Introduction: Formalism Unbound

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In the decades after the Agrarians drifted from Vanderbilt to points north and established New Criticism as the dominant interpretive method across the United States, formalism came to be understood as an irresponsible evasion of politics or worse: a means of safeguarding a reactionary social order. This view remained remarkably consistent across all variety of political methodologies — Marxist, feminist, New Historicist, queer, anti-racist, and post-colonial — during the final decades of the 20^th century. The 1990s saw potent challenges to this orthodoxy: John Guillory's claim that a misguided conflation of literary and political representation underwrote the canon wars; Dorothy Hale's analysis of the covert attachment to formalism in "social" theories of the novel; and Elaine Scarry's defense of aesthetic cultivation as a means of encouraging just action.1 Still, literary form remained a disreputable subject of scholarly inquiry. Over the last decade or so, the taboo against formalism has lifted, as calls for "new formalist," "post-critical," "surface," or "distant" reading have brought the question of what counts as the "literary" back into focus. Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown helped to inaugurate this turn with their 2000 special issue of Modern Language Quarterly "Reading for Form" (followed by a 2006 collection) along with Marjorie Levinson's "What is New Formalism?" in 2007.2 Shortly thereafter, the 2009 "The Way We Read Now," a special issue of Representations edited by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, challenged the default attachment in political criticism to a "hermeneutics of suspicion," in the hopes of expanding the range of acceptable scholarly postures towards literary form.3 The array of projects contributing to what Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian have called "the millennial reboot of formalism" is steadily growing: it includes Michael Clune's Writing Against Time (2013), G. Gabrielle Starr's Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (2013), Caroline Levine's Form: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2014), Namwali Serpell's Seven Modes of Uncertainty (2014), Walter Benn Michaels's The Beauty of a Social Problem (2015), Rita Felski's The Limits of Critique (2015) and Hooked: Art and Attachment (2020), Sandra Macpherson's "A Little Formalism" (2015), Kramnick and Nersessian's "Form and Explanation" (2017), Anna Kornbluh's The Order of Forms (2019), and Anahid Nersessian's The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life (2020).4 The appearance of this extensive and varied body of work — as well as a new book series at the University of Chicago Press, "Thinking Literature," edited by Nan Z. Da and Nersessian — attests to a wider acceptance of the literary as a distinctive category. Crucial to us, these developments imply a conception of the formalism employed to understand the literary as legitimate and necessary. But having only recently regained respectability, formalism remains a method whose myriad possible applications have been largely untried. This special issue seeks to illuminate some of its untapped potential.Even with the new interest in questions devoted to understanding "literariness," we have yet to explain the difference this new work makes, in part because of the lingering association between formalism and the New Critics. The substitution of "description" for "interpretation" in calls for surface and post-critical interpretation seems inadequate: after all, as Kramnick and Nersessian point out, "critics are doing explanation whenever they set out to work."5 Nor does the insistence among New Formalists that an attention to form can serve ethical or political ends entail a significant departure from the premises of earlier methodologies. We have instrumentalized literary form in these terms for decades now, and this seems a good moment to ask whether there is another way. What might a true departure from political criticism and its commitment to assessing all cultural forms in ideological terms look like? Might there be other means of asserting the value of form and aesthetic experience? Can form do other kinds of work or make contributions that are distinct from the task of advancing specific ideological aims?

What criteria and what interpretive strategies are necessary to capture the specificity of the literary? And what is at stake for the discipline? Would an unapologetic formalism ensure the survival of literary studies or hasten its demise?

We recognize that adopting formalism as one's principle methodology does not entail an obvious or easily navigable path forward. Indeed, for those so tempted, the question may not be whether to embrace formalism, but which among the myriad formalisms they should adopt. We also realize that many will reject the apparent dichotomy between political and formalist criticism as a false one, thereby remaining committed to approaches that underscore their inevitable entanglement. Thus, in raising the question of what formalism now might or should look like, we are seeking to initiate a conversation. As will become clear, the contributors to this issue offer a diversity of views on what shape formalism may take in the years to come, what it can offer the discipline, what motives underwrite its emergence, and what risks attend its development. Without promising a roadmap, we hope that both the formalist readings and the broader discussion here will provide a clearer picture of the critical terrain that we currently inhabit, and a more systematic articulation of the questions and problems that a robust twenty-first century formalism must confront. The complicated history of formalism in the United States has weighed it down with heavy baggage, enabling the unjustified belief that formalism alone furthers the cultural elitism and institutional privilege that other methodologies, such as political criticism, claim to escape. We suggest that this critical sleight of hand is no longer sustainable. The essays gathered here begin from a less encumbered position and thus, we hope, generate ways of imagining a formalism unbound.

Timothy Aubry is professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY.  He is author of Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures (Harvard University Press, 2018) and Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans (University of Iowa Press, 2011), and the co-editor of Rethinking Therapeutic Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2015).  His essays and reviews have appeared in The New Republic, The Point Magazine, The Chronicle Review, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Music & Literature, n+1, Best American Essays 2014, PMLA, Criticism, American Studies, and other academic journals.

In This Issue

Part 1

Introduction: Formalism Unbound
Timothy Aubry and Florence Dore

Good for Nothing: Lorrie Moore's Maternal Aesthetic and the Return to Form
Florence Dore

On Philosophical Imagination and Literary Form
Yi-Ping Ong

"Now can you see the monument?" Some notes on reading for "form"
Gillian White

Transformation and Generation: Preliminary Notes on the Poetics of the Memphis Sanitation Strike
Francisco Robles

The Sight of Life
Sarah Chihaya

Beyond Desire: Blackness and Form
Amber Jamilla Musser

Part 2

Form contra Aesthetics
Timothy Aubry

Zadie Smith's Style of Thinking
David James

Queer Formula
Joan Lubin

Formalism at the End Times: A Modest Account
Danielle Christmas

Furnishing the Novel, Feeding the Soul: Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Benjamin Widiss

Notes on Shade
C. Namwali Serpell

Afterword: Form Now: as Limit and Beyond
Dorothy J. Hale

References