Introduction: The Return of Form

A special issue on French formalisms in 2008 may seem to require some justification. As the once heated debates over structuralism and poststructuralism fade into the past, it has become customary to proclaim the end of theory (and particularly of "French Theory").¹ Furthermore, critics approvingly assert that contemporary French literature has moved away from the formal play and language games of earlier decades in order to reengage with social reality and history.² However, accusations of formalism have not disappeared from contemporary polemics. To cite a recent example, Tzvetan Todorov's La Littérature en péril (2006) criticizes (without naming names) the "conception formaliste de la littérature" that has allegedly come to overshadow both literary study and contemporary literary works in France.³ Are formalist approaches obsolete, or do they still dominate the theory and practice of literature?

Formalism is often a nebulous, catch-all concept. The word refers broadly to a concern with form either in criticism or in creation. It has been applied variously to the "formal method" in Russian literary studies from 1916 to 1930, to the Anglo-American New Criticism of the 1920s to 50s, and to the structuralism of the Nouvelle Critique that emerged in France in the 1950s and 60s. It has been used to characterize the modernist novel, the French nouveau roman, and the experiments of the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Oulipo). As a pejorative term, it has a charged political history, while its ambiguity hinges on the difficulty of defining 'form' itself. As Raymond Williams points out, 'form' came to stand for both the idea of a visible or outward shape, and that of an "essential shaping principle." The senses of the word thus span "the whole range from the external and superficial to the inherent and determining."⁴ The idea that form is necessarily a matter of outward show, as opposed to inner significance, is at the heart of attacks on literary formalism, whether leveled at modernist techniques by the proponents of socialist realism, or at the linguistic wordplay of contemporary authors by today's critics. In present-day debates we still encounter the same old polarizations: formalist versus realist literature, art for art's sake versus social commitment.

The intellectual environment of twentieth-century France favored a certain preoccupation with artistic form. There has often been a close (and sometimes fraught) connection in France between literary theories and approaches to literary creation. Paul Claudel even identifies as a national psychological trait the desire for rules and constraints that risk reducing writing to a cerebral game.⁵ Without going this far, we might certainly trace formalist tendencies in twentieth-century French literature back to earlier reflections on the rules of writing, such as the classicism of the seventeenth century. Yet the blossoming of structuralism in France was in some respects belated, lagging behind the earlier developments of Russian Formalism or Anglo-American New Criticism.⁶ Debates about the ideological implications of critical formalism have played out very differently in different national contexts: while the New Criticism is often linked to conservatism, the French Nouvelle Critique is on the contrary associated with the left—with attitudes ranging from mild suspicion of literary convention as an expression of bourgeois doxa, to the Maoist sympathies of the Tel Quel group.⁷ This is not to ignore the significance of cross-cultural exchange, for instance the influence of the Russian Formalists on French structuralists, or the American academy's receptivity to French 'theory' in the 1980s.

It should be noted that the relationship between theory and formalism is far from straightforward. Poststructuralist approaches often turned against the earlier preoccupation with form. The dynamics of transatlantic transmission further complicate this situation, as a glance at some recent critical works demonstrates. On the one hand, in Le Démon de la théorie (1998) Antoine Compagnon associates literary theory with formalist criticism, commenting on the latter's institutionalization by the French national education system (13, 11). On the other hand, the "Theory" targeted by the anthology Theory's Empire (2005) is defined less by formalism—indeed, the editors lament the fact that American...