The Commitment to Form; or, Still Crazy after All These Years

Having counted the adjectives, and weighed the lines, and measured the rhythms, a Formalist either stops silent with the expression of a man who does not know what to do with himself, or throws out an unexpected generalization which contains five per cent of Formalism and ninety-five per cent of the most uncritical intuition.—Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (ch. 5)Bring out number weight & measure in a year of dearth.—Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (35)Everyone knows that the concept of form has outlived its usefulness in discussions of literature, the arts, and media. The word does not appear in the recent handbooks of critical terms in art history and literary studies issued by the University of Chicago Press (Nelson and Shiff; Lentricchia and McLaughlin), and it appears in Raymond Williams's classic glossary, Keywords, only in its derivative (and mainly pejorative) form as an “-ism,” as in the phrase “mere formalism.” Formalists, as we know, are harmless drudges who spend their days counting syllables, measuring line lengths, and weighing emphases (Trotsky), or they are decadent aesthetes who waste their time celebrating beauty and other ineffable, indefinable qualities of works of art. If form has any afterlife in the study of literature, its role has been completely overtaken by the concept of structure, which rightly emphasizes the artificial, constructed character of cultural forms and defuses the idealist and organicist overtones that surround the concept of form.