Capitalizing Form: The Globalization of the Literary Field: A Response to David Palumbo-Liu

In recounting first the turn against formalism that marked the inauguration of American Literary History and then the subsequent renewal of interest in questions of form, David Palumbo-Liu proposes a rapprochement between formal and historical analysis that would encompass both more expansive, transnational conceptions of literature as well as greater attention to the local contexts of reception. This is an important project that opens up, and brings together, numerous arenas of research, all constellated around investigations of form. As the central concept holding all of this together, the notion of form is being asked to do a great deal of work, and here I would like to take up certain questions and ambiguities in the margins of Palumbo-Liu's main argument in order to advance and specify the conception of form adumbrated in his essay.

I want to ask, first of all, what exactly do we mean by Form? Although Palumbo-Liu offers at least three definitions, he endows the term with a certain indeterminacy, even describing it simply as "a placeholder" for contents under negotiation. While I find the vision of multiple heterogeneous reading publics brought together in debate over Form a provocative one, it raises once again all the questions about who constitutes these publics. Who has access and who is excluded? Despite the assertion that these publics are "heterogeneous, contestive, unsettled," Palumbo-Liu does not elaborate on the institutional structures and processes that might produce them as such. These questions seem to lurk beneath the surface of this account only to erupt momentarily, if obliquely, when he asks, "how do differently conceived of publics 'see' Form (or not) in any one literary text?" At first this query seems to imply that seeing or not seeing literary form are both equally valid (and equally likely) responses in the public forum, but the relegation of non-seeing to parentheses signals that they are in fact not equal, since an incapacity to perceive form would appear to rule one out from participation in any debate in which that was the primary topic. How would a debate regarding form be possible if no one was capable of seeing it? Not seeing form, then, can only be part of public discourse if there is a (presumably substantial) segment of the public that can see form.

After Bourdieu, the capacity to read literature, much less to perceive form, must be understood as embodied forms of linguistic and cultural capital. Being unable to see form, then, signals a lack of such capital. If one's perception of form is mediated by capital, the question I would pose is what relation form bears to formalism, and to genre. Palumbo-Liu's insistent capitalization of the term seems to indicate that it is nearer to the former than to the latter. Formalism defines itself in opposition to genre; this is the line of demarcation dividing the autonomous literary field, or what Bourdieu calls the field of restricted production, from the commercial field, or the field of general production. It is, however, not solely a matter of whether or not one is capable of seeing form; there is also the question of what kind of form one perceives. While Palumbo-Liu seems to suggest that both perceptions can take part in public deliberations over form, the two oppose each other as legitimate and illegitimate perspectives.

The question I want to pose is this: What are the material and institutional conditions that sustain the possibility of a recognition of and attention to form and its circulation among various transnational publics? If formalism is a product of the autonomization of the literary field, is there any basis for conceiving of an attentiveness to form outside of the capital produced by that field? Conversely, would discussions of genre convey the same atmosphere of public deliberation as debates over form? Could we imagine melodrama—soap opera, for example, certainly one of the most popular global forms—as an object of the kind of formal analysis that Palumbo-Liu imagines? There is no doubt that it certainly could be, but...