“Reading for Form” by Susan J. Wolfson.
Modern Language Quarterly 61:1, March 2000. © 2000 University of Washington.
[....] assaults on formalist criticism came from many quarters, some with critiques of social isolationism; others, of intellectual constraints. It was not attention to form per se that was discredited; it was the impulse to regard it as the product of a historically disinterested, internally coherent aesthetics. Critics as various as Harold Bloom and Terry Eagleton found common ground
[....] Eagleton’s influential essay “Ideology and Literary Form” described literary form as shaped and limited by the social forms of its historical moment and typically in the business, consciously or not, of recasting “historical contradictions into ideologically resolvable form.”
[....] Formalist criticism was useful only insofar as it teased out the “ideological struggles” that form was said to displace through its “naturalising, moralising, and mythifying devices.”
[....] To read for form was to read against formalism: no longer New Critical explication, the project was now New Historicist critique
[....] Unlike non-aesthetic utterance,” poetic form offers social evaluations “to the reader under the sign of completion,” and while formalists take this sign “as their object of study,” the historicist needs to see both the “experience of finality and completion” and the “trans-historical” claim as the product of a specific discourse of “historical totality.
[....] Theodor W. Adorno gives the rubric: “The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form”
[....] exposing “the original contradiction and the formal signs of its irresolvability.”
[....] the New Critical “theory of signifying form” (language as containing, reflecting, or referring to experience
[....] Bloomlike “engaged reflection of personal myths and communal dreams,” he wanted “to go beyond formalism and to define art’s role in the life of the artist, his culture, and the human community” (ix), setting this goal against two institutions: first, the socialist view of formalism as the aesthetic opponent of social progress (ix), and second, the high New Critical “Yale formalism” (Wellek, Cleanth Brooks, W. K. Wimsatt), which seemed to isolate aesthetic form from human content.
[....] There are many ways to transcend formal ism,but the worst,” Hartman proposed, “is not to study forms”
[....] task necessarily became “that of understanding the formal processes through which literary texts work upon and transform dominant ideological forms” (Bennett, 8).
[....] Lukács had contended that “the truly social element in literature is the form.”
[....] “a little formalism turns one away from History, but . . . a lot brings one back to it.”
[....] the more a system is specifically defined in its forms, the more amenable it is to historical criticism.”
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Jay
9 January 2024
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