§ Kinds of Fiction Genres I Like

§ Cool Poets (Contemporary)

§ Cool Poets (Older)

§ History

§ Journal Articles

§ EVERYBODY HATES KANT Blakean Formalism and the Symmetries of Laura Moriarty

New Formalist poetry has seemed interested largely in returning to forms—sestina, villanelle, sonnet, and so on—that, according to New Formalist poets, have fallen into disuse through decades of freeverse practice.

§ What Is New Formalism (Marjorie Levinson)

Jonathan Loes berg's A Return to the Aesthetic and Isobel Armstrong's The Radical Aesthetic
About a quarter of the studies trace the discipline's neglect of form to new historicism's alleged denunciation of form as an ideological mystification.
The above distinction between two strains of new formalism translates into a practical division between (a) those who want to restore to today's reductive reinscription of historical reading its original focus on form (traced by these critics to sources founda tional for materialist critique?e.g., Hegel, Marx, Freud, Adorno, Althusser, Jameson) and (b) those who campaign to bring back a sharp demarcation between history and art, discourse and literature, with form (regarded as the condition of aesthetic experience as traced to Kant?i.e., disinterested, autotelic, playful, pleasurable, consensus-generating, and therefore both individually liberating and conducive to affective social cohesion) the prerogative of art. In short, we have a new formalism that makes a continuum with new historicism and a backlash new formalism.
I call the first kind of practice "activist formalism" (2), I call the second kind "normative formalism," not because it achieves normative status but because it as signs to the aesthetic norm-setting work that is cognitive and affective and therefore also cultural-political.
The central work of the movement as a whole is rededication, a word I choose be cause new formalism seeks not only to rein state the problematic of form so as to recover values forgotten, rejected, or vulgarized as the direct or indirect consequence of new historicism's dominance but also to generate commitment to and community around the idea of form. The language of "commitment," "conviction," "devotion," "dedication" is fre quent and often focal in these essays, and it points up the advocacy slant of the movement as well as its emphasis on affect, a recoil from what is cast as the arid rationalism ("scholastic" is the term one critic uses).
In closing, let me cite a very different kind of essay, Elizabeth Harris Sagaser's "Flirting with Eternity: Teaching Form and Meter in a Renaissance Poetry Course." The excellence of this essay is in its hands-on approach to the problem of helping students address "basic questions such as why?politically, philosophi cally, psychologically?a culture would develop form and meter so intensely" without lapsing into an alienating technicalism (185). Because hers is a rigorously interactive notion of form ("form and meter only exist in practice?in reciting verse, listening to it, reading it, writ ing it, remembering it, teaching it" [186 ]), she designs exercises (recitation, memoriza tion, etc.) to counteract the reification effects of contemporary print and academic culture. Even as she stresses the acoustic, she quot

§ II Theory over Method, or In Defense of Polemic (Tom Eyers)

What does form explain? Does form explain?

§ Tactical Formalism: A Response to Caroline Levine

For some time now, a knee-jerk contempt for formal inquiry as such has, in its own turn, become as firmly established within programs of advanced training as the dogma of formalism used to be.
Triumphant antiformalism has to answer, besides, for a more serious dereliction: the enervation of literary close reading in critical practice. A review of the habits of literary analysis that have prevailed during the last academic generation or so reveals widespread atrophy of a disused set of critica To let the tools of formal literary analysis rust unburnished is to risk discovering one day that our services are no longer wanted. While it is not too late to recoup that fine-motor coordination between eye and hand on which our guild's distinctive contributions are likely to depend, it is decidedly not too soon to enter rehab and start practicing

§ Narrative Networks: Bleak House and the Affor dances of Form (Carloine Levine)

Faced with a doorknob, most of us know what to do. We turn it in one direc
tion, and if that doesn't unlatch the door, we turn it in the other. We then use the same doorknob to pull the door toward us or push it away from us. We perceive what design theorists and cognitive psychologists call the doorknob's affordances.