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  • Enigmatic Signifiers
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Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present
Tom Eyers
Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/speculative-formalism-1
256 Pages; Print, $34.95

In his recent book Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present, Tom Eyers sets out to offer what he calls a new "apparatus" for thinking about literature, particularly poetic form. Eyers, an assistant professor of philosophy at Duquesne University, brings a usefully philosophical approach to his ambitious project. The theory of speculative formalism is a beautiful piece of literary philosophy that is worth our attention: Eyers's ideas are nuanced and he earns his insights through clear and thought-provoking critiques of previous literary theories. His arguments build in a linear way and yet he writes recursively, so that his terms become more refined, his points sharpened, as the book progresses.

The theory of speculative formalism rests on the foundational precept asserted by Eyers that literary texts themselves "embody a formal speculative capacity that prevents their final absorption or neutralization by [their] prior conditions, even as the result may well be stasis or immobility rather than, say, contestation or critique" and thereby enable "a transport outward from literature's seemingly sealed bounds." For Eyers it is no contradiction to simultaneously claim "stasis or immobility" and "transport outward." Or rather, it is contradiction but one he is deliberate about. The vectors through which the transport outward is facilitated, and the backbone of speculative formalism, are: shared incompletion, paradox, and textual self-reference.

Eyers identifies what he calls a "shared incompletion" that inheres in literary language on the one hand, and within the worlds outside of literature—"materiality, history, politics, nature"—on the other. The relationship between the language of literature and its contexts and outsides is repeatedly characterized as "agonistic," which is the fecund soil out of which paradoxes are generated. Attention to the paradoxes of form results in a textual self-reflexivity that, rather than sealing literature in a solipsistic universe, Eyers suggests is actually literature's only means of contact with the worlds outside itself. The ability for impasses to be generative of meaning, or formalization, as Eyers redefines the word, is the general logic underpinning speculative formalism: "literature stages better than most phenomena the manner in which, far from shutting down the possibility of meaning, the impossibility of any final, formal integration of a structure and its component parts is the very condition of possibility of that structure." The theory of speculative formalism, then, is an idea about how literary texts offer a connection that is always unfinished, always interrupted.

Speculative formalism is a capacity that Eyers situates in the literary text itself. The connection possible from literary text outward is one that speaks to representation as a non-mimetic correlation. The perceiving subject, the reader, is taken for granted, perhaps even unnecessary. It could be debated whether this strengthens or weakens the theory overall—and to be fair, Eyers addresses this elision directly in his final chapter. Nevertheless, this elision deserves more thought. It would be inaccurate to say that Eyers takes account of the creative process of poetic works; however, he does make distractingly frequent reference to the intentions of the various poets and thinkers he reads, using writers' published statements about their work as evidence that a kind of irresolution does in fact inhabit the work. For a theory that is otherwise so focused on the literary text itself, and considering that he also constructs such strong theoretical arguments, these inclusions do not serve his overall program.

The critical argument begins by reassessing well-established literary theories in order to "clear the ground" for speculative formalism. Two case studies—of the digital approaches of Franco Moretti and Stephen Ramsay—challenge the strategies of the digital humanities in its current iteration, along the way staging critiques of new positivism and new historicism. Moretti's view tacitly understands history to be a teleological series of cultural responses to political events and therefore forgets our inescapably retroactive perspective. A best, digital humanities offers a "quasi-dialectical history—from structure and fixity to fluidity and back again—especially attractive to the...

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