New Formalisms and Literary Theory Also by Verena Theile

Home , Formalism (linguistics), Formalism (literature), New Formalism

RECLAIMING HOME, REMEMBERING MOTHERHOOD AND REWRITING HISTORY: African American and Afro- Caribbean Women Writers in the Twentieth Century (edited with M. Drews) STAGING THE SUPERSTITIONS OF EARLY MODERN EUROPE (edited with A. McCarthy) New Formalisms and Literary Theory

Edited by Verena Theile Assistant Professor of English, North Dakota State University, USA and Linda Tredennick Associate Professor of English, Gonzaga University, USA Selection and editorial matter © Verena Theile and Linda Tredennick 2013 Individual chapters © contributors 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-01048-3 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-43636-1 ISBN 978-1-137-01049-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137010490 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Contents

Foreword by Heather Dubrow vii Acknowledgments xix Notes on Contributors xx

Part I Introduction 1 New Formalism(s): A Prologue 3 Verena Theile Part II Theory 2 Toward a New Formalism: The Intrinsic and Related Problems in Criticism and Theory 29 Fredric V. Bogel 3 Doing Genre 54 Group Phi Part III Practice 4 Inventing an Ancestor: The Scholar- Poet and the Sonnet 71 Edward Brunner 5 From Close Reading to Cross- Reading: Sacco- Vanzetti Poetry and the Politics of New Formalism 96 Bartholomew Brinkman 6 Re- Reading for Forms in Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy 116 Corey McEleney and Jacqueline Wernimont 7 Collecting Body Parts in Leonardo’s Cave: Vasari’s Lives and the Erotics of Obscene Connoisseurship 140 Harry Berger Jr 8 Form as a Pattern of Thinking: Cognitive Poetics and New Formalism 159 Karin Kukkonen Part IV Pedagogy 9 Reading Like a Writer: A Creative Writer’s Approach to New Formalism 179 Kelcey Parker

v vi Contents

10 Punk Bodies, Jorie Graham, and the Draft Itself: Notes Toward a Lyric Formalism 197 Cynthia Nichols 11 ‘One Another’s Hermitage’: New Formalist Pedagogy 223 Linda Tredennick

Bibliography 242 Index 256 Foreword Heather Dubrow

PROLOGUE: we will turn it finely off, sir (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5.2.510)

The historical turn? The cognitive turn? And now, the New Formalist turn? Our vocabulary in writing the history of our profession shapes (or dare one say informs) that history. ‘Verso,’ the Latin for ‘turn,’ is the root from which branch words like ‘adversary’ and ‘controversy,’ and, in emphasizing change as it does, ‘turn’ itself opens the possibility of repudiation. Moreover, ‘turn,’ unlike ‘swerve’ or ‘lurch,’ implies a kind of purposefulness and agency. As references to the skilled ‘turning’ of Jacobean furniture demonstrate, the word participates in the vocabulary of lathe- work, so the phrases on which this paragraph opens implicitly associate changes in the profession with control and arguably with another fraught word explored in a different con- text below, craft, more than with, say, the unwitting pressure of anxieties.1 Craft sidles into craftiness in the instances, extensively documented in the Oxford English Dictionary, linking turning and deceit.2 And a turn is often a step in a journey rather than its conclusion. In all these ways, then, the very concept of a professional turn introduces issues explored in this Foreword and throughout the chapters that succeed it. In what senses and to what ends does New Formalism repudiate what has preceded it, arguably including other types of formalism? Who or what drives the car that makes the turn? How much craft – or craftiness – impels the ways New Formalism drives away from its ancestors? And what critical practices will, or should, succeed the initial stages of a recent turn towards a New Formalism? Yet ‘turn’ does not establish the degree and hence type of change – barely perceptible at ten degrees? radical at one hundred eighty degrees? the turn that isn’t one at three hundred sixty degrees? – and I explore that issue as well below. In particular, to what extent and in what ways should New Formalism be seen not only as repudiation but also as a version of the three hundred sixty degree circle, the turn that is also a return? Verena Theile, one of the editors of this volume, writes, ‘we …want to propose and challenge the conception of New Formalism as an extension of contextual readings or a “mere” return to aesthetic readings’ (6).3 In what ways is New Formalism new? In what ways is it formalism? This introductory essay, then, aims to develop protocols for defining the relationship of New Formalism to other movements, both when we write its

vii viii Foreword history and when we script the movement by practicing it. Recognizing the variety and liability in the predecessors of New Formalism guards against the temptation someone wittily described as throwing out the father with the bathwater and permits a more judicious winnowing. For example, our conceptions of form will be enriched if we learn from the subtle commentaries on genre by critics like Alastair Fowler, Claudio Guillén, and Paul Hernadi without embracing the ahistorical and prescriptive conceptions advocated in some essays by the Chicago School. And our close reading skills will be sharpened if, while questioning adulatory conceptions of the text and posi- tivistic interpretations of the critical enterprise recurrent in New Criticism, we review with respect the subtle analyses of, say, Clay Hunt, Richard Poirier, or critics deeply influenced by New Criticism who are still alive and well in the academy, notably Helen Vendler. A more judicious reading of past texts also discourages two dubious approaches to locomotion: jumping on bandwagons and reinventing the wheel. But why should these and related issues about New Formalism matter to anyone beyond adherents of that movement and their fellow travelers? Fredric V. Bogel’s chapter in this volume implicitly gestures towards answers inasmuch as many questions that he associates with the development of a New Formalism, particularly intrinsic literariness, intention, and reference, are at the cutting edge of the field as a whole. More broadly, whereas positioning our own critical world as the center of the critical universe is a dangerous if not uncommon enterprise, recognizing its potential as a vantage point onto ‘far other worlds and other seas’ is potentially valuable, and in this instance the questions necessitated by developing a New Formalism do, indeed, crystallize debates central to many academic projects. Thus New Formalists are asking: What should we study? The distinctly literary? Texts in a broad sense that may lack qualities normally associated with the literary? The text as culture? These are, of course, questions of interest to students of the material text, as well as many other movements. And, as the contribution by Group Phi to this volume (Chapter 3) demonstrates so persuasively, in studying the workings of form and the creation of meaning (if indeed it is created) New Formalists pose questions about agency: To what extent is the author responsible? The audience? The culture? Similar questions arise as well in endeavors ranging from performance criticism to the recent interest in cognitive theory and the study of visualities. Debates about how form relates to historical and political pressures, the inquiry that many see as the core of a New Formalism, have been of interest to feminists, other students of gender, and, of course, materialist critics. In enumerating such similarities, my aim is not the occlusion of equally telling differences in how these issues are approached but rather the establishment of new perspectives on them, an invitation to learn from and with and through New Formalism even if one’s own interests lie elsewhere. Foreword ix

New Formalism and its predecessors: ‘this strange eventful history’ (As You Like It, 2.7.154)

Although New Formalism, like many other heirs, is often ambivalent about its paternity and patrimony, its lineage clearly includes New Criticism itself, Russian formalism, the so- called Chicago School, and the formalism regularly – though, as I will argue, problematically – associated with New Criticism, while its relationship to New Historicism is variously represented as that of inheritor, collaborator, or opponent. A brief history of the development of New Formalism from these roots, supplementing the valuable overview in the editors’ Prologue (Chapter 1 below), can readily be constructed. Paul de Man famously attacked formalist practices, arguing that they attribute to texts a wholeness that conceals the ruptures they themselves reveal (my computer replicated divided professional responses to that critic when its word check program prof- fered as substitutes for his name ‘dean’ and ‘demon’).4 Attacking from a different perspective, New Historicism self- consciously positioned itself as an alternative to New Criticism, though its relationship to the study of form was more various and ambivalent; as Richard Strier has pointed out in one of the best analyses of all these movements, the noun, not adjec- tive, in ‘new historicism’ is often stressed, thus drawing attention to the contrast with formalism rather than with earlier versions of historicism.5 Despite and because of such attacks, calls for a New Formalism were issued as early as the 1990s. But that turn came into its own at the turn of the century and the decade that succeeded it, heralded and advanced by an issue of Modern Language Quarterly, by the volume that expanded that issue entitled Reading for Form, and by such collections as Mark David Rasmussen’s Renaissance Literature and its Formal Engagements and Stephen Cohen’s Shakespeare and Historical Formalism.6 Books published in that decade, notably Susan Wolfson’s Formal Charges, by precept and example advanced the development of New Formalism.7 And that development was influentially – though problematically – chronicled and anatomized in Marjorie Levinson’s essay in PMLA and its longer online version.8 As Edward Brunner reminds us in Chapter 4 below, however, these types of New Formalism need to be carefully distinguished from a school of poets and critics advocating a return to meter and rhyme, whose main forum has been an annual conference at West Chester University. But how can we move from that sound but bald summary to analyses of the connections between the movements in question? Although certain studies, including the editor’s Prologue in this volume and the introductions to the collections cited immediately above, persuasively tell both the story and the historical back stories of New Formalism, most accounts instead exemplify problems to avoid when defining the movement through com- parison and contrast with its predecessors. In an era when assisted fertility x Foreword often produces twins, a matched pair of devilishly attractive temptations often distorts these definitions in our professional psychomachias. First, in describing the predecessors to a movement with which one identifies, one may either inflate the value of one’s predecessors, or, more commonly, flatten and even parody them to emphasize the novel achievements of one’s own movement. Second, the ruptural models of historical change inherited from Foucault and many other sources tempt one to write a professional history that emphasizes not seismic but revolutionary shifts and thus accords with the paradigms applied to other versions of cultural change. (Alternatively, in certain circles, the progress narratives that once structured literary, art, and political history – limited and imperfect sorties into the sonnet form give way to its triumphant flowering in Elizabethan England, the experiments with representing the human form in proto- and Low Renaissance paint- ings enjoy their glorious culmination in the High Renaissance, autocratic government gradually and peacefully declines as Parliament develops – have rightly been rejected; but an equally celebratory trajectory culminating in the development of one’s own and one’s allies’ critical stance remains alive and well.) In any event, in both instances the imperative to concentrate on the ways a New Formalism differs from its predecessors is intense. These lures produce the interrelated problems explored below: a syn- chronic and diachronic oversimplification of the movements related to a New Formalism; a conflation of terms, most regrettably a blurring of New Criticism and formalism and of the historical and the political as well as of several different types of historical endeavor; and a focus on how a movement functioned in particular historical fields or institutions at the expense of noting alternative versions. In short, whereas the title of Edward Brunner’s contribution to this volume, ‘Inventing An Ancestor,’ refers primarily to African American literary traditions, the phrase could also gloss the ways in which many contemporary critics refer to the movements of the past, recalling Sir Philip Sidney’s witty reminder that a ‘sunne-burn’d braine’ (Astrophil and Stella, 1.8) often has trouble producing fruitful words about its fathers or, indeed, anything else.9 Representations of New Criticism synecdochally demonstrate the problems in question. According to these tales, New Criticism, a version if not the identical twin of formalism, was a static monolith enjoying a hegemonic domination of the American academy in the 1950s and 1960s. Not only the forms of biographical and philological scholarship that it had opposed but also any concern with history were exiled. This New Criticism studied texts in isolation not only from their cultural matrices but also each other, reading them as individuated well wrought urns, that is, unified, cohesive entities. Partially true though they are, such accounts neglect the variety of approaches among New Critics and among versions of the movement at different stages. Most obviously, an outlier like the Marxist William Empson hardly ignored cultural and political readings, but less predictable examples Foreword xi can also readily be amassed. Richard Strier has demonstrated that Erich Auerbach’s formalism and New Criticism do not conform to descriptions like those in the previous paragraph.10 Concerns posited as antithetical to New Criticism even appear, though in significantly abbreviated form, where one would least expect them. If Clay Hunt’s influential volume on Donne’s poetry is paradigmatic New Criticism in its devotion of each chapter to a single poem and its approach to what some would have studied as philo- sophical questions in terms of emotional states, it nonetheless incorporates cultural questions about Catholicism that cannot fit within the compass of a single text.11 Moreover, analyses of New Criticism need to acknowledge both national and chronological distinctions; its relationship to Leavisites is too often neglected in the United States. Similarly, those accusing New Criticism of a- or antihistoricism are often ahistorical in their renditions of the movement: Gerald Graff has persuasively demonstrated its shifting attitudes to historical and political analysis over the course of several decades.12 Although Graff’s caution on this and other issues remains valuable, one can safely say that the movement did not neglect history, but that it privi- leged certain types over others, positioned history as background, and, in so doing, encouraged its own apolitical tendencies. Tracing those patterns involves disentangling many types of history and distinguishing between history and politics, as well as distinguishing an awareness of political issues from a commitment to political action. New Critics often practiced literary history – witness one of the finest examples, David Kalstone’s Sidney’s Poetry – and, as Graff also observes, did include other types of history.13 What is absent, of course, is the type of cultural history that intensely interests many critics today and that enables political agendas, such as the exposure of gender politics or other versions of power plays in our own cultures. For attacks on New Criticism as ahistorical often screen the justified concern that it is apolitical or attracted to a conservative agenda. In her acute essay in this volume, Linda Tredennick rightly encourages us to realize that ‘New Criticism has its limitations but is not nearly as perniciously apolitical as its critics in the 1970s and 1980s suggested’ (223). Her arguments about how New Critical procedures can be adapted for a progressive agenda are persuasive, but in practice many New Critics did not do so. Certainly many of its founders traced their roots to the political conservatism of Southern Agrarianism. And much as President Obama has learned to his cost that a balanced exposition of alternatives is not a sure formula for rallying support, so the New Critical emphasis on paradox, complexity, and a balanced resolution could lead to subtle readings of political issues (witness Reuben A. Brower’s work on Shakespeare’s tragedies and history plays) but did not readily encourage political commitment or action.14 (One afternoon around 1967 or 1968, we hotheaded graduate students organized a meeting to talk with our professors about the Vietnam War. Ben Brower observed that sometimes these and other such issues were very complicated; his xii Foreword colleague Monroe Engel retorted that certain problems were in fact simple and clear- cut.) If New Criticism was not a monolith intellectually, neither did it dominate the academy to the extent accounts sometimes claim: significant pockets of resistance to and rejection of New Criticism survived the heyday of New Criticism, and other approaches, notably Freudian psychological criticism, thrived in many quarters. The Harvard English Department, for example, was still a center of literary history and editorial scholarship (rumor has it that many years after Douglas Bush, distinguished literary historian and editor, had retired, perhaps even years after he had died, one wag referred to this as the department Bush was chairing, a comment all the more telling for my purposes in light of that putative chair’s attack on New Criticism in his Modern Language Association presidential address). Attacks on the movement, such as Rosemond Tuve’s insistence in 1952 on intellectual and historical contexts for reading Herbert, demonstrate the continuing power of alternative approaches.15 Temptations to misread New Criticism in defining a New Formalism are closely connected to similar problems in approaching earlier formalisms. To begin with, we need to challenge the facile equation of New Criticism and formalism.16 Although the title ‘the well wrought urn’ insistently focuses on the containing form, formalist and New Critical analyses may diverge, if not clash, for more reasons than one. Many subgenres of formalism evince little interest in individual texts and, least of all, in their linguistic textures: witness not only the Chicago School but also many practitioners of Russian formalism. Rosalie L. Colie, among the best formalist critics of her century, does less close reading than one might have expected, especially given her own work as a poet. (She also deserves prominence in any history of the profession because of her challenge to other common misreadings of it: for all her commitment to formalism and new history, she wrote what is not only an early but also a powerful materialist reading of Lear.17) Conversely, in the work of many New Critics, an interest in form, though present, was limited in type and degree. Douglas Bruster’s reminder that rhetorical figures are forms, though intended to suggest connections between formalism and materialism, alerts us to the fact that the fascination with paradox and irony alone links New Criticism to certain types of formalism; but a nominal or virtually absent engagement with other kinds of form, such as genre itself or connections between poems in a sequence or loosely related series, is also characteristic of many practitioners.18 Like New Criticism, formalisms vary in many ways, not least in the putative presence of a rigidity derived in part from their ahistoricism.19 Those eager either to reject all formalism or distinguish their own work from predecessors sailing under that flag sometimes attribute the prescriptive rhetoric of French neoclassicism and the neo- Aristotelian strictures for comedy developed by the Chicago School to the movement as a whole. Foreword xiii

To be sure, a vocabulary of laws and rules, motivated in part by the desired connections with science that have shaped so many literary movements, certainly implies regularity if not rigidity. But Derrida’s insistence that the rule of genre is its challenge to rules is not nearly as original as his essay implies.20 The best genre critics have long delighted in showing how literary forms shift and change – returning to Colie, witness her study of how the epigram metamorphosizes in the English sonnet.21 Nor were the formalisms that preceded its current avatar consistently apolitical. Whereas the Russian formalists explicitly positioned themselves against the overtly politicized analyses of their counterparts, their conceptions of generic change, which they often represent in terms not of gradual evolution but abrupt revolution, implicitly parallel models for political upheaval. Thus Tynyanov writes, ‘Any literary succession is first of all a struggle, a destruction of old values and a reconstruction of old elements.’22 And needless to say, Marxist formal analysis has a long history. In theory as well as practice formalism is amenable to discussions of political issues. A series of essays by Robert Kaufman, not yet accorded the attention they deserve, demonstrates that a concern for form and the attending recupera- tion of the aesthetic are not antagonistic to materialist agendas, including overtly Marxist ones.23 Kant has often been misread, he persuasively asserts, and, for this and other reasons, we can and should separate the aesthetic from aestheticization. The work of some earlier formalists, as well as many of the chapters in this volume, buttress and gloss his point. ‘New Historicism is not the catch- all that it has frequently been made out to be,’ Verena Theile writes in this volume (16), and the temptation to reduce movement to monolith, so characteristic of misreadings of New Criticism and formalism, needs to be avoided in this instance as well. The introduction to Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self- Fashioning devotes far less attention to Althusser and Marx than Lacan and Geertz, and, indeed, in its early days, New Historicism was often contrasted with English cultural materialism and criticized for occluding materialist explanations and materialist or, indeed, any theory.24 In the 1980s, when the accusation was damning, Alan Liu accused it of a version of formalism, seen in his attack as an alternative to political acuity or even awareness.25 Another complication in baldly casting New Historicism as New Formalism’s demonic Other or, alternatively, its respected progenitor, lies, again, in significant differences among practitioners. Although, during the 1980s, many feminists rightly claimed that New Historicism as a whole devoted too little attention to gender, individual members of that movement sometimes acknowledged its importance, as Louis A. Montrose famously, though not uncontroversially, did in his work on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.26 Similarly, as early as the mid-1980s, Peter Stallybrass, an acknowledged leader of materialist projects, collaborated in a gendered reading of Astrophil and Stella. And New Historicism assumed different forms in different historical fields.27 xiv Foreword

Critics who attempt to see New Formalism more as an alternative to the limitations of New Historicism than a development of its potentialities often accuse it of giving only lip service to issues of form.28 One can again identify some exceptions, such as Montrose’s work on pastoral and Richard Helgerson’s choice of the title Forms of Nationhood; however, the fact remains that if we think of form in terms of a distinctly literary practice, New Historicism was indeed committed to rejecting it.29 At the same time, identifying a handful of New Historicist essays that do address form can provide models for relating the material to the formal – and also instances of some dangers of doing so. Above all, Arthur L. Marotti’s claim that ‘love is not love’ but political ambition famously and brilliantly shifted our assumptions about direction of address in the sonnet tradition, and yet its readings would have been stronger had they acknowledged an interaction between the various forms of desire in the tradition rather than polemically replacing one reading with another.30

Conclusion and new directions: ‘Gentles, do not reprehend’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.429)

Despite the box- office success of the film Avatar, this essay does not attempt to replicate its ideologies: I am not trying to establish a peaceable kingdom where all critical methods can live in harmony because there are no significant differences between them as long as one banishes the evil military forces. On issues like the agency and, hence, significance of the individual writer, the critical movements that preceded New Formalism do indeed differ from each other in vital respects, and similar differences may be found within each movement, as well as within New Formalism itself. My focus is not on denying or concealing disagreements but rather on identifying them more precisely in ways that do not preclude establishing fruitful connections as well. Most importantly, doing so could enrich our professional practices. Rethinking the adversarial models that so often structure professional discourse by recalling Linda Hutcheon’s championship of both/and rather than either/or models would serve collegial as well as intellectual aims.31 This approach would, for example, encourage us to recognize the invest- ments we ourselves bring to the histories we try to tell and create. That awareness can limit, though not completely prevent, distortions; in writing this essay, for example, I have attempted to negotiate my own ambiva- lence about the New Critics who taught me. Another advantage of a more balanced approach to the predecessors to a New Formalism is limiting the generational rivalries that risk distorting personnel and curricular decisions. The desire to aggrandize one’s own movement – and moment – by contrast- ing them with the straw men we conveniently ascribe to the past is pernicious for individuals and for interactions in departments and the profession at Foreword xv large. Decisions and interactions in research- oriented English departments are too often scarred by competition for graduate students and other markers of prestige, by the increasingly uneven distribution of goodies in our current reward systems, by arguments about in what field one should hire in a shrinking economy, and so on. We hardly need additional sources of tension. Although most New Critics have retired (or, perhaps, are explicating poems together in realms where the decline in pension plans is no longer a concern), developing an attitude to earlier generations that involves some respect would foster collegiality within departments and, in so doing, would encourage us to encourage our graduate students to recognize that respect for the achievements of others and intellectual rigor are allies, not polar opposites. ‘Rigor,’ like ‘smart,’ is too often a coded and self- serving criterion, encouraging the conflation of so- called rigorous analysis with one- upmanship. More to my purposes here, recognizing the varieties and inconsistencies within New Criticism, New Historicism, and earlier formalisms encourages a more measured evaluation of the potentialities for building bridges between those movements and a New Formalism in some respects while also establishing boundaries in others. Doing so can advance vital projects outside the scope of this essay, notably defining in what senses a New Formalism should study form and to what extent and in what ways it should engage with history. A plaque at the University of Wisconsin- Madison announces that ‘we believe that the great state of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.’ One might well question the implicit positivism in that statement, but I have endorsed its implication that the New Formalism can best establish its relationship to other movements through sifting and winnowing rather than uncritical emulation and the attendant rivalry (more historicist and/or more materialist than thou) or, more commonly, the equally competitive Oedipal murders that oversimplification and misrepresentation foster. But another summary and extension of my arguments is closer to hand. In commenting on Vasari in his extraordinary contribution to this volume (Chapter 7), Harry Berger Jr writes,

The most significant phrase in this passage is the one containing the verb ‘cavò’: ‘out of the number of [the animals] variously put together he drew forth – “cavò” – a most horrible and fearful beast’ (‘cavò un animalaccio molto orribile e spaventoso’). One translator renders ‘cavò’ as ‘he formed’ and another as ‘he created.’ But the creative action implied by the verb ‘cavare’ is more like excavation or extraction – as one extracts a tooth, or digs up an old statue, or (like Michelangelo) draws forth the statue lurking in the stone. (151–2)

An essay that opened on the noun ‘turn’ may invite action and reaction by concluding on the verb ‘cavò.’ We need to extricate ourselves from certain xvi Foreword practices of the past – but not at the expense of ignoring what we can fruit- fully extricate and extract, drawing forth the New Formalisms lurking in our predecessors’ aging stone and, in so doing, reshaping it and ourselves.

Coda: ‘you twain / Rule in this realm’ (King Lear, 5.3.320–1)

Having suggested some conditions for building bridges between scholars and critical methods, I will conclude on a similar engineering project, addressing the gap between the islands from which literary and cultural critics and writers (who often dislike that term) confront each other. Within this volume appear two very strong essays that assume different positions on key issues. Developing the category of ‘lyriciste’ as an alternative, in Chapter 10 Cynthia Nichols emphasizes tensions between the perspectives of critic and writer and attempts to effect solutions. One representative of the former camp, the traditional formalist critic, sees literature as unchanging and dead, she asserts, while the writer sees it as always in progress. Arguing that all creative writers are fundamentally formalists, Kelsey Parker (Chapter 9), in contrast, believes the methods of creative writing may be more smoothly transferred. Although, as my Foreword maintains, I might question some assumptions in each chapter, it is with both enthusiasm and respect that I second their pedagogical concerns and methods and their assumption that negotiating the relationship between critics and writers should be one of the challenges – and can be one of the joys and principal achievements – of a New Formalism. The best way a New Formalism can do so, I myself would suggest, is by replacing an emphasis on the aesthetic with an adoption of the writers’ emphasis on craft or techne (a concept that permits but does not privilege the emphasis on trickery mentioned above). Many concepts of the aesthetic are, indeed, already virtually synonymous with craft, but the change would aid in building those bridges between critics and writers and would facili- tate avoiding the equation of attention to form with the Kantian aesthetic (so often misread, as many philosophers have demonstrated), thus effecting that distinction between the aesthetic and aestheticism for which Robert Kaufman has so cogently argued.32 Talking in terms of craft as opposed to the aesthetic draws attention to poetry as process, as Nichols enjoins, and encourages us to redefine aesthetic effects in ways often not associated with that concept, though, in fact, as I have argued, accommodated in many versions of it. That is, such effects may be partially or imperfectly achieved, leading to one type of roughness. And often even – or especially – a successful achievement of them manifests itself not in polish and symmetry but a different type of roughness that in this instance is deliberately achieved by a driver carefully executing turns; imperfections may bring their own pleasures and beauties, as philosophers redefining the Kantian aesthetic have reminded us. Recall that leaders of the Japanese tea ceremony and their artists gradually came to favor not the ceramics that imitated Foreword xvii the perfection of their Chinese ancestors but rather those that were deliberately uneven, bumpy, and asymmetrical. And this focus on craft would recuperate a concept of the author, one of several possible drivers of that turning car, without unduly emphasizing either an isolated individual (craft is learned from and with other poets and hence is not incompatible with Bartholomew Brinkman’s arguments about cross- reading in Chapter 5 below) or celebrating a godlike icon (craft is the product of continuing struggle). Recalling that these concepts are in fact present in many, though not all, interpretations of the aesthetic, we return to Berger’s ‘cavare.’ I attempt to extricate, to extract. And now to exit, pursued by the bears and bugbears that this essay has tried to tame.

Notes

1. On connections between lathe- work and the craft of lyric poetry see my book The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 29–30. 2. Dubrow, Challenges of Orpheus, 29. 3. All references to chapters in this volume appear parenthetically within the text. 4. Paul de Man, ‘The Dead- End of Formalist Criticism,’ in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). 5. Richard Strier, ‘How Formalism Became a Dirty Word, and Why We Can’t Do Without It,’ in Renaissance Literature and its Formal Engagements, edited by Mark David Rasmussen (New York: Palgrave, 2002), esp. 208. 6. See respectively Modern Language Quarterly 61.1 (2000), Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown, eds, Reading for Form (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), Stephen Cohen, ed., Shakespeare and Historical Formalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), and Rasmussen’s Renaissance Literature and its Formal Engagements. 7. Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 8. Marjorie Levinson, ‘What Is New Formalism?’ PMLA 122 ( 2007): 558–69; also see its longer version at http://sitemaker.umich.edu/pmla_article (accessed 28 November 2012). Despite the acuity of this article, its status as the primary source in its field is regrettable because of its commitment to a simple binary that privileges the New Formalists closest to the author’s own positions. 9. I cite The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, edited by Wiliam A. Ringler Jr (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). 10. Strier, ‘How Formalism Became a Dirty Word,’ 211–12. 11. Clay Hunt, Donne’s Poetry: Essays in Literary Analysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), esp. 169–76. 12. Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), esp. chapter 9. 13. David Kalstone, Sidney’s Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965); see Graff, Professing Literature, 183, on history as background. 14. Reuben A. Brower, Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco- Roman Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). xviii Foreword

15. See esp. Rosemond Tuve’s attack on William Empson and other New Critics in A Reading of George Herbert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 19–99. 16. Compare Strier, ‘How Formalism Became a Dirty Word.’ 17. Rosalie Littell Colie, ‘Reason and Need: King Lear and the “Crisis” of the Aristocracy,’ in Some Facets of King Lear, edited by Rosalie L. Colie and F.T. Flahiff (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974). 18. On this and several other subjects related to my essay, see Douglas Bruster, ‘The Materiality of Shakespearean Form,’ in Cohen, Shakespeare and Historical Formalism, 31–48; the discussion in question appears on 36–9. 19. On that variety, compare Levinson, ‘What Is New Formalism?’ 561. 20. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre,’ translated by Avital Ronell, Glyph 7 (1980): 202–32. 21. Rosalie L. Colie, Shakespeare’s Living Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 96–112. 22. Quoted in Boris Eichenbaum, ‘The Theory of the Formal Method,’ in Russian Formalist Criticism, edited by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 134. On the relationship of Russian formalists to politics, also see my book Genre (London: Methuen, 1982), 89–91. 23. See esp. Robert Kaufman, ‘Red Kant, or The Persistence of the Third Critique in Adorno and Jameson,’ Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 682–724; and his ‘Negatively Capable Dialectics: Keats, Vendler, Adorno, and the Theory of Avant- Garde,’ Critical Inquiry 27 (2001): 354–84. 24. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self- Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 25. Alan Liu, ‘The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism,’ ELH 56 (1989): 721–71. 26. Louis A. Montrose, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture,’ in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern England, edited by Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 65–87. Some readers have maintained, however, that gender issues proved less prominent even here than the predictable New Historicist investigations of power. 27. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The Politics of Astrophil and Stella,’ SEL 24 (1984): 53–68. 28. See, for example, my own essay ‘Friction and Faction: New Directions for New Historicism,’ Monatshefte 84 (1992): 212–19. 29. See two essays by Louis A. Montrose, ‘“The perfecte patterne of a Poete”: The Poetics of Courtship in The Shepheardes Calender,’ TSLL 21 (1979): 34–67; ‘Eliza, “Queene of shepheardes” and the Pastoral of Power,’ ELR 10 (1980): 153–82; and Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 30. Arthur F. Marotti, ‘“Love is Not Love”: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order,’ ELH 49 (1982): 396–428. 31. Linda Hutcheon has written and spoken powerfully on this subject in several venues. See esp. her MLA ‘Presidential Address,’ PMLA 116 (2001): 518–30. 32. See Kaufman, ‘Red Kant’ and ‘Negatively Capable Dialectics.’ Among the philosophers who have challenged the view of Kantian aesthetics that reduces them to a universalizing and amoral celebration of beauty is Donald W. Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974). Acknowledgments

This collection grew out of conversations and into friendships. We are grateful to our contributors who have, throughout, kept us thinking on our toes and fascinated us: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us and trusting us with your work. The same gratitude is owed our colleagues in the English departments of Gonzaga University and North Dakota State University. Their patience, their solidarity, and the intellectual community they provide sustain us. Verena Theile would like to express her gratitude especially to Gary Totten, Miriam Mara, Cindy Nichols, Linda Helstern, Carol Pearson, Davin Wait, Owen Romo, Carrie Anne Platt, Zoltan Madjik, Christina Weber, Harry Berger Jr, William M. Hamlin, and Heather Dubrow, without whom this collection would never have happened and whose support and kind indulgence truly matter. Linda Tredennick would like to thank Roland Greene and Karen Ford for their intelligence, inspiration, and support, and Jeremy Loss for being Jeremy: friend, partner, travel companion.

xix Notes on Contributors

Harry Berger Jr is Professor Emeritus of Literature and Art History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His numerous books include A Fury in the Words: Love and Embarrassment in Shakespeare’s Venice (2012), The Perils of Uglytown: Studies in Structural Misanthropy from Plato to Rembrandt (2012), Caterpillage (2010), Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief (2006), Situated Utterances (2005), Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance (1999), and Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (1989). Forthcoming in 2013 are Harrying: Skills of Offense in Shakespeare’s Henriad and Simonides in Couch City: Studies in Plato's Republic and Protagoras. Scott Black (Group Phi, see below) is Associate Professor of English at the University of Utah, where he teaches eighteenth- century British literature and the history of the novel. He is author of Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain (2006) and recent essays on Fielding, Ortega, Heliodorus, and eighteenth- century romance. Fredric V. Bogel, Professor of English, has taught in the English Department of Cornell University since the 1980s. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses mainly in eighteenth- century literature, in critical theory, and in the reading of poetry. His research has focused on Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, later eighteenth- century English literature, theory of satire, modern critical theory, and formalist criticism. He is currently at work on two books: A New Formalist Guide for Interpreting Literature, an exploration of contemporary formalist criticism; and The Matter of Emotions: Affect and Mechanism in Eighteenth- Century Literature, a study of literature, philosophy, aesthetic theory, theories of acting, and sentimentalism which explores the ambivalent movement between materialist and volitional accounts of affec- tive and aesthetic experience. Bartholomew Brinkman is Assistant Professor of English at Framingham State University. He has published articles on modern poetry and print culture in Modernism/modernity, the Journal of Modern Literature, the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, and the African American Review and is currently completing a book manuscript on poetic modernism in the culture of mass print. With Cary Nelson he edits the Modern American Poetry Site. Edward Brunner is Professor of Modern Literature at Southern Illinois University where he teaches courses in twentieth- century poetry, cultural

xx Notes on Contributors xxi studies, and graphic art. He has published book- length studies on Hart Crane, on W.S. Merwin and, most recently, on Cold War poetry. Portions of a new study on ‘cultural front comics,’ an examination of artists and writers from 1935 to 1955 who used the adult- adventure comic strip syndicated in newspapers as a forum for dissent, have appeared in MELUS, the International Journal of Comics Art, and American Periodicals.

Heather Dubrow is John D. Boyd, S.J. Chair in the Poetic Imagination at Fordham University. She is the author of six scholarly books, most recently The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (2008). Her other publications include a co- edited collection of essays, an edition of As You Like It (2011), and articles on early modern literature and on teaching. Forms and Hollows, a collection of her poetry, has been published by Cherry Grove Collections (2010), and she is director of the Poets Out Loud reading series at Fordham University. Group Phi is an informal association of Philadelphia- area scholars of early modern literature who have been discussing questions about the relationship of formal and historical concerns for several years. Their chapter emerges from these on- going conversations about the methods of literary and cultural study – drawing on the collective expertise of a group whose interests cross different periods, media, and theory – and attempts to for- malize the group’s explorations as a prompt to further conversation. The members of Group Phi include Scott Black, Nora Johnson, Laura McGrane, Steve Newman, Kristen Poole, Katherine Rowe, Lauren Shohet, and Julian Yates (see individual biographical notes). Nora Johnson (Group Phi), Professor of English at Swarthmore College, is the author of The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama (2003) and other essays on early modern drama. She is currently at work on a study of high and low appropriations of Shakespeare in nineteenth- century American culture. Karin Kukkonen is Balzan Postdoctoral Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford. Her research interests include narratology and cognitive approaches to literature. She has published on multiperspective storytelling, metaphor, and metafictional strategies in comics and graphic novels, and co- edited a volume on Metalepsis in Popular Culture (2011). Corey McEleney is Assistant Professor of English at Fordham University, where he specializes in early modern literature, literary theory, and gender and sexuality studies. He is currently working on a study titled Vanity Fare: Pleasure, Futility, and Early Modern Literature, which examines the role that pleasure plays in early modern debates over poetic value. Laura McGrane (Group Phi) is Associate Professor of English at Haverford College. Her pedagogical interests include political satire, performance, xxii Notes on Contributors and print histories in transatlantic contexts. She has published essays on Fielding, theatricality, and witchcraft in MLQ and FMLS and is completing edits to her manuscript titled ‘Oracular Politics in English Print and Popular Culture: 1680–1800’. Steve Newman (Group Phi), Associate Professor of English at Temple University, is the author of Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism (2007) and is begin- ning a book that has as its working title Time for the Humanities: Competing Narratives of Value from the Scottish Enlightenment to the 21st Century Academy. He has published essays on The Beggar’s Opera, Allan Ramsay and the Scottish Enlightenment, and Shakespearean lyric and popular song, among other topics. Cynthia Nichols is a long- time senior lecturer and jack-of- all- trades at North Dakota State University, with an MFA from the University of Iowa. Her poems have appeared in many national journals, including, most recently, Quarter After Eight, Painted Bride Quarterly, Karamu, Writing on the Edge, and Sentence, a Journal of Prose Poetics. She is active in the burgeon- ing field of creative writing studies, with a recent article in New Writing, The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, has written on labor issues in English studies, and is an avid explorer of the collision zones and mixed- genre possibilities of scholarly essay, lyric poetry, visual art, and blog. Her cross- genre work includes an animated, interactive essay for Enculturation’s Special Multi- Journal Issue on Electronic Publication. Kelcey Parker is the author of For Sale By Owner (2011), winner of the 2011 Next Generation Indie Book Award in Short Fiction. Her next book, Liliane’s Balcony (forthcoming, 2013), is a novella set at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. She has published numerous articles, interviews, and reviews about contemporary literature and creative writing pedagogy. She has a PhD from the University of Cincinnati and is currently Associate Professor at Indiana University South Bend, where she directs the Creative Writing Program. Kristen Poole (Group Phi), the author of Radical Religion: Figures of Nonconformity from Shakespeare to Milton (2000), is Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware. Her essays on early modern drama, poetry, and culture have appeared in Comparative Drama, English Literary History, Shakespeare Quarterly, and Studies in English Literature. Katherine Rowe (Group Phi), Professor of English at Bryn Mawr, teaches and writes about literature and media change. Trained as a scholar of Renaissance drama, she turned her attention to questions of media history and adaptation. She is the author of Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Notes on Contributors xxiii

Renaissance to Modern (1999); co- author of New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (2006); and co- editor of Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (2004). Rowe is Associate Editor of The Cambridge World Shakespeare Online and co- founder of Luminary digital press, publisher of Shakespeare’s The Tempest for iPad. Lauren Shohet (Group Phi) is Luckow Family Professor of English at Villanova University. She is the author of Reading Masques: Public Culture and the Seventeenth- Century English Masque (2010) and articles on Milton, Shakespeare, Donne, theatrical publication, and adaptation. Verena Theile is Assistant Professor of English at North Dakota State University where she teaches early modern literature and critical theory. She is co- editor of Reclaiming Home, Remembering Motherhood, Redefining History (2009) and Staging the Superstitions of Early Modern Europe (2013) and co-translator of early modern German quack texts in M A Katritzky’s Performance and Medicine in the Writings of Three Early Modern Physicians (2012). Her current project, Superstitions in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, examines the intersections of early modern superstitions and stage literature. Linda Tredennick is an Associate Professor in the departments of English and Women and Gender Studies at Gonzaga University in Spokane. She is currently working on a book project, tentatively titled Degenerate Journeys: Protestantism and Early Modern Narrative, which explores the intersection of Protestant theology and narrative in early modern England. Jacqueline Wernimont is Assistant Professor of English at Scripps College where she teaches sixteenth- and seventeenth- century British literature. Her current book project, Writing Early Modern Possible Worlds, traces the shared histories of poiesis and mathesis in the project of early modern world building. She is the director of the Counting the Dead project at Scripps, a digital humanities archive which explores relationships between early modern numerical and poetic commemorative technologies. Her research interests include the history of science and mathematics, digital humanities, theories of poiesis, narrative, gender, and possible worlds. Julian Yates (Group Phi) is Associate Professor of English and Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (2003), which was a finalist for the MLA First Book Prize in 2003. His recent work focuses on questions of ecology, actor network theory, and reading in early modern England and beyond.