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MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 61.1 (2000) 1-16



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Reading for Form

Susan J. Wolfson


As the winter of the Starr inquiry daily dissolved the Clinton presidency into scandals involving Gap dress and power tie, the New York Times offered relief with a foray into the subculture of teenage fashion. "Cracking the Dress Code: How a School Uniform Becomes a Fashion Statement" provided a less lurid moment of cultural formation. 1 "It's how you want to look," said one student, unflapped by the prescription at the School of the Incarnation for white blouse, navy skirt, or slacks for girls, white shirt and navy slacks for boys. With the dressers performing as both critics and artists, the basic material proved negotiable, the dress code itself an inspiring resource. Subtle accessorizing (just cautious enough to evade a bust) was one route, a use of artful supplement, perhaps so artful that only the wearer knew for sure. The school uniform itself proved multiform, its deformation the syntax of fashion-statement: the arrangement of collars and cuffs, the interpretation of white, the use or nonuse of sweater buttons, the number of rolls to take in a skirt waistband, form-fitting to baggy-slouching pants, knotting the tie, indulging the frisson of unseen underwear--all opportunities to perform with and within the uniform.

One student's gloss on this material culture casually and cannily fell into the form of an irregular couplet (I render the lines):

They know you're not going to totally conform
because half the time you don't want to be in perfect uniform. [End Page 1]

My couplet form, appropriately, can only almost conform to standard formal prescription. What an exuberant playing out, by the teens, of art historian T. J. Clark's argument that "the work of art may have an ideology (in other words, those ideas, images, and values which are generally accepted, dominant) as its material, but it works that material; it gives it a new form and at certain times that new form is in itself a subversion of ideology." 2

A reading of activist formalism was one of the things lost in "the radical transformation of literary study that has taken place over the last decade" (i.e., into the early 1990s), described by George Levine in his introduction to Aesthetics and Ideology. Levine noted two related negative effects on formalist criticism: first, a view of literature as "indistinguishable from other forms of language" (as against the dominant assumption of the now nefarious "New Criticism"), and second, a more pointed hostility, "a virtually total rejection of, even contempt for, 'formalism.'" Levine himself, though meaning to be hospitable to a formalist criticism refreshed for the 1990s, slipped into negative descriptions and defensiveness. 3 And no wonder. The most influential stories in criticism typically proffered the narrowest versions of literary form to serve accounts of its covert work.

Assaults on formalist criticism came from many quarters, some with critiques of social isolationism; others, of intellectual constraints. It was not attention to form per se that was discredited; it was the impulse to regard it as the product of a historically disinterested, internally coherent aesthetics. Critics as various as Harold Bloom and Terry Eagleton found common ground. Bloom indicted the "impasse of Formalist [End Page 2] criticism." 4 Eagleton's influential essay "Ideology and Literary Form" described literary form as shaped and limited by the social forms of its historical moment and typically in the business, consciously or not, of recasting "historical contradictions into ideologically resolvable form." Formalist criticism was useful only insofar as it teased out the "ideological struggles" that form was said to displace through its "naturalising, moralising, and mythifying devices." "Marginalised yet . . . querulously present," these struggles either compel "organic closures [to] betray their constructing functions" or rupture literary structure with "self-contradictory forms," "fissures and hiatuses--formal displacements," "formal discontinuities," "formal dissonances" that are necessarily part of the work's "historical meaning." 5

Exposing the fragile facticity of form and its incomplete cover-ups was the most powerful form-attentive criticism in the post- (and anti-) New Critical...

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