The Literary Text As Framework, Model, and Experiment

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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.

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).

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 possible, in a connective movement that puts impasse to creative use" (2017, 1). This inherent paradoxicality of form and truth, which Eyers and before him Luhmann (1999) and Roberts (1999) so keenly advocate, presumably provides the closest structural correlative to how the universe works that we have access to. In this view, intimations

3 Levinson offers a typology of new formalist approaches with a slightly different focus as to the aims of the respective adherents. She distinguishes between 'normative formalism,' which remains squarely within the realm of the aesthetic and wants to "bring back a sharp demarcation between history and art, discourse and literature, with form […] the prerogative of art," and 'activist formalism,' which intends to "restore to today's reductive reinscription of historical reading its original focus on form" (2007, 559).

of formal contingencies parallel intimations of the contingencies of existence. Form, says Leighton, "keeps us in a place which postpones the logic of both," name and thing, experience and representation (2007, 21). Ascertaining and developing such analogies, it is claimed, presents us with an all-purpose analytical tool, which can be applied with equal justification and prospect of success to elemental questions of philosophy and politics as well as to the analysis of lyrical or dramatic forms, as both in essence remain unanswerable within their own discourses, with a contingent remainder still out there to remind us that form is after all not all there is to life.4 On the other hand, there are those who locate form firmly in culture and understand it in terms of human action, perception, and power. From this perspective, questions of form may be seen to subsume everything else: "Forms," Levine claims, "are at work everywhere" (2015, 2). For the sake of juxtaposition, and using Levine's own term, one could call this the "strategic" school of formalism (Levine 2005). In contrast to speculative formalism, Levine's new formalist agenda does not reserve a privileged status for aesthetic form. Rather, she emphasises the inevitable interdependence of aesthetic and political forms, arguing that both "emerge as comparable patterns that operate on a common plane" and that "each is capable of disturbing the other's organizing power" (Levine 2015, 16-17). One way to draw a bridge between these approaches, we suggest, is to shift attention from an ontological to an epistemological level. We take our departure from Leighton's suggestion that the form of an artwork needs to be understood as "a way of knowing, not as an object of knowledge" (2007, 27) and ask how literary forms represent the world, how they intervene in the world, how they shape our knowledge of the world. Whether or not forms are present in the world and therefore whether (and in what way) literature (or literary form) is mimetic or non-mimetic is of less interest to such an approach than the question how forms structure and are structured by knowledge. Such an approach profits from insights of both 'strategic' and 'speculative' new formalist positions. For one, it shares their insistence on a dynamic understanding of its object. Rather than accepting any literary text in its given, i.e. immovable and fixed, form, new formalist strategies are interested in the shape-shifting and contingent aspects of how literature comes to be 'formed.' As Leighton puts it, "[f]orm is not a body but an agent. It forms" (2007, 7). Thus, the noun 'form' for us always implies the verb or even the gerund, 'forming.' 'Forming,' in our understanding, is at the same time a noun, a verb, and a process. It has simultaneously the potential to transform and be transformed; it has agency but necessarily acts on something. Form makes experience relatable; it translates our being-in-the-world. Literary form, as arguably the most formally prescribed and describable register of language, consequently provides us with the code to interpret what it means to be in the world. If this draws on the 'strategic' position that forms are actively shaping our reality in and beyond literature, it also acknowledges the 'speculative' insistence on the

4 Joseph North has penned what is to date arguably the most comprehensive condemnation of 'new formalism,' claiming that this concept "has allowed some of those involved to attract a crowd by posing in the mantle of the great enemy, only to reveal, once we are inside the tent, that what they are in fact proposing is simply historicism as usual, plus form" (2017, 146).

complexity and radical openness of literary forms and on the singularity of the aesthetic, a singularity which, as Derek Attridge notes, always appears "as something more than the category or entity it is claimed to be" (2004, 5). Forms may, as Levine argues, "lay claim to a limited range of potentialities and constraints," they may "afford the same limited range of actions wherever they travel" (2015, 7), but in the field of the aesthetic, precisely these constraints can potentially become the object of dynamic play in the sense of Wolfgang Iser (1993).5 As suggested by focusing on its formal aspects, literary meaning, if there is indeed such a thing, arises out of the complexity of conflicts and is produced as difference, paradox, and incompletion rather than as revealed truth and totality. It is, according to Eyers, "this initial self-reference or self-reflexivity that is, in fact, an opening to the only kind of reference available to literature" (2017, 2). In a similar vein, Attridge highlights the default mode of self-questioning implied in this when he claims that if "literature rests on a certain inaccessibility to rules, as the aesthetic tradition recognizes, there is no way it can serve as an instrument without at the same time challenging the basis of instrumentality itself" (2004, 13). Rather than prescribing an objective and uncontestable interpretation of given forms, literature plays with their affordances. The aesthetic in this sense would mark an in-between space that makes play possible and in which a form's specific affordances can no longer be taken for granted. An epistemological focus on the work of literary form also begs the question of how literature does or can relate to structures and practices of other forms of knowledge production, be they scientific, historiographical, anecdotal, non-fictional or any combination of those. Indeed, this question has motivated many scholars to look to the sciences – from cognitive literary studies to digital humanities – in order to rethink and reconfigure the value of literature by placing it in dialogue with, and by utilizing the resources from, forms of generating and traducing knowledge which have long been considered alien to the study of literature. A focus on "how form transmits interpretive information," according to Rogers, "establishes a link to the knowledge-making work of form in science" (2014, 1). New formalism thus offers one viable answer to interdisciplinary challenges by paying attention to "the ways literary, philosophical, or even scientific forms enter into conversation with, and retrospectively reconfigure, the formally elastic domains within which, and against which, they arise" (Eyers 2017, 5). Acknowledging these interrelations while at the same time emphasising the specificity of the aesthetic, we suggest an understanding of new formalism which considers the way that literature incorporates and plays with the affordance of forms that have organised its own as well as other fields of knowledge, even while being determined by the same cultural milieu.

5 Iser's concept of textual play as the interplay between free and instrumental play might be fruitfully invoked here. If instrumental play provides a frame and restrictions (as form does), in the realm of the literary text such play is always counteracted by free play: "Games in the text always pit free and instrumental play against each other. [...] Each individual game [that is, each individual reading of a literary text] uses the basic contraflow of play in its own particular way, and play remains dynamic even beyond its pragmatic specifications insofar as the different games of the text continue to be played against each other" (1993, 258).

Such an interplay of form and knowledge of necessity embraces questions of cultural value, as it opens up the question of form to an ethical consideration which has often been sidelined in most formalist accounts. In forming knowledge, forms can variously embody or address epistemic injustices (Fricker 2007), making different kinds of knowledge and experience accessible, or in turn uncommunicable. Moreover, any form can potentially be said to have either a particular or a general validity for certain audiences, groups, or readers, a resonance depending on the way such form is employed or laid out within the field of textual play. By playing with and reflecting on the affordance of form, literary experimentation, we argue, can illustrate the danger that lies in taking one particular form as a norm, others as deviations, or in generalising a specific effect (or epistemological shaping) of a form beyond its context.6 If they neglect the complexity of literary meaning that arises as difference, rather than truth, formalist approaches become easily susceptible to ideological instrumentalisation and appropriation. Thus, a comparison of particular and general validity and an awareness that their interplay is constitutive of the aesthetic is relevant where the politics of form is concerned. Early formalist criticism was often accused of saying that form is beyond politics. New formalist criticism, in contrast, suggests that form always already has a sort of (political) agency in its own right, that power, in other words, is always implicit in form. Form produces power, but it is also subject to it. Once this question of 'which formal agency is (made) available to whom' is registered as inherent in any formal display, the relationship between aesthetics and politics can and needs to be renegotiated. The following articles that make up this section all explore possible interrelations of literary form and epistemology by investigating the formal procedures by which literature, as a process of giving 'form' to information, frames, models, or orders knowledge. They retrace and interrogate these intersections by opening up conceptions of form or structure to different types of knowledge. In keeping with what we have laid out above, they are interested in the political as well as the aesthetic affordances of literary form, both in how literary forms are capable of intervening in the world and how they can play with and reflect upon such intervention. According to Eyers, literature's task, unlike that of other forms of more systematic representation, is not to generate objective knowledge or factual evidence. Literature rather has, as Luhmann puts it, "an open reference to the world" (1999, 17); its formal procedures are dynamic rather than fixed, and generally aim at producing rather than answering questions. In consequence, opening oneself to the possibilities and impossibilities of literature means, with Attridge, "to trust in the unpredictability of reading, its openness to the future" (2004, 130). In a sense, however, thinking through and about form also helps to introduce order and to limit possibility. And in this sense it has a fundamentally practical force and can be enlisted to apply such lofty thinking about intervention and openness to the concrete reading of texts. With the papers in this section, we especially want to address this

6 This formal opposition of the particular versus the general also maps onto other questions, such as, for example, the particular validity of a particular text, say a sonnet, against its general, or generic, validity as a sonnet.

pragmatic dimension of formalism by asking what happens to form when its practical force is subject to literary experimentation. Literary form provides the parameters for the play of aesthetics, but these very parameters can also be drawn into the redefinitions and resignifications characteristic of aesthetic play. The three papers in this section showcase three different approaches to the question of form's affordances and agency and give an intimation of the rich potential of formal analyses. Theresa Schön looks at form on the level of discourse, asking how different forms of non-literary discourse are brought into the aesthetic field to shape reader response and to convey a specific moral world-view. At the same time, she shows how these forms transform and become dynamic in the field of literary play. Her objects of study are two character sketches of a 'Coquette,' published in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's satirical periodicals The Tatler and The Spectator at the beginning of the 18th century. Both character sketches draw on non-literary discursive forms: anatomical dissection and an inventory of stolen goods. Situating both these discursive forms in their historical context, Schön interrogates the different kinds of knowledge production and transmission which they bring to the morally didactic agenda of the literary texts she examines. She shows that these forms, once they come into the field of aesthetic play, can develop in surprising ways. Thus the deceptively simple form of the inventory, familiar from ordinary everyday life and requiring little expertise to compile, both puts higher demands on the constructive powers of the reader and allows for more complex constitutions of meaning than the apparently more sophisticated form of the anatomical dissection. These two different forms organise their knowledge production differently: hierarchically, in the case of the anatomical dissection, through which the audience has to be guided by a professional expert; contingently in the case of the inventory, a mere accumulation of items whose interpretation and evaluation is left entirely to the reader. Nina Engelhardt's paper approaches the question of form (or formalism) on a more broadly conceptual level, illustrating the importance of mathematic formalism to Virginia Woolf's aesthetics. Engelhardt points to the work of mathematician David Hilbert, who endeavoured to divorce mathematics from all nominal referential connection to physical reality, establishing it as a system of purely formal relations. Noting the significant role of mathematics on the level of content of both Woolf's early novel Night and Day and the later To the Lighthouse, Engelhardt explores analogies between mathematic and literary formalism, arguing that a common aim and a main appeal lie in the way they open their symbolic relations to multiple referential possibilities. Modern mathematics and modernist literature, "both explore forms of possibility, partly apart from the pressures of reality" (44). Cautioning against rashly assuming that one of the foremost affordances of mathematic language lies in its precision, Engelhardt shows that in the context of Woolf's aesthetics, mathematic forms afford semantic freedom and deliverance from restrictions. Formalist mathematics "exemplifies the openness and variability of words" (38); it serves Woolf as "an example of formalist activity leading to knowledge of possibility and multiplicity" (43). Anna Auguscik's contribution considers the formal affordances of historical reenactment in narratives about scientific expeditions. Historical reenactment, Auguscik argues, helps novels to consider scientific and societal dynamics by producing

expectations about how a novel – a work of narrative fiction – should turn out and what kinds of knowledge it supposedly conveys. A focus on literary form helps to gauge the specific investment of a novel in the history of heroic exploration and expedition as scientific practice. As science novels with a historical focus on the age of heroic exploration, the three chosen texts – Beryl Bainbridge's The Birthday Boys (1991), Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica (1998) and Rebecca Hunt's Everland (2014) – show an interest in both the myth of the explorers and in the expedition as scientific practice and they negotiate this through different ways of playing with the formal features of historical (re)enactment. Auguscik demonstrates throughout her discussion that literary form itself can become a kind of reenactment, while at the same time remaining self-aware and reflecting on its imitative, revisionary or critical potential. Meanwhile, she shows that all three novels explore the specific kind of knowledge that various forms of actual and literary reenactment are able to add to scientific knowledge of Antarctica. As the heterogeneity of these papers suggests, the field of inquiry opened up by new formalism is immense and its basic terms are capable of protean mutability. This is its chance and its main vulnerability. It remains for future conceptual work to sharpen its methodological rigour if new formalism is to become more than a catch-all critical trend, at some mid-point between historicism, cultural studies and close reading. Nevertheless, the papers in this section illustrate the critical possibilities for case studies informed by this prolific and stimulating approach.

Works Cited Anker, Elizabeth S., and Rita Felski. "Introduction." Critique and Postcritique. Eds. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2017. 1-28. Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Barthes, Roland. The Responsibility of Form. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986. Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. "Surface Reading: An Introduction." Representations 108.1 (2009): 1-21. Bogel, Fredric V. New Formalist Criticism: Theory and Practice. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Eyers, Tom. Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017. Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Iser, Wolfgang. The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Leighton, Angela. On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of the Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Levine, Caroline. "Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies." Victorian Studies 48.4 (2005): 625-57.

Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton, NJ/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015. Levinson, Marjorie. "What Is New Formalism?" PMLA 122.2 (2007): 558-569. Luhmann, Niklas. "The Paradox of Form." Problems of Form. Ed. Dirk Baecker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. 15-26. North, Joseph. Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2017. Roberts, David. "Self-Reference in Literature." Problems of Form. Ed. Dirk Baecker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. 27-45. Rogers, Janine. Unified Fields: Science and Literary Form. Montreal and Quebec: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. London: Methuen, 1979. Theile, Verena, and Linda Tredennick, eds. New Formalisms and Literary Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Turner, Henry S. "Lessons from Literature for the Historian of Science (and Vice Versa): Reflections on 'Form.'" Isis 101.3 (2010): 578-589.