Teaching & Learning Guide for: Formal Pasts and Formal Possibilities in Victorian Studies
Authors: Levine Caroline 
Published: August 2008

Author's Introduction

Formalism, famously, went out of fashion in the 1970s. Three decades before, the New Critics had inspired an extraordinarily wide audience for formalist reading practices in university classrooms across the US and Britain, where ‘close reading’ became the basic staple of English literature courses. But by 1980 these same practices had become the target of powerful critiques by feminists, Marxists, post‐structuralists, and historicists of all stripes, who charged it with being escapist – too focused on purely aesthetic considerations and hence divorced from urgent political and social pressures, or worse, cloaking implicitly racist, nationalist, or imperialist political agendas. But in the past ten years, formalism has been making something of a comeback, as critics have begun to argue about whether and how literary form might matter both historically and politically. Some critics have continued to claim that form dangerously transcends or evades politics, while others have contended that literary forms express or reflect political realities. And a few recent critics have asked whether form is actually capable of exerting social power: perhaps literary forms actively participate in the making of the social world. What, then, is the best way to describe the relationship between form and politics? And how might the return to formalism be shaping the field of literary studies for the future?

Author Recommends:

Cleanth Brooks, The Well‐Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York, NY: Harcourt‐Brace, 1947).

For readers interested in understanding the formalist methods associated with the New Criticism, this book is a classic example of what came to be called ‘close reading’. After a series of painstaking readings of ten poems from different periods, this book concludes with an attack on critical methods that fail to take form seriously – a famous chapter called ‘The Heresy of Paraphrase’.

William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ and ‘The Affective Fallacy’ from Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1954).

These two legendary essays insist that the proper critical relationship to poetry involves focusing on formal techniques and tensions within literary texts rather than on writers’ intentions or readers’ feeling experiences. These essays inspired many later attacks from critics eager to resuscitate the situated, historical author and the feeling reader.

Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, rev. ed. (New York, NY and London: Verso, 2000 [1987]).

Marxist critics have a long tradition of reading literary forms as expressive of social and political struggles. Moretti's Way of the World is a beautifully clear and well‐written example of this kind of reading. It interprets the European novel of education or development – the Bildungsroman– as a quintessentially modern form, one that focuses on youth and change in ways that convey the restlessness of life in a moment of rapid industrialization and class transformation. And yet, the nineteenth‐century British novel also uses its form to limit the sense of modernity's massive transformations by bringing youthful characters to mature and settled endings, as though the enormous upheavals of the modern period could be resolved through marriage.

D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989).

If Marxist critics have been inclined to read literary forms as expressive of social struggles, critics who have been influenced by French philosopher Michel Foucault have been more disposed to read formal literary devices as ways of controlling and disciplining readers. Miller's Novel and the Police is an immensely shrewd, subtle, and elegant reading of formal tactics employed in the nineteenth‐century British novel, with chapters devoted to The Moonstone, Bleak House, Barchester Towers, and The Woman in White.

Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).

This fine critical study of Romantic poetry can be credited with ushering in a new wave of formalist criticism, one that joins brilliant formalist readings of specific texts with a deep knowledge of historical and political contexts. Unlike Marxists, who tend to see form as an attempt to conceal or resolve social struggle, and Foucauldians, who interpret forms as powerful techniques of a disciplinary society, Wolfson reads the formal choices of Romantic poets as self‐conscious, intentional ways of actively engaging with the political struggles going on around them in the social world.

Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown (eds.), Reading for Form (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2007). A reprint of a special issue of the journal Modern Language Quarterly 61 (March 2000).

In this collection of excellent essays, Wolfson and Brown bring together a wide range of prominent literary critics from different period specialties to reassess the prospects of formalism in the field. The articles are uniformly richly conceived, well‐written, and thought‐provoking, including pieces by Heather Dubrow, Frances Ferguson, Catherine Gallagher, J. Paul Hunter, Robert Kauffman, Franco Moretti, and Garrett Stewart.

Linda K. Hughes (ed.), Victorian Poetry 41 (Winter 2003), special issue on new work in Victorian poetry.

A whole array of young critics, including Dino Felluga, Erik Gray, Anne Hartman, Monique Morgan, and Jason Rudy, discuss the importance of returning to formalist techniques to read Victorian poetry in the contemporary critical context. These essays are insightful and stimulating, especially when read together.

Caroline Levine, ‘Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies’, Victorian Studies 48 (Summer 2006): 625–57. This essay was followed by a forum of responses in Victorian Studies, which included: Carolyn Dever, ‘Strategic Aestheticism: A Response to Caroline Levine’, Victorian Studies 49 (Autumn 2006): 94–99; Herbert F. Tucker, ‘Tactical Formalism: A Response to Caroline Levine’, Victorian Studies 49 (Autumn 2006): 85–93; Caroline Levine, ‘Scaled Up, Writ Small: A Response to Carolyn Dever and Herbert F. Tucker’, Victorian Studies 49 (Autumn 2006): 100–5.

In the first essay listed here, I attempted to broaden the scope of formalist reading so that reading for form would target not only literary texts but also social institutions. Responses by Carolyn Dever and Herbert Tucker in the subsequent issue pointed to both the promises and the drawbacks of this methodological expansion. I then had a chance to respond to their critiques.

Online Materials:

SWIRL: Your Guide to Post‐Millennial Paradigms at Southern Oregon University offers a clear and brief introduction to formalism, including an overview of the New Criticism and an explanation of how do a close reading:

http://www.sou.edu/English/IDTC/Paradigm/formal.htm

This site also offers a gateway to many of the major figures in literary theory, including Foucault and Jameson at: http://www.sou.edu/ENGLISH/IDTC/People/theory/therists.htm.

Quick bullet points about formalism and New Criticism for a sophomore‐level course in reading and interpretation can be found at:

http://www.assumption.edu/users/ady/HHGateway/Gateway/Approaches.html#New%20Criticism/Formalism

A classic text of the New Criticism was Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, intended to be used in the classroom (1938). Here are some exemplary extracts:

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/understanding‐poetry.html

PhilWeb: Theoretical Resources Off‐ and On‐line offers a nice overview of Marxist literary theory, including extensive entries on Fredric Jameson and Franco Moretti with links to works of theirs that are available online:

http://www.phillwebb.net/History/TwentiethCentury/Continental/Marxism/MarxismLit.htm

This site also includes a lengthy bibliography for Foucault and set of useful links:

http://www.phillwebb.net/History/TwentiethCentury/Continental/(Post)Structuralisms/Foucauldian/Foucault/Foucault.htm

Another great source for Foucault online, complete with a gallery of images, an extensive bibliography, and many links to useful sites can be found at:

http://www.foucault.qut.edu.au/

Sample Syllabus:

Upper‐level undergraduate course or graduate seminar

Rethinking Formalism

This course will introduce you to a lively debate happening in the field right now: should we be paying attention to form when we read literature? and if so, how and why? We will read some of the classics of formalist criticism, including Henry James, the Russian Formalists, and the New Critics; we will read passionate attacks on formalist reading by feminists, reader‐response theorists, deconstructive thinkers, and Marxists; we will think about two theorists of political power who strongly suggest a link between aesthetic forms and social formations – Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu; and we will turn to exciting new theoretical work on form and politics, including texts by Nicholas Dames, Frances Ferguson, Catherine Gallagher, Fredric Jameson, Franco Moretti, and Susan Wolfson.

Week 1: Definitions of Form

OED definitions

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 5–29

Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, from The Art of Criticism, eds. William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 165–96

Week 2: Russian Formalism

Victor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’ and Boris Eikhenbaum, ‘The Theory of the “Formal Method”’, in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, eds. T. Lemon Lee and J. Reis Marion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), pp. 3–24, 99–140

Week 3: The New Criticism

Cleanth Brooks, The Well‐Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), pp. 3–21, 167–77, 192–214

Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, ‘Letter to the Teacher’, from Understanding Poetry (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1938)

William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ and ‘The Affective Fallacy’ from The Verbal Icon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), pp. 3–40

Week 4: Critiques of Formalism (I)

M. M. Bakhtin, from The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 3–40, 259–422

Fraya Katz‐Stoker, ‘The Other Criticism: Feminism v. Formalism’, from Susan Koppelman Cornillon, ed. Images of Women in Fiction (Bowling Green: Bowling University Popular Press, 1972), pp. 315–27

Fredric Jameson, from The Prison‐House of Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 43–100

Week 5: Critiques of Formalism (II)

De Man, ‘The Dead‐End of Formalist Criticism’, from Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 229–45

Richard Ohmann, from English in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), online at: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/ohmann.html

Week 6: Beyond Formalism (I)

Frank Lentricchia, from After the New Criticism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 2–27

Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Beyond Formalism’, from Beyond Formalism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 42–57

Week 7: Beyond Formalism (II)

Stanley Fish, ‘Interpreting the Variorum’, Critical Inquiry 2 (Spring 1976), pp. 465–85

Catherine Gallagher, ‘Marxism and the New Historicism’, from The New Historicism, Harold Veeser, ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 37–48

Week 8: Social Forms and Formations

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), pp. 135–228

Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words, trans. Matthew Adamson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 34–58, 94–108

Week 9: New Historicism and the Necessity of Form

Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Towards a Poetics of Culture’, from Learning to Curse (New York and London: Routledge), pp. 146–60

Alan Liu, ‘The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism’, ELH 56 (1989), pp. 721–71

Fredric Jameson, from The Political Unconscious (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 17–102

Week 10: Formalism Makes a Comeback

Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)

Week 11: New Formalisms (I)

Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown, eds., Reading for Form (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007). A reprint of a special issue of the journal Modern Language Quarterly 61 (March 2000)

Week 12: New Formalisms (II)

Mark David Rasmussen, ed. Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (New York and Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002)

Week 13: New Formalisms (III)

Caroline Levine, ‘Formal Pasts and Formal Possibilities in Victorian Studies’, Literature Compass 4 (May 2007)

Jonathan Loesberg, ‘Cultural Studies, Victorian Studies, and Formalism’, Victorian Literature and Culture (September 1999), pp. 537–44

Victorian Poetry 41 (Winter 2003), special issue on new work in Victorian poetry

Week 14: New Formalisms (IV)

Nicholas Dames, ‘Wave Theories and Affective Psychologies: The Cognitive Strain in Victorian Novel Theories’, Victorian Studies (Winter 2004): 206–16

Caroline Levine, ‘Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Literary Studies’, Victorian Studies (Summer 2006): 625–57

Focus Questions:

What, specifically, does each reading mean by ‘form’? What particular differences or similarities do you notice between this text's definition of form and the ones you have encountered in other texts? In particular, what does ‘form’ mean here; what is its value; and what is it set up against?

Try to isolate the passages in the readings that could be construed as political. For example, do you see particular values at work here that have to do with hierarchies and power relationships? Does the text hint at specific forms of social organization or ideals? And does it subtly suggest a role for the reader that might have repercussions in the social world?

Explain the specific failures ascribed to formalism by its critics. Pay particular attention to the ways that the links between politics and form are said to operate, locating specific passages that reveal cause‐and‐effect or logical relationships between formalist reading practices and the social world.

What connections between literary or aesthetic forms and social forms does each reading describe or imply? If there is no explicit mention of aesthetic forms in the reading assigned to you, think about the kind of role that art forms would play in relation to the social forms articulated here.

Do recent proponents of new formalist methods satisfactorily respond to the critiques of formalism you have read? If so, how? Do some critiques remain unresolved?

Individual Project:

Invent a method for reading formally. You are not expected to craft it from scratch, but rather to create it out of a combination of methods and insights taken from the readings. You may decide on any one of a huge range of presuppositions: that poetry differs from prose; that readers matter more than writers; that politics matters less than aesthetics; that formal structures signal social facts; that the basic political vehicle is hegemony or identity or democracy; and so forth. The point is to be clear about your presumptions and about the specific kinds of evidence that those presumptions entail. Try to get at the kinds of aims and ideas that kindle your enthusiasm. For example, isolate the kinds of details or problems you would want to look at – line, rhythm, or stanza; voice or perspective; contemporary debates; social hierarchies; multiple texts, parts of texts, or single works, or some combination of these and others. Why are those factors the important ones? Articulate an approach and make a case for the kind of practice it entails.