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The Literary Text As Framework, Model, and Experiment

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The Literary Text As Framework, Model, and Experiment 5 WOLFGANG FUNK, IRMTRAUD HUBER, AND NATALIE ROXBURGH What Form Knows: The Literary Text as Framework, Model, anD Experiment And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns to the shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. (William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, V. i) That form matters, again, in literary studies can by now be considered received wisdom. The past decade has borne witness to a resurgence of critical interest in issues of form, which is usually lumped together under the heading of 'New Formalism' (see Bogel 2013; Levinson 2007; Theile and Tredennick 2013). In her book Forms (2015), which has become a touchstone reference of this critical persuasion, Caroline Levine claims an almost restorative objective for this return to form by proposing that in the wake of poststructuralism and deconstruction, "the field [of literary studies] has been so concerned with breaking forms apart that we have neglected the major work that forms do in our world" (Levine 2015, 9). Form, in other words, matters for literary studies precisely because it matters beyond literary studies. A focus on form allows literary scholars "to take our traditional skills to new objects ‒ the social structures and institutions that are among the most crucial sites of political efficacy" (23). In addition to this more or less overtly political dimension, the new formalism in literary studies appears to be nurtured by two further critical and epistemological yearnings which motivate recent developments in the humanities: post-critique and an apparent desire for some sort of scientific objectivity and public accountability, which manifests itself among other things in the increasing prominence of science-based methodologies like digital humanities or cognitive literary studies. New formalism can be seen as part of the more general trend "to explore fresh ways of interpreting literary and cultural texts" which Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski have called "post-critique" (2017, 1). In this context, new formalism promises one possible way out of a 'hermeneutics of suspicion' (Paul Ricoeur's term) and towards what Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus have called "surface reading:" "We take surface to mean what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts; what is neither hidden nor hiding, what, in the geometrical sense, has length and breadth but no thickness" (Best and Marcus 2009, 9). Form, it would seem, potentially presents itself for interrogation Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 30.2 (Summer 2019): 5-13. Anglistik, Jahrgang 30 (2019), Ausgabe 2 © 2019 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) 6 WOLFGANG FUNK, IRMTRAUD HUBER, AND NATALIE ROXBURGH as one such surface phenomenon,1 and as such, it can satisfy another critical desire: the desire for an object of study that is objectively 'there,' that has some (quasi-)material haecceity, like the objects of (classical) natural science. Thus Levine maintains that "[f]orms, defined as patternings, shapes, and arrangements," once they are recognised, "are themselves no longer matters of interpretive activity or debate" (2015, 13). With an eye to the epistemology of knowledge, Janine Rogers similarly argues that "in many ways the study of form is the science of literature, insofar as it is the study of the material nature of the literary text, the structures, substances, patterns, and forces that we experience when we read" (2014, xiv). In a sense, therefore, new formal approaches hold out the promise to add to literary studies' public accountability and turn towards a more objective – or at least systematic – method. Form's ability to cater to such divergent critical desires is partly due to the term's versatility. The main problem for the construction of a coherent new formalist analytic framework seems to be that 'form' can mean a great number of sometimes contradictory and incompatible things. In an ontological sense, form has been conceptualised as "the distribution of space caused by edging one thing against another, so that each calls attention to the other," (Leighton 2007, 16) or, in the words of Niklas Luhmann, "[f]orm not only is the boundary, but also contains the two sides it separates" (1999, 17; original emphasis). Form, in this sense, is a fundamental category of being, albeit one whose Winter Journals ontological status is relational and philosophically complex. More narrowly understood in a semiotic sense, form has been defined as "what is between the thing and its name" (Barthes 1986, 234; original emphasis) and thus becomes an essential element of Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) symbolic representation. But a strong case has also been made for form as something with a privileged presence in literary discourse and aesthetics. Thus Rogers argues that forms are "the patterns, structures, and orders that make literature literary, that is, in for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution contrast to everyday expressions of language" (2014, 9; original emphasis). "Form, for many literary readers," Levine remarks, is "precisely that which distinguishes art objects from ordinary life" (2015, xi; original emphasis). Furthermore, in relation to aesthetic objects (including literary texts), form can mean any number of different things. As Leighton notes, form "suggests in itself something of the very multi- dimensionality, the unsettled busyness, of the artwork. For form can signify both the finished object, the art form in its completion, or the parts that make up the technical apparatus. It can signify a visionary apparition in the mind, or the real, physical properties of a work" (2007, 3). For different scholars, form can mean the Platonic idea, the underlying structuring principle, the genre, the kind of narration, the style, the visual shape, the phonological organisation, the punctuation, the materiality of a text, even a (readerly) experience (and this list claims no comprehensiveness).2 Notwithstanding 1 Best and Marcus list six different examples of what they call textual surfaces, at least three of which overlap directly (and explicitly) with new formalist concerns: surface as materiality; as the intricate verbal structure of literary language; as the location of patterns that exist within and across texts (the other three are: surface as an affective and ethical stance; as a practise of critical description; and as literal meaning) (2009, 9-13). 2 In an attempt at clarification Henry S. Turner has offered four categories of literary form: stylistic, structural, material and social (2010, 580-581). Anglistik, Jahrgang 30 (2019), Ausgabe 2 © 2019 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) WHAT FORM KNOWS: THE LITERARY TEXT AS FRAMEWORK, MODEL, AND EXPERIMENT 7 their differences, what combines these perspectives, and what is central to the perceived innovation of new formalism, is an emphasis on the relationality of forms. Forms are not self-contained, nor are they meaningful in and by themselves. Closer scrutiny thus quickly reveals that a critical attention to form resists and exceeds an accommodation to academic trends like post-critique or the desire for objectivity. Form's apparent stability becomes problematic once forms are situated in complex, dynamic relationships, where they necessarily overlap, alter, and contradict each other. Moreover, the surface-depth distinction does not work well as a metaphor for the work of form (even less than for the work of texts). Form is not what is to be found on the surface, indeed, form has neither surface nor depth, or it necessarily has both. It becomes, as Tom Eyers suggests, "the conflicted, multiply distributed and plastic site where truths specific to literature are rendered contingent but also given their only opening to the world" (2017, 6). Moreover, an attention to form by no means precludes a hermeneutics of suspicion. Rather, forms disclose nothing without probing and without the kind of theoretical abstraction which adherents of post-critique reject (Best and Marcus 2009, 11). Instead of subscribing to one of the supposed alternatives of post-critique or a hermeneutics of suspicion, new formalism potentially combines the close attention and revaluation of specific textual phenomena of the former with the ideological sensitivity of the latter. While focusing on forms as stable aspects of a text, new formalism explores how forms transform and are transformed when they enter the field of aesthetic play. To complicate things further, in spite of the relatively short history of new formalism, two major strands can be identified, which diverge precisely on the question of how to conceive of this relational quality of form. Very broadly speaking, new formalist approaches can be classified according to the relationship they accord to the concepts of 'world' and 'representation,' or, to use Leighton's terms 'thing' and 'name' (2007, 21).3 On the one hand, there are those who might vaguely be grouped around Eyers's label of 'speculative formalism,' a procedure which departs from the assumption that the world in all its complexity forever and always eludes any attempt at objective description, in whatever shape and form. Speculative formalism thus aims to "identify a shared incompletion across both literary language and its various outsides – materiality, history, politics, nature – that, far from preventing literature from interfacing with outsides, rather makes a nonmimetic reference
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