Formalism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"It would be hard to find any reputable literary critic today who would care to be caught defending as an idea the old antithesis of style versus content. On this issue a pious consensus prevails. Everyone is quick to avow that style and content are indissoluble, that the strongly individual style of each important writer is an organic aspect of his work and never something merely "decorative." --"On Style (1966) - Susan Sontag “According to the formalist creed, absolute music does not possess semantic or representational content. It is not of or about anything; it represents no objects, tells no stories, gives no arguments, espouses no philosophies. According to the formalist, music is ‘pure’ sound structure; and for that reason the doctrine is sometimes called musical ‘purism.'”--Peter Kivy |
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Formalism may refer to:
- Form (disambiguation)
- Formal (disambiguation)
- Legal formalism, legal positivist view that the substantive justice of a law is a question for the legislature rather than the judiciary
- Formalism (linguistics)
- Scientific formalism
- Formalism (philosophy), that there is no transcendent meaning to a discipline other than the literal content created by a practitioner
- Religious formalism, an emphasis on the ritual and observance of religion, rather than its meaning.
- Formalism (philosophy of mathematics), or mathematical formalism, that statements of mathematics and logic can be thought of as statements about the consequences of certain string manipulation rules.
- Formalism (art), that a work's artistic value is entirely determined by its form
- Formalism (music)
- Formalist film theory, focused on the formal, or technical, elements of a film
- Formalism (literature)
- New Formalism, a late-20th century movement in American poetry – sometimes called simply "Formalism"
- Russian formalism, school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s
- New Formalism (architecture), a mid-20th century architectural style, sometimes abbreviated to Formalism
See also