Or long and choppy, short and flowing? Images can do more than simply acquire significance from repetition and context. Why that and not another? Anything you can see, hear, smell, taste or touch is included. But the fact is that an author makes choices when describing something as simple as an article of clothing or a piece of furniture. But in fact, even the main characters can be considered formal elements. Usually it’s the person who solves the crime. (Don’t get too hung up on the size issue; it’s just a handy way of listing these things.). Gay, straight, bisexual? Again, this is a matter of authorial choice. All of the “small” elements I’ve described can be repeated to create a pattern: Larger elements such as characters and events can repeat as well. In literature, the word character demonstrates two meanings; the individual in a work of fiction or the attributes of a person. Falling action: Also called resolution, this term refers to what follows from the climax, bringing the story to its conclusion or denouement. Usually these are people, though they can be other things too—animals, spirits, aliens, talking trees, whatever. Which alters when it alteration finds. While these are very common types of literary elements, there are many more you can use to make your writing stand out in comparison to others. Thus, the death might take on added poignancy because the repeated image recalls a time when the main character’s friend was alive. Are these really the “same”? The 2000 movie Memento was told backwards, starting from the climax and working backwards to the very beginning. Two of them, Viktor Shklovsky and Yury Tynyanov, wrote significant fiction illustrating their theories:…. For one thing, just using metaphor at all is a choice—and remember, any time the author could have done things differently, you’re looking at a formal property, a feature of how the work is written. What’s more, in any story there are many choices the author must make about the main character: age, gender, ethnicity, occupation, physical appearance, inner psychology, speech patterns, style of dress, and so on and on.

The 1963 novel Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar, is designed to be read in many different ways, not in one set order—a precursor of hypertext written 25 years before the Internet. Death might be a tragedy for one person, justice for another and relief or rest for a third. The whole idea of literary analysis is that literature tries to make us feel, not just think or know or understand. For now, I’ll just mention a few.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the author is “just telling what happened.” The author is making it up, and good authors put the pieces together deliberately. Identifying patterns is a key task in describing and analyzing the formal properties of a text.

There are many more than I can list here, so I’ll just discuss a few of the most important ones. Technically, you could say that the basic sequence of events is the “same,” but the effect will be totally different as a result of such choices.

Consider this example. “Seattle is a maze” might give you the idea that “Seattle will suck you in and you’ll never get out,” but it will also suggest other meanings. Some people even say that there are only a few stories in the world, and the only difference is in how they’re told. All these elements and more can be combined in dozens of different ways to produce a different driving experience. And that means the way it is written is part of the meaning. It is a formal property of the work, and it has an effect on how we experience the story.

They bridge the concrete, everyday world of lived experience and the larger meanings the author makes of that experience. The author can use such characters to emphasize hidden aspects of the story, to undercut what we might be inclined to think or feel if we just saw it from the main character’s perspective, to add another dimension to the story, and so on. Setting: where and when the story takes place. Fear of the unknown? Some of those non-negotiable elements are a roof, walls, a kitchen, and a bathroom. Even the choice of what story to tell is, in some sense, a formal question. Lemon and M.J. Reis, eds., Russian Formalist Criticism (1965), L. Matejka and K. Pomorska, eds., Readings in Russian Poetics (1971), and Stephen Bann and John Bowlt, eds., Russian Formalism (1973). When we look at metaphor we’re paying attention to the content (what is the metaphor telling us) but we’re also paying attention to how that content is expressed. These, too, are part of the formal properties of the work. Three important points emerge from this example. White, Black, Asian, Latino, Native American, Pacific Islander...? This means that they also appeal to a part of our minds—the unconscious part—that we aren’t necessarily aware of at all when we read, but that accounts for some of our most powerful reactions: why we get angry at one character and admire another, why we are frightened or excited or happy when we read. Since stories are all about people, any change in such features means a change in the story itself. Repetitive or varied?

(See the Bible example above for an illustration.). I’ve already talked about imagery in discussing metaphor, so here I just want to mention some points about non-metaphorical imagery. Take a minute and imagine building a house. On the other hand, they emphasize different aspects of that basic task. Thus, a symbol may represent “death,” but what does that mean exactly? We are separating them here strictly for purposes of analysis and explanation. To use the example of the mystery again, suppose it happens mostly in a single room. Suppose it’s a married man with a family. Funny? As with words and sentences, the way the author structures paragraphs will have an impact on how we experience what we read, regardless of the content. It’s hard to over-emphasize the importance of symbolism in literature, because it is so common and so powerful. How does the author use paragraphs to organize the story? Love which alters when it finds alteration is not love”—which is hideous, but it illustrates the point. You could always be literal about it rather than using metaphor. To what extent is this mere window dressing? I hope to show you that these, too, are actually formal elements, choices in how the story is told. Think of it this way.

Admit impediments. Allied at one point to the Russian Futurists and opposed to sociological criticism, the Formalists placed an “emphasis on the medium” by analyzing the way in which literature, especially poetry, was able to alter artistically or “make strange” common language so that the everyday world could be “defamliarized.”