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One of the defining tasks of any New Formalism is to break decisively with problematic assumptions central to the older formalist project of the New Criticism: assumptions about the unity of a text, about its total meaningfulness, about the intrinsic nature of textual meaning, about the distinguishability of literary from non-literary language by specifiable features, and more. Theorists like John M. Ellis, Stanley Fish, and others have gone some way to revise such assumptions, in most cases by replacing a rhetoric of the intrinsic with a rhetoric of assumptions about the social uses of texts or the attitudes and procedures of communities of interpretation. Such rewriting of the intrinsic — "the language of paradox," "the language of poetry," "literary language" — as a relation between text and reader is a characteristic move of recent formalist criticism. It is, for one thing, a way of revising and thus extending a number of the most valuable insights of the New Critical era without endorsing its more problematic assumptions.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137010490_2

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