'close reading' as the foundational pedagogical skill taught in literature classrooms worldwide.
Explanation:
Despite later theoretical shifts, close reading remains the bedrock methodology of practical literary analysis in education today.
