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  • Scaled Up, Writ Small:A Response to Carolyn Dever and Herbert F. Tucker
  • Caroline Levine (bio)

There is no pleasure like having one's work read by people one has long admired. I am keenly grateful to Carolyn Dever and Herbert F. Tucker for their searching and elegant responses, and to Victorian Studies for arranging this forum. The pieces by Dever and Tucker afford another pleasure, too: the exciting feeling that formalism is really coming back, and not in its old, tired guises but in a whole range of reinvigorated and reinvigorating ways. Indeed, what these responses suggest is that we no longer need to ask ourselves whether or not to return to form, but rather: Which forms? Which formalisms? And to what ends?

Implicitly, both Dever and Tucker pose another, quite specific question about the work of formalism now: On what scale ? Dever writes that a formalism drawn exclusively from literary objects could well prove too narrow to meet the challenges of grasping the complex relations between aesthetics and politics:

Literature, after all, consists of a range of specific and linguistic practices in a cultural world composed of all kinds of aesthetic media, only some of which are linguistic and textual. . . . To take literary forms as a synecdoche for aesthetic or cultural forms in total risks limiting a powerful political intervention to just one set of aesthetic and disciplinary practices.

(97–98)

If it borrows only from literary formalism, in other words, strategic formalism ends up unnecessarily restricted—too small for the massive task of cultural analysis.

Or perhaps strategic formalism has the opposite problem. "Dazzled as I am by [its] generosity of scope," writes Tucker, "I expect some readers will flock faster to the formalist cause if we can show them, on a traditional and micro-analytic scale, how poetry's means of discursive [End Page 100] embodiment performs generative conflicts like the ones Levine urges us to look for" (86–87). Turning his own focus to "matters deliberately small" (91), Tucker offers a revelatory reading of Barrett Browning's "Cry of the Children" by attending to a tense metrical struggle waged within the poem between the unrelenting mechanization of a rigid poetic pattern and the unassimilable eruptions of resistant human voices and bodies in "a network of alternative reference that queries the system from within" (90). He concludes with the suggestion that close textual analysis on a "micro-analytic scale" gives us more than enough, since writ small in poetic forms is precisely the design of large social relations.

Is strategic formalism too narrow or too broad? Too puny or too presumptuous? Too small to do justice to the social or too large to do justice to the aesthetic object? It is worth dwelling on this question in part because it gestures to methodological problems that go well beyond the question of formalism. Those of us who do literary and cultural studies of all kinds continue to face perplexing questions about the size of our proper object of study: should this be a work of art, a genre, an individual, a community, a period, a canon, a class, a culture, a nation, a transnational network, a species, or even a planet?

Indeed, in this moment of post-post-colonial criticism, as new shapes and theories of transnational power are emerging, it has come to seem urgent that we think in global terms about cultural production. Rich and persuasive recent work has unsettled a sense of the Britishness of British culture: scholars as various as Gauri Viswanathan, Katie Trumpener, Sharon Marcus, and Paul Giles have shown that we need to think along transnational axes. But while each of these scholars has reconfigured British literature in a new context, revealing new facets of the cultural production we thought we knew, each has also gestured to a vastness that is staggering, even crushing: we now seem responsible for knowing a dense interlacing of cultural, economic, and political global traffic so large that each of us can grasp only a tiny sliver. How is it that we decide which sliver to choose to know? Which axis, which place, which hierarchy really matters ? One crucial challenge of thinking transnationally comes from the...

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