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What Is New Formalism?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Marjorie Levinson
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Extract

This review of new formalism poses challenges very different from those of the familiar compendium-review genre (e.g., “The Year's Work in Victorian Studies”). While all review essays face questions of inclusion, in an assignment of this kind, where the defining category is neither an established period nor topic but a developing theory or method emerging from the entire repertoire of literary and cultural studies, identifying the scholarly literature is a critical task in its own right. Moreover, because new formalism is better described as a movement than a theory or method, the work of selection is especially vexed and consequential. It is vexed because the practitioners' modes and degrees of identification with the movement are so various, and consequential because the reviewer's bibliographic decisions cannot help but construct the phenomenon being described.

Type
The Changing Profession
Information
PMLA , Volume 122 , Issue 2 , March 2007 , pp. 558 - 569
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2007

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