Literary Criticism from Liberal Humanism to Formalism

Abstract

The research aims to shed some light on literary criticism in the twentieth century, as it begins with the poetics of modernity and ends with formal criticism as appeared on both sides of the world: Eastern and Western. Literary and critical modernity is crystallized at the beginning of the twentieth century, influenced by the liberal humanist currents and their conceptions of the universe, man, literature, life and, consequently, criticism. Hence, the critical movements in the early twentieth century were moving towards certain paths based on isolating aesthetics from ethical and religious concerns.  These movements were tending towards the glorification of aesthetics by abandoning the arguments of bourgeois thought and its representations of utilitarian and pragmatic values, ​​as a last line of defense against a mercantile, capitalist and a world free of humanity values. Thus, the interest in the formalist tendencies of literary analysis emerged, and the critical arenas on the two opposite sides of the world simultaneously came to know it.  It emerged In Russia and the Eastern world during the transition to socialism and in America and Britain in what is known as the new criticism. This research is hopefully characterized by excavating and digging into the cultural, cognitive and philosophical backgrounds that simultaneously launched these critical paths that are geographically divergent and cognitively convergent at the same time. Hence, the research briefly presents the contributions of Boris Eichenbaum, Mikhail Bakhtin and Roman Jacobson on the one hand, as well as the efforts of John Crow Ransomou, both the critic William Wimsat and Monroe Beardsley. Perhaps it is obvious that all of this has made an outstanding and significant contribution to international critical theory.