New Formalisms and Literary Theory

V. Theile, L. Tredennick, V. Theile, L. Tredennick

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137010490
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Bringing together scholars who have critically followed New Formalism's journey through time, space, and learning environment, this collection of essays both solidifies and consolidates New Formalism as a burgeoning field of literary criticism and explicates its potential as a varied but viable methodology of contemporary critical theory.

Part I

Introduction

1

New Formalism(s): A Prologue

Verena Theile

Joining the conversation

New Formalisms and Literary Theory is a conversation that began between Linda Tredennick and myself, but it is also an on-going conversation into which we stumbled, to which we listened for a while, and one which we felt needed to be formalized (pun intended). This collection aims to share this conversation. It is our goal, with the help of our contributors, to trace the beginnings of New Formalism and to sketch how it, too – much like our branch of its conversation – began to grow, reach out, and theorize itself, long before it shared in our conversation or before we participated in its.

Linda and I were both working at Gonzaga University when we began talking about how we teach literature, how we attempt to apply critical theory to even the first-year writing classroom, and how we both seem to grapple with the tenets of New Historicism, particularly in our Shakespeare courses. We noticed we had something in common that day. Besides sharing an office wall and a coffee maker, we also shared a certain sense of dissatisfaction with the way we had been trained to read and write in graduate school and a sense of wonderment at how that training did not translate into the teaching of literature, or even the teaching of theory. We both realized at that moment that New Historicism had failed us, as teachers and as critics. And that it did so despite the fact that both Linda and I strongly believe in cultural, historical, and political approaches to literature and that we recognize the importance of work, both in the classroom and without, that illuminates a text’s cultural tensions.

For example, I was teaching King Lear at the time in a senior level course on literary theory where we discussed Edmund’s speech, ‘This is the excellent foppery of the world’ (1.2), as an instance in the play in which two entirely disparate worldviews are structurally poised against each other: one which firmly holds on to the Platonic concept of the musica universalis, or universal harmony, in which macro- and micro-cosmos are connected like the strings of a musical instrument – when a chord is struck in the heavens, its vibrations are felt on earth; and a second one which is clearly impacted by Renaissance humanism and Reformation philosophy and actively considers the possibility of free will and individualism, thus granting humans the potential to make decisions – wrong ones as well as good ones.

Where the Old Historicism would have insisted on one uniform and universal Elizabethan worldview, New Historicists quote this passage as an instance in which a fictional character partakes in contemporary philosophical debates and abandons medieval certainties:

…. when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behavior, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.

(1.2.109–16)¹

By mocking his father’s trust in ‘spherical predominance’, Edmund distances himself from the ‘old’ and instead assumes full responsibility for his ill deeds:

an admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows, I am rough and lecherous. Fut! I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.

(1.2.116–22)

Because the play provides such a meaningful visual for the access points of New Historicist criticism, King Lear is how I teach New Historicism. Indeed, in many ways, both Linda and I would have described ourselves as New Historicists, disciples of Montrose and Greenblatt, Geertz groupies and Foucault fans, but that is in spite of the fact that we are, at our core and in our classrooms, close readers.

Talking about this incongruence between our teaching and our theoretical training, Linda and I came to realize that neither she nor I were in step with New Historicism, and perhaps never had been. Linda felt especially dislodged and uncertain of where her allegiance lay. She and Roland Greene had been talking about the ways in which literary theory and classroom practice had become disjointed, how theory itself had become destabilized and how that destabilization had found its way into the classroom. My own dissertation director, Will Hamlin – a practicing New Historicist and a skeptic, who would, unfailingly careful and ever respectful, answer questions with questions and offer advice only when I directly asked for it – initiated similar reflections in me.

I remember I went to Will, armed with a newly designed handout, when I was prepping a Shakespeare course. Trying to figure out how to get my students to talk about the plays with more confidence, I had discovered Nicholas Royle’s How to Read Shakespeare, with its contextualizing via language and metaphor.² Royle walked students through the plays – or, more often, a specific scene within a play – and, often, by means of deciphering, paraphrasing, and contextualizing a single word, he showed them how a scene or an image might bear upon the rest of the play. To me this was reminiscent of New Historicism’s fondness for anecdotes – it showed by a single example how a greater context could be related (and, indeed, persuasively did relate) to the world of the play. That, at least, was my understanding of it at the time.

I liked Royle. Will, however, seemed subtly unimpressed. After having looked over my handout, he first nodded and then cautiously commented, query-like: ‘That looks great … if you want to be a formalist. Do you?’ Did I? I walked away deep in thought. I had no clue what I wanted to be or who I was right there and then, nor had I been aware that I had designed a handout with formalist leanings. That sounded almost criminal, theoretically deviant for sure. But how did I want to teach Shakespeare? Seemed to me I read Shakespeare like Royle, didn’t I? Only, what I had liked about him had not been, or so I thought, his formalist approach, but his New Historicist methodology, right? I pondered.

I pondered some more. And then I decided that what crucially separated me from New Historicism is that while I might teach New Historicism via King Lear, I certainly do not teach King Lear like a New Historicist; like Royle, I walk my students toward discovery, conflict, and resolution via a text’s diction, its formal features, and aesthetics. What I was looking for was a theoretical framework within which critical inquiries and teaching practices like mine could take place, where my scholarship and my pedagogy could meet, inform each other, and still harmonize with current literary criticism.

It was at the crossroads of aesthetic readings and historical, political criticism that Linda and I met, shared conversations and experiences we’d had over the years, and, finally, confessed, after much reflection and unabashedly, that, above all else, we are, indeed, close readers. We teach close reading. We treasure form. We make our students memorize and identify stylistic devices, meter, rhyme scheme. Occasionally, we spend a whole class period dissecting and discussing a single poem, a soliloquy, or even a metaphor. Metaphors, we believe, are reflections of a culture’s creative imagination. Marjorie Levinson’s article ‘What is New Formalism?’ had come out right about this time.³ In it, Levinson addressed some of my concerns, explained why I felt in flux and as though literary theory was running away with me, carrying me toward history and culture but away from what I felt comfortable with: the text. I know Linda felt the same way; Levinson was a constant companion in our conversations. Like me, Linda recognized the need to rethink the role of the text in both theory and the classroom; her essay ‘“One Another’s Hermitage”’ (Chapter 11 in this volume) effectively proposes a New Formalist pedagogy that does just that: it theorizes such rethinking and then applies its methodology to the teaching of literature. ‘What is New Formalism?’ had left a deep impression on our understanding of contemporary, literary-cultural research. Additionally, it significantly contributed to the way in which Linda and I began thinking of this collection and the shape we wanted it assume, maybe the shape we thought it needed to assume, by necessity and in order to convey what both Linda and I felt were the major tenets of New Formalist theory.

In the extended version of her essay, Levinson states that her general goal in composing the article is aimed at giving ‘readers a feel for the general resurgence of formalist interests, for the variety of these interests, and for the inner tensions within new formalism.’⁴ It was those ‘inner tensions’ – politics vs. aesthetics, history vs. form, contextuality vs. intertextuality, cross-cultural vs. cross-textual inquiries, and so on – that Linda and I felt ourselves drawn to, because it was these tensions that we saw rippling through other theories and criticisms as well; understanding New Formalism, to us, meant understanding the epicenter of those tensions and comprehending them as internal to a new methodology and central to a new theoretical approach to literature. In particular, New Formalisms and Literary Theory is interested in the political motivations of a return to formalism, but, together with our contributors, we also, and perhaps simultaneously, want to propose and challenge the conception of New Formalism as an extension of contextual readings or a ‘mere’ return to aesthetic readings. As we assembled the collection, it was important to us, therefore, that the central questions that govern and guide all the chapters address these tensions and actively encourage reflection upon the points of intersection with other theoretical approaches, such as formalism, New Criticism, gender studies, queer theory, post-structuralism, New Historicism, cultural materialism, and Marxist criticism, to name but a few.

But in order to shape the collection, Linda and I first had to re-imagine ourselves, to come to terms with our new identities, that is, we had to understand and accept the way in which we saw our identities as teachers and critics as separate from each other and how both seemed to move away from current cultural studies and New Historicist practices to formalize themselves within a new critical context, via new theoretical methodologies, and as New Formalists. Allowing and indeed facilitating this process entailed, first and foremost, an acceptance as well as a conscious reworking of a training that had put us at odds with our profession, the practical day-to-day toils, troubles, and tribulations we all face in our respective English departments: the teaching of literature. And so, as we continued talking over the next few months, Linda and I realized that in order to engage with our critical heritage and our theoretical upbringing, we necessarily had to tackle our teaching practices, and we knew, almost immediately, that our own contributions to this collection would have to be both pedagogical and theoretical – the two had to meet. There was no other way: we had to confront our classroom experiences critically and find a way to describe the ways in which we endeavor to integrate formalist analysis in our teaching of literature, within social and cultural contexts.

I have talked about my pedagogical concerns a little bit above. It is perhaps time to connect pedagogy and theory more firmly and to highlight how my own concerns resonate with the scholars represented in this collection. Contributors to New Formalisms and Literary Theory recognize that form signifies as much about the milieu in which literature is composed as it does about the manner in which literature is consumed (and, perhaps, is meant to be consumed) by an audience. The scholars gathered here agree that New Formalism stems from a literary-cultural theory that harkens back to New Criticism, Russian formalism, and structuralism, but that embraces cultural theory and actively draws on New Historicist methodologies. Form is perceived as a social construct: society imposes form on literature, but this passage of form is never passive, neither for the society nor the literature. A text does not live sealed off from the historical, cultural, political moments in which it participated; it does not exist in isolation. Literature actively transforms formal features; it individualizes as well as historicizes. New Historicism, even as its methodology is based on interdisciplinary investigations, does not suffice. Instead a theory is needed that addresses teacher training and actively confronts the incongruence between our current teaching practices and our professional research interests. Enabling a theoretical meeting of the two (three?) is of the essence. That’s what New Formalisms and Literary Theory aims for, in theory, practice, and pedagogy.

Fredric Jameson starts his Political Unconscious with his now famous call to all critics of literature: ‘Always historicize!’⁵ It sounds easy enough, but, of course, it isn’t – especially not today when cultural studies dominate our field. Too often, Jameson’s urgent recall of Kenneth Burke to read (or is it recognize?) ‘narrative as a socially symbolic act,’ leads to a politicizing, historicizing, and a personifying of the text that effectively silences literature – literature as an art form, that is, something purposefully and deliberately designed by an author whose profession it is to compose texts for specific purposes. Jameson acknowledges this and, indeed, makes a conscious choice to do one and not the other – that is, to read for interpretation (culture) and not for form (literature):

In the area of culture … we are thus confronted with a choice between study of the nature of the ‘objective’ structures of a given cultural text (the historicity of its form and of its content, the historical moment of emergence of its linguistic possibilities, the situation-specific function of its aesthetic) and something rather different which would instead foreground the interpretive categories or codes through which [we] read and receive the text in question.⁶

Jameson opts for the latter (‘For better or for worse,’ as he says) and thus ‘presupposes … that we never really confront a text immediately, in all its freshness as a thing-in-itself. Rather texts come before us as the always-alrea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes On Contributors
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Theory
• Part III Practice
• Part IV Pedagogy
• Bibliography
• Index