The Life and Death of Literary Forms

Abstract

HE SUBJECT proposed is the life and death of literary forms, not of literary works (a different subject). We say that the mock epic form has died out but The Rape of the Lock in some sense lives on, that the sonnet continues viable though Constable's Sonnets are moribund, that pastoral persists in fresh guise, even if Googe's Eclogues do not. The historical duration of works need not coincide with the duration of the forms they use. However, I must not take this as axiomatic, since for certain meanings of form it would be untrue. If forms meant personal configurations -as in Buffon's le style est l'homme mime-they might be coterminous with individual literary works. And a Crocean idealist who thought of form as expression-intuition would not even want to distinguish it from the internal event of the work1; for him, each work is formally unique, the diachronic propositions of literary history meaningless. Best begin, then, by specifying a literary model. The theoretical model currently useful is likely to be based on recent ideas of the substrate, and consequently to draw on post-Saussurean linguistics and on information theory. Thus we may define a literary work as the record of a specialized speech act. An author makes and communicates it, much as speakers express themselves, through a system of shared grammatical rules-Saussure's langue-supplemented by other more specialized systems of conventions.2 His individual speech act, however, is parole, a unique contingent communication, which,