Formalism
A critical method treating literary form as primary to meaning—how structure, language, imagery, and technique create effects rather than form merely expressing pre-existing ideas. Formalism attends closely to textual details and how they interact.
Real World
A formalist reading of Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale' focuses not on Keats's tuberculosis or biography, but on how the ode's eight-stanza structure and the shifting pronoun from 'I' to 'thee' enacts the speaker's attempted dissolution of self.
Exam Focus
Ground every point in specific formal choices — metre, syntax, structure — showing exactly how form produces the meaning you identify.
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