The Occupation of Form: (Re)theorizing Literary History

If we were to start a journal today and name it, say, American Literary History, what kind of journal would it be? That is not a rhetorical question, but a very real one. However, it is not the purpose of this essay to answer that question fully, or with any confidence of landing on the "right" answer. Rather, I pose the question not only as a way to get us to think about the idea of writing an American literary history today, but also to compare and contrast that activity to the inaugural ethos and spirit of American Literary History 20 years ago. More precisely, I want to ask if that ethos might be perpetuated today, under our specific historical conditions and bearing in mind not only the persistence of certain questions that were present at the founding of this journal, but also questions that have arisen subsequently. The historical moment in literary studies 20 years ago could be characterized as the burgeoning of "theory"; the ethos of the founding of American Literary History included to no small degree not only a receptivity to new critical and theoretical perspectives, but also the belief that these perspectives could themselves serve as vehicles for retrieving elements that had been effectively banished from the study of literary texts. One could legitimately call these elements individual and social history.

I begin by considering the convergence of theory and the manifestoes, if you will, of two journals, each attempting to rethink and re-conceive literary history with this purpose in mind. Besides American Literary History, I want to draw on the establishment of another journal, New Literary History. I will outline their common themes and intentions, both inside and outside the academy. Specifically, I am interested in the connection each saw between literary studies, the classroom, individual lives and public life, and how the transformation of literary critical sensibility that attended the founding of both these journals had everything to do with a new sense of the diversity of life, social and cultural, and hence the need to equip students of literature with a plurality of ways to apprehend literary objects. This would result precisely in a new literary history—on the one hand, the very objects of literary analysis were to be critically reconstituted, but on the other, entirely new works were to be brought into the canon under a different logic of value and significance. Not only did the two journals share a set of goals, but they also shared a sense of what was then presenting a particular obstacle for achieving those goals. That obstacle can be named in one word: formalism. Both journals saw themselves as reacting in part to the lingering effects, both critical and pedagogical, of literary formalism.

In the past decade, of course, formalism has been variously rehabilitated, in both conservative and liberal forms.¹ Although I share certain sympathies with some versions of the New Formalism, my discussion of Form will center on literary and social history, both in terms of general theories of literature, that being the central focus of New Literary History, and national literary history, as in American Literary History. I wonder if today a certain reconception of Form, transnationally envisaged but at the same time empirically situated in finite and contingent domains, may not be a way to do the work of linking the classroom to public life that formed the core of both these journals' beginnings. In particular, I consider whether Form may not be productively reimagined as both a space of co-habitation (occupation) and a base for teaching (as an occupation of literary scholars) in our own contemporary situation. Again, I will argue that the rationale for such a rehabilitation is consistent with many, if not most, of the goals and values found in the "manifestoes" of New Literary History and American Literary History.

1. Rationales

In a retrospective article published in 1986, Ralph Cohen, the founding and current editor of New Literary History, makes clear that part of the rationale for starting the journal was to provide a forum wherein the connection between literary...