Coda: New Formalisms

Abstract

As noted in the Introduction, the label “New Formalism” in this study (like “New Formalist”) has no connection with the movement in American poetry of the same name — a movement Susan Wolf son tartly characterizes as “a Reagan-80s school of American poetry, with a formalist agenda that was reactionary, politically and poetically.”1 The possibility of mistakenly allying current formalist criticism with that poetic school is only one of Wolf son’s objections to the term. Like some other critics, she also hears in “New Formalism” the implication that attention to form had virtually disappeared from criticism until bravely resurrected by a few contemporary stalwarts. But in fact, as she notes, there have never not been literary students attentive to form, however marginalized they may have been — or been made to feel — by such phenomena as the rise of politically engaged, largely thematic critical writing, particularly during the 1980s and after. From this perspective, a label like “New Formalist” obliquely denigrates those who have been practicing formalism all along. Yet it is nonetheless the case that a number of modern critical trends or schools, quite different from one another, may arguably claim the label “formalist”: Russian Formalism, the art criticism of Roger Fry, the French tradition of explication de texte, New Criticism, Deconstruction, New Historicism (at times), and more.