Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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at least as important as style, where he interprets Russian Formalism as being
concerned with style only, particularly as an identifier of the literary as set apart
from everyday language. (7) Without saying it outright, Eagleton, a staunch and
vocal Marxist, appears to consider formalist methodologies not worth much
inclusion in something resembling a textbook on literary analysis.
In his journal article “Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure”,
(1976) Colin McCabe dismisses the formalists by identifying the allure of observing
a text on its own, outside of its context, which he considers fallacious. McCabe
writes, “The text has no separate existence and, for this reason, it is impossible to
demand a typology of texts such as I proposed in my earlier article. Rather each
reading must be a specific analysis which may use certain general concepts but these
concepts will find their articulation within the specific analyses and not within an
already defined combinatory.” (McCabe 1976; 25)
Within this argumentation, McCabe fails to see, or at least address, the value
of observing a text on its own terms; suggesting that the significance of a text is only
understandable when social conditions and meanings are considered. It appears as
though McCabe, and in turn, Žižek and Eagleton are claiming that displacing a text
from its social context immediately diminishes its value, or at least its value must be
reconsidered within a different social context.
Furthermore, the quote from McCabe is particularly revelatory in considering
the opposing analytic philosophies. I have stated where Berliner overtly, and
Bordwell and Thompson more implicitly, identify the utilisation of neoformalism as
engaging with the text itself and on its own terms. However, McCabe here claims
that the “already defined combinatory”, or, as I understand it, the perceived rigidly
inflexible parameters for analysis, becomes something outside the text that