I have been working
regularly on my new book on the short story—tentatively titled Reading the
Short Story, aka How to Read Short Stories, and hope to finish a
draft within the year and send it out to seek a publisher. The audience I am writing for is the kind of
audience I seem to have attracted for my blog:
intelligent, educated writers, readers, and students of the short
story. Although I plan to make the book
theoretically sound enough to convince literature professors who have
previously ignored the form that the short story is worthy of serious study, I
intend to write it in a clear and concrete style that will be accessible to a
wide range of readers.
Since the short story
is, like poetry, highly dependent on form, and since in the last few decades, a
“formalist” approach to literature has been derided by theorists and cultural
critics, I must not only establish, but I must also justify, my own approach to
the short story--which has always been and will continue to be, formalist.
Literary criticism in
the twentieth century has followed certain trends depending on what aspect of
literature is most emphasized, e.g. the author, the historical context of the
work, the form of the work, the philosophical justification of literature,
literature’s relationship to other human studies, the social content or intent
of the work, etc. Usually one aspect
will be emphasized in the classroom and in academic critical studies until
established professors tire of it and introduce a new emphasis to graduate
students, who get their degrees and then teach that approach in the classroom
and publish their own articles to build a respectable resume that will earn
them tenure and promotion, and sometimes fame and fortune.
Then the cycle begins
all over again. For example, long
before there was a “new historicism,” there was an historical approach to
literature that provided historical and cultural background for the work,
biographical background of the author, and casual discussion of the work’s
content and/or theme. However, some
critics begin to think this approach was neglecting the actual way the work of
literature “worked,” that it, its form.
Thus, a “New Criticism” developed, often called “formalism.” When that reached a point of focusing so
much on individual trees that the forest—i.e, literature as a general
enterprise—was lost sight of, formalism mutated into structuralism and
deconstruction and various other high level philosophic approaches. When that became so rarified that much of
the theory became unreadable, the cry went up for a “New Historicism,” which
was something like the “old historicism, but with a difference—the difference
being all the formalism and theory that had come betwixt and between. When that
became too focused on the historical details, the cry went up for a focus on
the political and social importance of literature—thus culture studies, ethnic
studies, gender studies, queer studies, etc.
It only seems
inevitable, given this action/reaction development of literature criticism that
the time is now ripe for a “New Formalism.”
And, what, pray tell, is that?
What is “new” about the new formalism that differentiates it from the
“old formalism” that used to be the “new criticism”?
Last month, I received a
blog comment from Kelcey Parker, a college
professor and fiction writer at Indiana University, South Bend, who has an
article forthcoming in a collection, New Formalisms and Literary Theory (edited by Linda Tredennick and Verena Theile, Palgrave Macmillan), in which she argues that the renewed interest in Formalism and the
rise of New Formalism corresponds directly to the rise of creative writing in
English departments, for creative writers always read and think and teach in
formal terms. It is a good argument, and I will come back
to it later.
As an unrepentant “old formalist,” I am, of course, interested in
the so-called “new formalism” and asked Kelcey to send me a copy of her essay,
which I have read with much interest. I
have also been reading other articles on the “new formalism,” such as W.J.T.
Mitchell’s essay, “The Commitment to Form” in 2003, Marjorie Levinson’s long
article “What is New Formalism” 2007), the essays in a 2000 special issue of Modern
Literary Quarterly, and several other pieces. I plan to do further research on the “New
Formalism” in the weeks ahead and report on my findings here. However, I thought it best to establish the
groundwork for my readers by providing a brief and simple survey of the “old
formalism.” This summary is intended
for the educated general reader, not the super theorists who so often become
entangled in the complexities of their ideas and the convolutions of their
prose that they become unreadable.
Twentieth-century
literary theory began with an effort by English and American critics to
understand and justify literature as a type of discourse essentially different
from other discourses such as those of the physical and social sciences. It may at first appear to be obvious that a
poem or a story differs from a psychological case history or a scientific
report. After all, both kinds of
discourse can use the same words and sometimes even the same sentence patterns,
and both kinds of discourse make statements about some phenomenon, sometimes
the same phenomenon. For example, a
book on the history of whaling in New England may make some of the same kinds
of statements that Herman Melville's Moby
Dick makes.
However, most readers
feel that somehow the "purpose" to which language is put in poetry is
different than the purpose to which it is put in a psychological report. Moreover, most readers feel that the
statements in a novel "refer" to something different than the
statements in a history book; whereas the first refers to a "made-up"
world, the second refers to a "real" world. Finally, most readers feel that in some way the
"effects" of statements in a scientific or historical discourse are
somehow different than the effects of statements in poetry.
Such issues as these are
not as simple as they at first appear.
Indeed, before the beginning of modern literary theory's efforts to
understand and to justify literature as different than other kinds of
discourse, literature was often felt to be secondary to other verbal forms;
literary works were studied as historical documents which played cultural roles,
or else they were studied for what social content or philosophic theme they
seemed to contain and communicate.
Modern literary theory, beginning primarily with the great modernist
British poet and critic T.S. Eliot, changed all that forever.
This is not to say that
everyone before T. S. Eliot believed that literature, particularly poetry, used
language the way other verbal forms did.
For example, the 19th-century British poet and critic Samuel Taylor
Coleridge noted that poetry differed in an essential way from other kinds of
language use, for its purpose is a unique kind of pleasure that results from
the reader's perception of the intrinsic unity of all its parts. And in America, Edgar Allan Poe argued
strongly that both poems and short tales depended on a highly unified structure
to communicate their singular effect. This point of view became even more
pronounced at the end of the 19th century with the advent, especially in
England and Europe, of the so-called aesthetic school of poetry, which insisted
that a poem was important for its own sake, not because it contained important
ideas.
Actually, what T. S.
Eliot contributed to this development of a particularly "modern"
notion of literature was a group of critical pronouncements about literature's
uniqueness that crystallized the views of other poets and thinkers. For example, Eliot suggested that art is
more concerned with expressing emotion than the logical ideas on which other
verbal forms focused; furthermore, Eliot argued, the only way of expressing
emotion in literature is by means of a verbal "objective
correlative," a set of objects, a situation, or a chain of events which,
even though it seemed to be made up of mere concrete, sensory details, served
as a verbal equivalent of the emotion. This idea that poetry communicated meaning by
means of concrete detail rather than by means of abstractions was an important
step in the critical effort to establish that poetry used language differently
than other forms of verbal communication.
Eliot's perception that
the language of poetry was unique was soon followed by the arguments of British
critic I. A. Richards that the kinds of "statements" poetry used were
different than those in other forms of discourse. In Science and Poetry in 1926, Richards noted that although poetry
does make statements, they are not statements that have to be verified as they
do in scientific forms; they are instead "pseudo-statements," which
are justified not because they correspond to the facts they point to but rather
because they serve the attitudes of the speaker or organize the attitudes of
the reader. The "truth" of
poetry is relative to the perspective of the speaker; it does not depend on its
correspondence to that which it seems to refer.
Next Week: The New Critics and the Russian Formalists
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