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Form and Explanation

What does form explain? More often than not, when it comes to literary criticism, form explains everything. Where form refers “to elements of a verbal composition,” including “rhythm, meter, structure, diction, imagery,” it distinguishes ordinary from figurative utterance and thereby defines the literary per se. Where form refers to the disposition of those elements such that the work of which they are a part mimes a “symbolic resolution to a concrete historical situation,” it distinguishes real from virtual phenomena and thereby defines the task of criticism as their ongoing adjudication. Both forensic and exculpatory in their promise, form’s explanations have been applied to circumstances widely disparate in scale, character, and significance. This is nothing new, but a recent flurry of debates identifying new varieties of form has thrown the unruliness of its application into relief. Taken together, they suggest that to give an account of form is to contribute to the work of making sense of linguistic meaning, aesthetic production, class struggle, objecthood, crises in the humanities and of the planet, how we read, why we read, and what’s wrong with these queries of how and why. In this context, form explains what we cannot: what’s the point of us at all? Contemporary partisans of form maintain that their high opinion of its exegetical power is at once something new in the field and the field’s