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• W611476793 abstract "A Little Formalism Sandra Macpherson My title comes from Barthes’s well-known parody of a well-known saying trotted out whenever one is asked to talk about form: “I shall say that a little formalism turns one away from history, but that a lot brings one back to it.”1 When in 1988 Caroline Porter asked “Are We Being Historical Yet?” and answered “no,” expressing from within New Historicism the wish for a “genuinely historicist critical practice” that would finally escape the “formalist legacy,” she perhaps missed Barthes’s point: that a committed formalism is historicist, that the legacy of formalism is historicism.2 The new formalism takes this legacy for granted. Indeed, in Susan Wolfson’s Introduction to the Modern Language Quarterly issue meant to capture the rebirth of formalism from among the ashes of cultural studies, Barthes “famous aphorism” is offered as shorthand for the argument of the volume: that “to set formalist attention against claims of contextual determination [obscures] the way formal choices and actions are enmeshed in, and even exercise agency within, networks of social and historical conditions.”3 Although Wolfson goes on to say that none of the essays to come “tries to justify or rehabilitate formalist criticism in the year 2000 by cross-dressing it as a version of historicist criticism and pleading for it on that basis, as if that were the only legitimacy,” it is my sense that much of the new formalism does precisely that—ransoms form with history.4 Given this, a better question might be: “Are We Being Formalist Yet?” And the answer, once again, is no. What follows expresses my own wish: for a genuinely formalist critical practice, a little formalism that would turn one away from history without shame or apology. But if even Barthes’s formalism is too big to serve as a model, it’s hard to know what a little formalism might look like. This is not only because, as Marianne de Koven points out, Mythologies was seen by key players in the movement as “an initiatory and paradigmatic text of cultural studies”; but also because when you look at Barthes closely, the opposition between formalism and historicism is superseded by a more perplexing one between form and formalization. And I am quite confused about form.5 [End Page 385] I can date that confusion precisely: to the wonderful English Institute meeting in 2009 on the topic of genre. There I realized three things that came to shape my future work: firstly, that although the book I had just published had the word “form” in its title, the term was massively underelaborated, weakly synonymous with “plot” or “structure”; secondly, that my formalism was therefore also rather thin, registering an interest in a determinism equated with formalism but lacking any rigorous discrimination between form, structure, and necessity; and finally, that after listening to two days of brilliant talks and stimulating conversation, I had no idea what distinguished form from genre.6 A recent perusal of the publication issuing from that meeting—The Work of Genre—reinforced my befuddlement. Jonathan Culler and Wai Chee Dimock call lyric a “genre,” and I have always thought of lyric as form-like—distinct from an ode, say, which is often described as a “genre,” and moreover a genre of lyric. Deidre Lynch begins by calling the novel a “form” and ends by calling it a “genre.” Alex Woloch calls the novel a form as well, but form looks a lot like genre; both are kinds of constraint placed upon a third term, “representation.” Craig Dworkin—who admits to wanting to “think through the dynamic of form and genre”—moves between calling prose a “form,” a “format,” and a “genre,” and calling both poetry and lyric “genres.”7 Such conflations of form and genre might be quite irrelevant to the nuanced arguments in which they occur and whose stakes lie elsewhere. Dworkin’s concern, for instance, is to make us see that whatever we happen to call poetry or prose, they tend to be distinguished from one another on the basis of lineation, and prose too is lineated. His is a materialist formalism that operates under the motto: “form..." @default.
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• W611476793 title "A Little Formalism" @default.
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