A Look Back at the Scholarship-Criticism Debate

David Letzler Letzler 1

A Look Back at the Scholarship-Criticism Debate

One interesting thread of Marjorie Levinson’s “What is New

Formalism?” addresses the usefulness of such labels as

“formalism” and “historicism” in defining movements within

academic literary studies. Echoing the writers she cites,

Levinson remarks on such terms’ potential to provoke “sectarian

and…extremist self-definition” (568) and notes instances in which

the movement-labeling process has either lumped together theories

with little in common (559) or excluded important work altogether

(563). She also implies that there might not be that much

difference between an “historically informed and informing

formalism” (565) and a “form-attentive reading of historicism”

(568) anyway (563). Besides, she adds, there’s very little

agreement about what “form” even means (562). These are all

perceptive points, though obviously such labels cannot be totally

dispensed with either, given their value in articulating larger

movements and facilitating individual writers’ agreement with or

opposition to them. To partly circumvent the dilemma this causes

– having to rely on two overused and inadequate terms to express

major trends of the past century’s literary study – and also to

NeMLA 2010New Formalism, Aesthetics, and American Literary Studies4/8/2010


help us examine freshly at the issues they raise, I’d like to

look back to a time in the American academy during which many of

the questions that surround the formalism-historicism split were

expressed within a different binary—that of “scholarship” versus

“criticism.”

So powerful are our contemporary labels that we often

retroactively rename that dispute to have been between a

formalist “New Criticism” and an “old historicism,” but this is

inadequate in several ways. For one, when the conflict was

invoked in its early stages – for instance, by William Nitze in

his 1929 MLA presidential address – the critics against whom

scholarship needed to be were not formalists at all, but

primarily humanists like Irving Babbitt, Henry Seidel Canby, and

Norman Foerster. Two other early significant calls for the

increased role of criticism in the American English academy came

in 1933 from Jonathon Livingston Lowes (now is primarily

associated with source-study) and in 1935 from the Chicago critic

R. S. Crane (who incorporated certain types of formalism in his

work but also spent which of his later career critiquing it (see

Graff 233-237)). Both of these predate the two best-known New



Critical statements on this issue, John Crowe Ransom’s 1938

“Criticism, Inc.” and Allen Tate’s 1941 “Miss Emily and the

Bibliographer.”

In fact, the diversity of the critical movement can be seen

through the odd history of the phrase “the new criticism” itself.

It was coined in a 1911 essay by Joel Ellis Spingarn about a

brand of creative criticism practiced by Anatole France and Oscar

Wilde, dialectically examining its relationship to more

“dogmatic” types of contemporary criticism. Two decades later,

it named an anthology edited by Edward Berry Borgum that collated

international literary criticism emphasizing literary aesthetics

over ethical instruction, including work by Spingarn, Benedetto

Croce, I. A. Richards, Ramon Fernandez, George Santayana, and

Oswald Spengler. In both cases, “new criticism” emphasized the

second word over the first: those works did not define any

particular critical movement but surveyed several types of

criticism practiced (or that might be practiced) by current

writers. This appears also to have been the aim of John Crowe

Ransom in his 1941 The New Criticism: though he praises their

uniform perceptiveness, his three “new critics” (I. A. Richards,



T. S. Eliot, and Yvor Winters) are each defined by an adjective –

respectively, “psychological,” “historical,” and “logical” – that

distinguishes their work from the others’1. It was only when

Ransom’s collection proved convenient for those making broader

critiques (cf. Crane, Critics and Criticism) that they began to be

consistently grouped as some sort of coherent movement. It was

not until the late 1940s that references to a movement of

capital-N capital-C New Critics appear without immediate

reference to Ransom’s book. That is, if the New Critics

consciously worked under the aegis of any named movement in the

thirties and forties, it was that of criticism generally, not New

Criticism2.

The extent to which “formalism” accurately describes “new

criticism” (by either definition) is also unclear. As we’ve

1 And each of which is, of course, at odds with our contemporary notions of the interests of the New Critics, particularly if we replace “logical” with Delmore Schwartz’s suggestion to Ransom for Winters, “ethical-logical,” which Ransom granted described Winters’ character better, though not his contribution to criticism (212).2 Ransom, Brooks, Warren, and Tate were also associated with the Agrarian and Fugitive movements at Vanderbilt, but by the time their major critical work began to appear in the late 1930s, they had all moved elsewhere. Furthermore,I have not seen any reference to their critical writing on literature as constitutive of a named movement until after the publication of Ransom’s book,at which point they were immediately grouped beside Richards, William Empson, Eliot, Winters, F. R. Leavis, R. P. Blackmur, Kenneth Burke, René Wellek, and so on.



noted, humanist and Chicago criticism was not necessarily

formalist; neither was that of Lionel Trilling, whose “The Sense

of the Past” also spoke against the scholars. Even the extent

and nature of the New Critics’ formalism is not particularly

clear. Ransom seemed to use the word as contemporary poetic New

Formalists do, to denote poetry with determined meter (cf. The

New Criticism 190, 232, 260). René Wellek never thought that

“formalism” much applied to the New Critics at all (History of

Modern Criticism 151), and neither Cleanth Brooks (compare The Well-

Wrought Urn 196 to “The Formalist Critics”) nor Allen Tate

(compare “Miss Emily…” 44 to “Is Literary Criticism…” 69) held

consistent views on whether their work was, or ought to be,

formalist3. This is all to say that to narrate the rebellion

within academic literary studies during the thirties and forties

as being led by or exclusively comprised of formalist New Critics

is to miss much of what happened4. It is better, I think, to

3 One more note on the near-meaninglessness of the phrase “New Criticism”: in French, an identical phrase – la nouvelle critique – identifies a similarly heterogeneous group including Lucien Goldman, Jean-Pierre Richard, and most notably Roland Barthes—who is considered in America to be one of the most significant challengers of the New Criticism. (Barthes’ use of this phrase has likely caused innumerable misunderstandings in undergraduate readings of “Death of the Author.”)4 My brief account is not particularly original: the surveys of critical and institutional history by Graff, Wellek, and Cambridge, for example, all relate



follow Gerald Graff and speak of a “United Critical Front” (126)

during this period.

The association of “scholarship” with “historicism” is a

better one, though the scholars preferred the phrase “literary

history.” Yet the critics’ attacks against scholarship do not

originate in any distaste for history, as virtually every essay

on behalf of criticism praises the importance of history (cf.

Lowes 1406; Crane, “History Versus…” 11; Ransom, “Criticism,

Inc.” 56; Tate, “Miss Emily…” 45-46; Trilling 184). Rather, the

discipline that they oppose, at least regarding its application

to literature, is science—specifically, the practice of gearing

the majority of academic literary work toward gathering and

presenting a positivist collection of verifiable facts about the

lives of authors, their possible sources, the derivations of

words, and so on, rather than attempting to understand why their it similarly, though without quite as much emphasis on treating “criticism” asthe central category nor on the haziness of the terms “formalism” and “New Criticism.” The narrative against which I contrast mine is more common in lessbroad-ranging studies. For instance, Robert Scholes’ brief account of the American English academy in The Rise and Fall of English essentially uses the old historicism to New Criticism narrative (1-29); Richard Ohmann’s English in America acknowledges that there were contemporary academic literary movements to New Criticism but finds little of interest to say about them (81); and Vincent Leitch’s American Literary Criticism From the 30s to the 80s barely mentions the “scholarship” camp at all (and thus finds itself awkwardly having to present as the main opponents to the New Critics the Marxist critics, who are for the most part mentioned only in passing in this debate).



literature is of any importance. In some cases this constituted

a full-blown anti-scientism, as Wellek claimed was true of Ransom

and Tate (“The New Criticism…” 618-619). But it did not in all

cases: Crane notes that “a good historian must also be...a

scientist” (“History Versus” 20), while Lowes praises the

development of the MLA’s more scientific methods during the early

twentieth century (1403).

Instead, the near-unanimous objection (and perhaps defining

characteristic) of the critics was that scientific language was

insufficient for responding to literature. Consider the

following:

What, in turn, is the object of research, and above all, of research in the humanities? […] The basic difference, for there is one, lies in the fact that we are, within definite limits, applying the methods of science to the interpretation of art. Humane scholarship, in a word, moves and must move within both worlds at once—the world of scientific method and the world, in whatever degree, of creative art. […] The path of least resistance is to follow one and let the other go. Research, which is the primary instrument of science, isfelt to be the easier and it is also the more alluring. I too have heard the Sirens sing, and I know whereof I speak. And so we tend to become enamored of the methods, and at times to forget the end; to allow, in a word, the fascination of the means to distract us from the very objectfor which they are employed.



What have been the effects of a century of science upon the study of literature? [...] Its central object is to describethe phenomena of langue as a factor in the history of man—anobject that does not directly assist in the understanding ofliterature. […] Confusing means and ends, emphasizing the instrument of language instead of the literary result, neglecting the higher tasks that alone can justify scholarship, they have in effect cooperated with the forces hostile to the humanities and betrayed their own cause.

For better or worse, certain kinds of communication are not amenable to scientific statement. […] The speech of that ordinary citizen in an ordinary day conveys many things, attitudes, feelings, and interpretations, that fall outside these restrictions. These things, though they fill a large part of the speech of that ordinary citizen, are never stated very clearly or precisely by him. The specializationof speech which we find in poetry aims at clarity and precision of statement in these matters.

Taine thought he was a scientist and a mechanist, who was examining works of literature from the same point of view asthe chemist’s in experimenting with chemical compounds. Butthe difference between the critic and the chemist is that the critic cannot first combine his elements and then watch the see what they will do […]. There was thus a certain element of imposture in Taine; but it was the rabbits he pulled out that saved him. If he had really been the mechanist that the thought he was, his work on literature would have had little value. The truth was that Taine lovedliterature for its own sake […] [I]t is evident when he writes of a great writer that the moment, race and milieu have combined, like the three sounds of the chord in Browning’s poem about Abt Vogler, to produce not a fourth sound but a star.

These passages, respectively, are from Lowes’ 1933 MLA address

(1403), Foerster’s The American Scholar (6-7), Brooks and Robert



Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry (5), and Edmund Wilson’s “The

Historical Interpretation of Literature” (259), representing four

quite varied critical positions. They are united, however, by

the notion that any study of literature requires more complex

language than that which science provides, because whatever the

value of literature may be, it is embedded within a different,

messier language than that which science uses. Viewed by

scientific methods, after all, it is not clear why literature

even is of any value. Novels and poems are made up: their

materials are invented by one or several individuals and have

little obligation to accurately represent any part of the

material world that scientific language describes adeptly. To

take up literature in a scientific mindset, as the critics

charged of the scholars, is to remove our capacity to gain

anything from it.

Is this positivist characterization of the scholarly

position accurate? Yes and no. It is true that “scholarship”

appears to be defined more by the accumulation of scientifically-

verifiable facts rather than by an interest in history. When

Stanley Edgar Hyman selected an emblematic scholar for his 1948



The Armed Vision, he explicitly chose neither a literary historian

nor biographer but Caroline Spurgeon, focusing on work like her

tabulations and calculations of the annotations in Keats’ copy of

Shakespeare’s plays (163-164). Furthermore, the two most

eloquent apologists for scholarship, Edwin Greenlaw and Howard

Mumford Jones, also emphasize the importance of verifiable

“facts” and “evidence” as the key to historical scholarship more

than anything else (Greenlaw x; Jones 745-747, 751). On the

other hand, Greenlaw and Jones are far from proselytizing for

positivist science. In fact, Jones’ 1934 “Literary Scholarship

and Contemporary Criticism” begins with a vicious attack on the

protection the scientist held in the university by virtue of “the

blind faith in his work which the skillful advertising of

toothpaste manufacturers has helped to build up” (740), while

Greenlaw both critiques scientists’ disregard for the humanities

in The Province of Literary History and parallels it to the humanist

critics’ negative attitude toward academic literary scholarship

(24). Both note that pure “facts” are not quite enough, too:

their purpose is to lead the scholar toward some deeper

understanding, although both defend apparently purposeless



scholarship because one never knew when a particular fact might

become important (Greenlaw 23; Jones 752-753).

Their response to the critics over how this deeper

understanding might be reached is also more intriguing than

recent writers have credited to “old historicism.” How, they

ask, are we to locate these literary qualities than lie beyond

scholarship? Greenlaw argues that if we are not to focus

primarily on scholarship, we must look to some “immutable laws of

literature” (152). Inevitably, he writes, these lead to foolish

arguments, such as those over whether Shakespeare’s plays were

adequate tragedies despite not respecting the classical unities.

While critics argued over this, he claims:

Only the antiquarians were correcting texts, approaching Spenser and the Elizabethans through inquiry as to their sources, collecting more and more specimens of early literature, and gradually building up a body of exact knowledge of former times upon which literary history could draw with precision. To the professional critic we owe verylittle (68).

What was the purpose of all this antiquarianism, though?

Greenlaw claims that this “exact knowledge” allows scholars

access to “the historical imagination,” which unlocks how “men

have sought to express brief human experience […]. In such a



vision the individual takes on a new greatness because his life

is merged in the greater life of man” (32). Taking a somewhat

less mystical, but no less cosmic, perspective, Jones claims of

criticism in his own time:

Contemporary criticism seems to me to demand of scholarship only the transiently and immediately interesting—to demand that that scholars humbly follow the reigning interests of criticism, whether it be Freudian psychology, economic determinism, revolutionary criticism, or pure form. Scholarship should do nothing of the kind. Its period is eternity, not 1934. Its object is truth, not the vogue of this or that emotional desire (757).

Despite Jones’ caustic tone, we may note the similarity between

his position (as well as Greenlaw’s) and that of the critics.

Both seek some deeper truth within literature—which ought not to

surprise us, since there is little apparent importance to

literature if such a truth (or something like it) does not exist.

But how might it be discovered? For the critics, scholarly

methods are too narrow for discovery because their arcane

tabulations, biography, source-studies, and other minutiae are

incapable of leading to any deeper knowledge beyond an elaborate

act of hand-waving. For the scholars, though, criticism is too



narrow for discovery because its conclusions are predetermined by

a set of arbitrary, didactic principles.

And thus we hit an impasse, because both sides essentially

make the same claim: while the other camp’s precepts limit it to

a small purview, ultimately uninteresting to anyone else, theirs

allow them access to new learning. To oppose the charges from

the scholars, several of the critics attempted more closely to

define what constituted a good criticism beyond dogmatism and on

what basis it could claim to make discoveries within literature.

Crane, tacitly agreeing with Jones and Greenlaw, ruled that the

humanists’ ethical principles were too rigid and divorced from

art to produce good literary criticism (“History Versus…” 22).

Despite writing against science for much of his career, Ransom

argued that, though criticism “will never be a very exact

science, or even a nearly exact one,” it “must become more

scientific, or more precise and systematic” (“Criticism, Inc.”

50). Why call for critical “precision,” which had been a

buzzword of the scholars? Likely, it was to require the close

demonstration of the steps by which a critic could move from the

artwork to some new learning, so that its results could not be



attributed to either subjectivist critical commonplaces or

predetermined maxims. For this reason, Ransom ruled out from

good literary criticism not only humanism; but also

impressionism; purely factual methods of comparison, summary, and

philology; and any project that treated as an end the judgment of

a work by the standards of accuracy in any other field (57-59).

What remained to examine was the “technique of art”—though from

there the critic must move to “a much more general question” (60)

—a tricky proposition that Ransom does not spell out further.

Indeed, he places himself in a similar predicament to that

of the scholars. Having touted their precision and accuracy,

they must then find a way to more to some larger question, a path

that is not immediately clear from their premises. For instance,

at the end of The Province of Literary History, Greenlaw promises to

explain how we may read a “transcript of life” – both spiritual

and material – in the moral ambiguity of Shakespeare (137). In

fact, this seems to be a critical move, what various commentators

refer to as “historical criticism” rather than pure scholarship.

As Ransom distinguishes the two in The New Criticism:



These scholars know the threads of factual and intellectual history which connect some English poet with the incidents of his own life, with the “thought” and “interests” of his age, and with contemporary and earlier poets in the same “school” or “tradition.” It will probably occur to us that they seem ordinarily to stop with knowing these connections […]. It is [T. S.] Eliot who uses his historical studies for the sake of literary understanding, and therefore might be called a historical critic (138-139).5

In both Greenlaw’s attempt and Ransom’s definition, an historical

critic uses his knowledge of history to guide his thoughts on

literature—much the same way a more formalist one uses his

knowledge of words. Actually, these two approaches are quite

similar, as Brooks and Warren imply in their preface to the third

edition of Understanding Poetry, where they comment “Poems come out

of a historical moment, and since they are written in language,

the form is tied to a whole cultural context” (xiv). (This

passage highlights perhaps the greatest problem regarding the

terms formalism and historicism, as it implies that all formalism

is historicism; the converse follows almost trivially.)

Yet consciously taking an historical perspective toward

criticism yields problems. Simply noting that language is an

5 Incidentally, Wilson begins “The Historical Interpretation of Literature” byexamining the most exemplary “non-historical” critic, to his view—T. S. Eliot (256).



historical phenomenon does not immediately lead to the conclusion

that all it recounts will inevitably concern the larger trends

and questions of history. Regarding this, Spingarn quotes

Anatole France, favoring creative criticism:

Historical criticism takes us away from it [Prometheus Bound]in a search of the environment, the age, the race, the poetic school of the artist; it tells us to read the historyof the French Revolution, Godwin’s Political Justice, the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, and Calderón’s Mágico Prodigioso. […] I at least strive to replace one work of art by another,and art can only find its alter ego in art (8-9).

Perhaps the reason that historical criticism creates such a

division is that it assumes that whatever have been decided to

have been the dominant ideas of the “age” must also be relevant

to all the age’s art. Despite Greenlaw’s assertion that

literature provides a “transcript of human life” (85), Crane

notes in Critics and Criticism that what a poet primarily does “is not

to express himself or his age” but to construct language (13).

And this is not to mention that there are a thousand better

sources for the spirit of “the age” in a larger sense than the

inventions of someone as idiosyncratic as Shelley. It is for

this reason, I suspect, that Spingarn associates historical

criticism with dogmatism (12); it decides the results first and



then fits literature to it, which is the same critique Greenlaw

makes of rule-based aesthetic criticism. But in this way

dogmatic criticisms also resemble scholarship: as Crane notes,

scholarship generally comprises “narrative propositions” that

trace “manifestations of [a] special characteristic which is

undergoing change” or “‘events’ or sources of influence helping

to account for the change” (“History Versus…” 9-11). Similarly,

dogmatic criticisms decide that certain literary occurrences are

always clear expressions (even despite, or because of, their

obliqueness) of certain things about culture, then go about

collecting examples for illustration.

How can we determine which of these approaches is most

valid? It cannot be done in the abstract. It can only be

justified by its results—and it probably because of this that the

scholars eventually lost to the critics. When Greenlaw finally

unveils what the “historical imagination” tells us about the

ambiguities of Shakespeare, all he comes up with is the claim

that they reflect the “uncertainties” of the Elizabethan age

(137-151). Since practically every period of history (and every

good work of literature) can and has been described as being full



of “uncertainty” by someone at some point in time, we should be

able to see how little is the gain Greenlaw draws from

Shakespeare. Brooks’ tracing of one image pattern in Macbeth (The

Well-Wrought Urn 22-43) provides more interesting thought on

Shakespeare than that—as does, for that matter, one paragraph of

William Empson’s reflections on the line “Bare ruined choirs

where late the sweet birds sang,” entirely devoid of any other

context (2-3). So much more powerful were these sorts of

critical essays that not only did they entirely remake the

Anglophone academy over a mere twenty years6, but that when they

did literary studies reached a peak of prestige (at least

according to Scholes 1-29 and Eagleton 15-46).

Greenlaw at least makes an attempt to generate something

worthwhile from his reading. While the dull scholars attacked by

Ransom, Tate, and Trilling in their essays – sad, gray men who

tell their students that the graduate perspective forbids any

sort of aesthetic response or criticism (because “anybody can do

that”), who prefer their writers long dead and forgotten so that

6 From Thomas Daniel Young’s description, Ransom’s classes on Shakespeare bears a closer resemblance to even the most “Theory”-laden class in Shakespeare today than to the scholarship-oriented Shakespeare classes that had existed prior.



matters are more settled – are likely parody (“Miss Emily” 39;

“Criticism Inc.” 54; Trilling 182), they do not appear to think

in a manner much distinct from that outlined by Jones. For

Jones, the genius of certain writers is merely a matter of “fact”

(756) has been decided by “history”; if we do not like Longfellow

anymore, that is our fault, not his. Describing the scholarly

perspective, he writes:

I trust that no scholar is blind to the aesthetic appeal of a work of art; but for the purposes of scholarship, the workmust be looked upon, not as an aesthetic experience, but as a document. […] In his private capacity as reader, the scholar may, like any other person, revel in Dickens or delight in Chaucer. […] But as a scholar he approaches the work primarily as a document (751).

Given the difficult questions we have outlined above, retreating

to this point is understandable. But maintaining it requires

that literature no longer is a going interest for the scholar;

any power it may have to change him is void.

*

Why bring up these ancient matters during a discussion of

aesthetics and New Formalism, at a time when most of the writers

involved have been either significantly undermined or wholly

discredited, when scholarship and criticism appear are so closely



linked in the academy that no one even bothers to distinguish

them? Compare the above quote from Jones to this one, written

somewhat more recently:

I once managed to live for a long time, and with no apparentstress, a secret life with literature. Publicly, in the books I’d written and in the classroom, I worked as an historian and polemicist of literary theory, who could speakwith passion, and without noticeable impediment, about literature as a political instrument. […] The secret me was me-the-reader, in the act of reading: an experience in whichthe words of someone else filled me up and made it irrelevant to talk about my reading; an experience that I’d had for as long as I can remember being a reader. This secret life implicitly denied that any talk about what I hadundergone could ever be authentic (59).

This is Frank Lentricchia, beginning his 1996 Lingua Franca essay

abjuring literary theory. Having served as a historical

scholar/critic, Lentricchia abandoned this position because he

could not continue propagating theories that, in his view,

decided a priori that every work of literature was a hidden

political ploy—that a work as esoteric as Pound’s Cantos was a

central part of worldwide anti-Semitism and that Faulkner’s

novels were designed to further American racism (60-64). There

was, he found, simply no warrant in the work to make such

conclusions, a claim similar to that made by George Levine



regarding the vast pronouncements about queer sociality in the

work of Eve Sedgwick based on an analysis of only a small handful

of books (13). Of course, Sedgwick herself also partially

rejected this position a decade later when noting that the

“strong theory” behind New Historicism and queer theory led even

the best writers in those movements to make arguments that were

“circular” and asserted “tautologies” (132-135), that were so

thoughtlessly impervious to change that they had not realized

that their paranoia about the secret machinations of the secular-

bourgeois-humanist-universalist-liberal-Enlightenment state had

been rendered obsolete by the emergence of a quite open, rather

more dangerous conservatism (139-141). We see here precisely the

same problems as before: dogmatic and tautological insistence on

certain theoretical conclusions, a lack of clear methodological

justification for the relationship of literature to those

conclusions, and little sense of why the literature under study

should have any importance given those conclusions. We have not

advanced beyond the quarrels of the thirties and forties; they

still go on, under different jargon, the answers to their central

questions either forgotten or perpetually absent.



The point of this is neither (wholly) to critique New

Historicism, cultural studies, or any other movement of the past

quarter century, nor (wholly) to defend formalism. As I’ve said,

I’m not sure those labels are terribly meaningful, at least in

terms of distinguishing the value of certain types of critical

writing over others. Besides, those theories crested two decades

ago and have been subject to substantial and effective critique

for the past fifteen years (in addition to Lentricchia, Levine,

and Sedgwick, see Loesberg and Armstrong to make five quite

distinct critiques on the subject). Their influence wanes: among

my colleagues in the generation of literary academics coming up

now, I’ve heard more anxiety about committing oneself to a

theoretical school than I have any eagerness to sign up for full-

blooded Marxism or Lacanianism or eco-criticism or any other

sect. The literary theory of the next few decades, I suspect,

will be a Cafeteria Theory—which, like Cafeteria Catholicism,

will probably make up for its general incoherence in part by

being practiced by slightly more genial people.

My point is that if the continued inclusion of literature in

higher education is not an oddity of curricular inertia from a



more primitive time, there must be something significant to be

learned from reading it. Given that literature is largely

invented and under no obligation to accurately represent any part

of the real world, it is not immediately apparent what that might

be, some form of thoughtful criticism is necessary to acquire

whatever that something is. Demonstrating theoretically how it

can be acquired for all cases – whether by cultural contexts,

linguistics, an organic-autonomy metaphor, etc. – is not easy and

perhaps not possible; it may only be justifiable by the

presentation of its results. This demands a precise account of

how such results are reached and why it is that those texts we

call literature are better suited for providing them than some

less convoluted form. It seems to me that such results are most

easily achievable via methods that are typically dubbed

“formalist,” because literature’s formal nature is so strange

that it is best fit for expressing equally strange thought, which

is often not intelligible in its full oddness if one begins with

the imperative to make a larger historical claim. But I’d just

as soon drop the labels “formalism” and “historicism” altogether:

all language is historical, and whatever literature has to say



about history (consciously or not) is expressed in some literary

form. The real distinction seems to me to be between criticism

that is capable of learning from literature and criticism that is

not. What seems to me more vital for those of us thinking about

how to incorporate questions of form into literary studies is to

make sure that we are pursuing the first kind, good criticism,

criticism that demonstrates what fabulous and unexpected things

happen when the mind encounters new orders of words that make it

worthwhile to read at all.



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A Look Back at the Scholarship-Criticism Debate

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