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Theory of Literature
greatness of literature by extra-aesthetic criteria? 6 Eliot's first
judgment should be dichotomized. Of a specific verbal construc-
tion, we classify it as literature (i.e., story, poem, play) and then
we ask whether or not it is "good literature," i.e., of rank worth
the attention of the aesthetically experienced. The question of
"greatness" brings us to standards and norms. Modern critics
limiting themseves to aesthetic criticism are commonly called
"formalists"—sometimes by themselves, sometimes (pejoratively)
by others. At least as ambiguous is the cognate word
"form." As we shall use it here, it names the aesthetic structure
of a literary work—that which makes it literature. 7 Instead of
dichotomizing "form-content," we should think of matter and
then of "form," that which aesthetically organizes its "matter."
In a successful work of art, the materials are completely as-
similated into the form: what was "world" has become "language."
8 The "materials" of a literary work of art are, on one
level, words, on another level, human behavior experience, and
on another, human ideas and attitudes. All of these, including
language, exist outside the work of art, in other modes ; but in
a successful poem or novel they are pulled into polyphonic rela-
tions by the dynamics of aesthetic purpose.
Is it possible adequately to evaluate literature by purely
formalistic criteria? We shall outline an answer.
The criterion which Russian formalism makes primary ap-
pears also in aesthetic evaluation elsewhere: it is novelty, sur-
prise. The familiar linguistic block or "cliche" is not heard as
immediate perception: the words are not attended to as words,
nor is their joint referent precisely made out. Our response to
trite, stock language is a "stock response," either action along
familiar grooves or boredom. We "realize" the words and what
they symbolize only when they are freshly and startlingly put
together. Language must be "deformed," i.e., stylized, either in
the direction of the archaic or otherwise remote, or in the direc-
tion of "barbarization," before readers attend to it. So Viktor
Shklovsky speaks of poetry as "making it new," "making it
strange." But this criterion of novelty has been very widespread,
at least since the Romantic movement—that "Renascence of
Wonder," as Watts-Dunton called it. Wordsworth and Cole-
ridge were variously, correlatively, working to "make it strange,"