Bridging Literary Studies and Rhetoric with Form

I teach literature in an interdisciplinary humanities department. In my classes, I use close attention to form to help students build bridges between the various disciplines that make up the department—in particular, between literary studies, creative writing, and rhetoric. Using a few examples from my courses, I would like to suggest that literary studies in general could benefit from renewed attention to form. Furthermore, I will argue that while attention to literary form is often viewed suspiciously, as something either boring or regressive, as a way of dodging contextual or ethical concerns, this is not necessarily the case. Indeed, to approach literary form rhetorically is to think about form in relationship to history and about the exigence of particular works or movements.

A few decades ago, the most prominent guide to this territory among literary scholars was probably Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1983) and The Company We Keep (1989), books that remain illuminating. Poetcritics such as Timothy Steele, Annie Finch, and Dana Gioia also made a prominent case for more attention to form.¹ In recent years, Terry Eagleton has been a perhaps surprising advocate of a more form-focused literature pedagogy. In his 2007 book How to Read a Poem, Eagleton writes, "Like thatching or clog dancing, literary criticism seems to be something of a dying art" (1). The threat is not only humanities cuts but also how literature is taught in literature classes. "What gets left out," in many classes, he writes, "is the literariness of the work" under study (3). Class discussions tend to emphasize what a work says far more than how it is said.² When it comes to short stories and novels, discussions often treat characters as if they were real people rather than literary inventions. When it comes to poetry, Eagleton argues that form is often treated as an opaque husk that needs to be ripped away to get at the "real" point of the poem, its content. As Eagleton puts it, many contemporary students "do not speak the same language as the critic who said of some lines of T. S. Eliot: 'There is something very sad about the punctuation'" (3). Now, there is undoubtedly a good deal of hyperbole in this, as is often the case when Eagleton is in a joking or polemical mood. He acknowledges that most English majors can make a smart point about imagery or figurative language. Still, I think he is correct that the formal analysis of literature often gets short shrift.

For instance, most students can tell you if a narrative is written in first, second, or third person, but few (unless they have taken a fiction writing course, I should add) know to look for how third person narration can still be oriented by the perspective of certain characters—how it can use focalization and free indirect discourse to collapse and create psychic distance, to give us access to some characters' thoughts and not others. If this kind of analysis is added to their repertoire, they can spot some interesting things, such as how in Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants," the narration is objective except for one loaded word—"reasonably"—which is either an instance of free indirect discourse that confirms how the man truly views the woman or an instance of the narrator's (and perhaps Hemingway's) own judgment surfacing in the story. There is a productive conversation to be had about this word, and it turns on close attention to the nuances of narration and diction.

To take up another example of this type of analysis, we might consider the midpoint of Toni Morrison's Beloved, the climactic chapter when Schoolteacher shows up at 124 to take Sethe and her children back to slavery in Kentucky. In that scene, the narration adopts the perspective of Schoolteacher and the other white slave catchers instead of Sethe's. When I teach Beloved, I point this out to students, and I ask them why Morrison may have written it this way. They come up with interesting possibilities that range from a desire to forefront Schoolteacher...