Formalism and its movements

The reading in Rivkin on formalism and how two significant movements in history during the twentieth century impacted literary criticism was very fascinating to me because I had not realized that language was not looked closely at. In fact I would have thought that language would have been the priority with all of the rhetorical influence of Shakespeare and many others authors before, compared to the content. It just would make more since that the priority would be on language structure and technique over content. However that was not the case apparently before these two movements. For the first movement they now placed literature as a separate entity from all the other forms of writing because it was not the same. Literature would now not be lumped in with all other writings but have its own separate means of criticism. For example, “The first movement was to attempt on the part of philosophers of science like Edmund Husserl to isolate objects of knowledge in their unmixed purity” (Rivkin 3). The second movement in criticism that changed was in looking at literature as a different kind of truth than the kind of scientific truths that could be measured by scientific methods. The idealist philosophers claimed that this kind of truth that literature provided was a kind of truth that could not be measured with scientific methods like they had tried to previously, due to the fact that they are what they considered connotative language. For example, “The second movement was the attempt on the part of idealist philosophers like Benedetto Croce to develop a new aesthetics, or philosophy of art, which would rebut the claim of science that all truth is grounded in empirical facts knowable through scientific methods” (Rivkin 23). These two major movements gave literature the respect that it deserved. It also developed the idea of defamiliarization which completely revolutionized the way of writing in that it defamiliarized the familiar words that we know by heart. This was accomplished by describing these familiar items and words in ways not done so before. Causing the reader to think harder to figure out what the author is trying to convey to his reader. For example, “Perhaps their most famous general claim is that literary language consists of an act of defamiliarization, by which they mean that such literature presents objects or experiences from such an unusual perspective or in such unconventional and self-conscious language that our habitual ordinary, rote perceptions of those things are disturbed” (Rivkin 4).