Tactical Formalism: A Response to Caroline Levine

This amicus brief is submitted in warm solidarity with the agenda of Caroline Levine's "Strategic Formalism," and is indeed inspired by a conviction of her essay/manifesto's importance. She wants to invigorate our reading of culture by making us better readers of form; so do I. Advancing this agenda at the present time is going to involve, as Levine's emphases demonstrate, both some therapeutic work at the level of theory and some calisthenic working-out at the level of practice. We need to relax the taboo on formalism that was instituted a long methodological generation ago by advocates struggling—with excellent cause and against established inertia, if not concerted opposition—to relegitimize historical and cultural meanings as primary objects of literary inquiry. Making this happen called for strong medicine in high dosage; and, as usual in such a case, there were side effects, one of which was to force the profession into an antiformalist crouch. Without going so far as to call this cure worse than the disease, we may still admit that its rigor has deformed literary studies in unwholesome ways. For some time now, a knee-jerk contempt for formal inquiry as such has, in its own turn, become as firmly established within programs of advanced training as the dogma of formalism used to be. One need not be new-critically trained, I trust, to be struck by a resulting paradox: the long views commended by ideology critique, identity politics, or empire mapping start to look short-sighted as soon as these telescopic philanthropies claim an exclusive stake in the future of the profession. The preemptive demotion of formal analysis lies open to the same critique any method invites when, grown reflexively automatic, it threatens to foreclose modalities of response from which much remains to be learned.

Triumphant antiformalism has to answer, besides, for a more serious dereliction: the enervation of literary close reading in critical practice. A review of the habits of literary analysis that have prevailed during the last academic generation or so reveals widespread atrophy of a disused set of critical skills in whose revival—I almost said survival—a self-interested literary studies would do well to get actively involved. As Levine observes of literary and cultural studies, "Formalist modes of thought are the best that these disciplines have to offer" (631). In approaching the cultural-studies roundtable—where historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and media specialists with distinct disciplinary credentials of their own will all be drawing up a chair—taking along anything less than our disciplinary best seems professionally foolhardy. To let the tools of formal literary analysis rust unburnished is to risk discovering one day that our services are no longer wanted. While it is not too late to recoup that fine-motor coordination between eye and hand on which our guild's distinctive contributions are likely to depend, it is decidedly not too soon to enter rehab and start practicing again.

Levine's essay addresses both the theoretical and the practical bearings of the situation I have just hurriedly outlined. She diagnoses a problem, prescribes in what she calls "strategic formalism" an encouraging remedy—one that privileges not the good old days (which they never really were), but new heuristic possibilities that formalist study can open up—and proceeds to lead by example with some astute remarks on Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "The Cry of the Children." My hope here is to make Levine's exemplary reading of this poem more so, first by attending to an aspect of poetic form that she omits, and then by asking what if any adjustment such practical attentions may suggest about Levine's theoretical argument. Dazzled as I am by the generosity of scope with which she urges us to survey and cull forms for analytic commensuration—say, "the bildungsroman and the rhetoric of separate spheres on the one [discursive] hand, domestic architecture and police custody on the [embodied] other" (635)—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...