Attending to Form

If one were to risk an adjective to describe the dominant mode of literary studies in the English-speaking world at the start of the current millennium it might be ‘empirico-historical’: the wave of high theory had passed, the principle of canonical expansion had been accepted, and questions of literary evaluation had been put on the back burner. Trend-conscious graduate students in all periods were exploring archives, examining historical contexts, and excavating little-read authors. No doubt classroom teaching still included a fair amount of formal analysis, attention to the major works of the canon, and discussion of what makes a successful literary work, but these concerns were thin on the ground beyond the undergraduate curriculum. However, there were signs that the great ship of academic literary discourse was beginning, slowly, to change course: 2000 was the year in which Isobel Armstrong's The Radical Aesthetic was published, as was the special issue of Modern Language Quarterly titled ‘Reading for Form’, edited by Susan Wolfson and Marshall Brown. There followed a steady stream of critical works reclaiming, in one guise or other, the formal study of literary texts, so much so that PMLA's section on ‘The Changing Profession’ in 2007 featured an article by Marjorie Levinson asking the question ‘What is New Formalism?’

The stream has by no means dried up, and has joined with another branch that could be said to have begun in 2003 with Eve Sedgwick's book Touching Feeling – more specifically with her chapter ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’ – and to have received a further boost the following year with the publication of Bruno Latour's essay ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?’ This approach, which also helped to open the way for fresh attention to form, queried the tendency of critics to treat literary works with suspicion as symptomatic of societal and ideological ills, emphasising instead the affirmative dimension of literary reading. As the editors of the 2017 volume Critique and Postcritique state, ‘There is little doubt that debates about the merits of critique are very much in the air and that the intellectual or political payoff of interrogating, demystifying, and defamiliarizing is no longer quite so evident’.