Humanistic Formalism & the ELT Era

Book Reviews Humanistic Formalism & the ELT Era Daniel R. Schwarz. The Transformation of the English Novel, 18901930 . New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989. 224 pp. $35.00 DANIEL R. SCHWARZ HAS WRITTEN an interesting, challenging, and timely book, in which he mediates between traditional modes of scholarship and criticism and the modes of discourse favored by continental theorists and their American and British disciples (structuralism , deconstructionism, Marxism). Contrary to many recent theorists and their practice, Schwarz maintains that interpretation is possible, desirable, and valid; that the literary work is not a hermetically sealed entity; and that a work can only be understood ultimately in terms of forces operating outside it. It more readily yields determinate meaning "to those who know about the author's other works, his life, and his historical context." Schwarz would build upon the formalism of the past as it was embodied in the "new criticism" and upon the skepticism concerning absolute readings implied in deconstructionist theory and practice, but he would go beyond such modes of inquiry to embrace a more comprehensive view of art, literature, and life that he terms "humanistic formalism." He would be happy, he says, to be regarded as a "progressive formalist" and a "pluralist." Meaning, he says, can be achieved, though it is often difficult to do so, and meaning inheres both in content and in form. The critic will make use of theory when it is expedient to do so, but theory will be subordinate when he writes about specific books. In Schwarz's view the reader actively participates in untangling the dimensions of a complex literary artifact, and he will, among other concerns, attempt to relate it to our total experience as human beings. The literary work, furthermore, is the product of the author's sensibility , his moral predispositions, the quality and reach of his imagination , and his evolving—or achieved—values. The authorial presence , in short, is always a factor in determining the significance of his creations: "Our challenge is to find ways of discussing the author as a formal presence within a work without committing reductive versions of the biographical fallacy." In large part Schwarz is a latter-day Arnoldian, and he would assert, like Arnold, that literature is a criticism of life. In relating 85 ELT: Volume 33:1, 1990 literature to life, however, the critic will perceive that the formal properties of a work of art help order and define the values embodied in it. These values, Schwarz would say, represent the most significant components of the work. In emphasizing the importance of content as well as form (or content as it is defined by form), Schwarz espouses a liberal humanism which he characterizes as follows: "liberal humanism believes in self-knowledge and self-growth; it believes that pursuing the life of the mind may lead one to moral maturity, and it believes that entering into the imagined world of books may improve one's perspicacity. It believes in a continuity between reading texts and reading lives." It is perhaps obvious that I concur with Schwarz's general views and that I welcome his lucid and confident formulation of them. Schwarz also discusses modern writers and their individual books with insight and imaginative sympathy, and he is sensitive always to the nuances and complications to be found in his chosen texts. He argues persuasively for his interpretation of a given work, and his critiques of modern classics such as Sons and Lovers, Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Lord Jim are fresh, rewarding, cogent, and at points controversial. He establishes firmly the grounds for his judgments, though I would sometimes contest his conclusions. In his informed discussions of Mrs. Dalloway and Lord Jim, for instance, I find much that is illuminating but also assertions that, in my view, are mistaken or overstated. Though he makes something of a case for an ironic interpretation of Clarissa Dalloway and her party (he believes that Woolf envisions her heroine, her activities, and her epiphanies negatively), I feel that he overstates matters. If alive to Clarissa's limitations, Woolf values her as an experiencing sensibility, and I cannot agree that her epiphany, after she hears of Septimus's...