What Is Formalism?

For them the locus of meaning is the text. And if you analyze that then you take a scientific approach to it. So that's formalism. Around the same time as formalism you have what was called the new criticism. But T.S. Eliot he would have never looked at himself as a new critic. He wrote a lot of essays not realizing that he was going to change the literary world in Europe and or in England in America.