The origin of this essay is a sense of disappointment at what had seemed to me at first one of the most interesting of recent developments in literary studies. I mean here the reemergence, on a critical scene dominated since the alleged death of "high theory" by historicism, of a self-conscious formalism, a "new formalism" to borrow the term employed by Marjorie Levinson in her 2007 PMLA review—"What Is New Formalism?"—which looks back to the March 2000 issue of MLQ—Reading for Form—and which anticipates the topics of some of the most recent meetings of the English Institute: "Form" (2013), "Medium" (2014), and "Figure" (2015). If, despite its having unsettled some critical commonplaces, and despite its having given rise to some interesting metacritical work, this reemergence of formalism (or this emergence of "new formalism") has been disappointing, the reason is that, while the ascendancy of the old formalisms—of the Yale School (minus the antiformalist Harold Bloom), or of the New Critics (expanded to include René Wellek and Austin Warren), or even of Aristotle—tended to coincide with an increased attention to or anxiety around the question of literature as such, the rise of the new formalism has not. It has, rather, affirmed some older formalist methodology once denigrated for its apolitical or ahistorical leanings all the while insisting on this methodology's real political or historical significance. I am thinking, for example, of the flourishing Adorno industry, and there is the somewhat different rehabilitation of Clement Greenberg in the criticism of visual art. Or, the new formalism has sought to innovate through the application to literature of ever more ingenious metaphors drawn from other fields—so the literary work is no longer an "organism" but a "machine" or a "network"; literary form is not "static" but "dynamic," "processual." The tendency of formalism to move in this direction was already noted by Fredric Jameson in 1972, in The Prison House of Language, where he writes that, with structuralism, "we find ourselves ultimately before the conclusion that the attempt to see the literary work as a linguistic system is in reality the application of a metaphor." And it was noted a year later by Paul de Man in "Semiology and Rhetoric," where, having discussed the prevailing model of literature as "a kind of box that separates an inside from an outside," de Man concludes that "metaphors are more tenacious than facts."In any event, the new formalism has done nothing to answer the question: what is literature? As far as I can tell, it has not even tried. And if it did try, it would fail. It would fail because it begins with a set of assumptions about its object, and about its relation to its object, that are more than two hundred years out of date—two hundred twenty-seven years out of date, to be exact. For it was the publication in 1790 of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment that demonstrated, once and for all, the impossibility of deriving a theory of the art object from a reflection on that object's formal properties. Somewhat counterintuitively, this impossibility is what Kant's discussion of "mere form" (in the sense that a judgment of taste, according to Kant, is "pure" when it is a judgment of the "mere form" of a thing) should help us to understand. And it should help us to see the limitations not only of the new formalism, which I shall stop discussing presently, but also of any formalist critical practice that attempts to move from the formal properties of its object to a characterization of that object as literature or as art.

中文翻译：

---

形式主义，仅仅形式和判断

这篇文章的起源使我对文学研究的最新发展中最有趣的一件事感到失望。我的意思是，自从所谓的历史主义“高级理论”死后，在一个关键的场面上重新出现了一种自觉的形式主义，一种“新形式主义”，借用了马乔里·列文森（Marjorie Levinson）在她的2007年PMLA评论中使用的术语-什么是新形式主义？”，它可以追溯到MLQ的2000年3月号（阅读形式），并且可以预期英语学院最近召开的一些会议的主题：“形式”（2013年），“中等”（ 2014年）和“人物”（2015年）。如果，尽管它尚未解决一些关键的常识，并且尽管已经引起了一些有趣的元批评工作，形式主义的重新出现（或“新形式主义”的出现）令人失望，原因是，虽然旧形式主义（耶鲁学派（减去反形式主义者哈罗德·布鲁姆）或新批评家（扩展） （包括RenéWellek和Austin Warren），甚至是亚里斯多德（Aristotle），这与人们对文学问题的关注度或焦虑度正好相吻合，但新形式主义的兴起却没有。相反，它肯定了一些较老的形式主义方法论，该方法论因其非政治性或非历史性倾向而被贬低，同时坚持该方法论的真正政治或历史意义。例如，我在思考蓬勃发展的阿多诺（Adorno）行业，而克莱门特·格林伯格（Clement Greenberg）在对视觉艺术的批评中则有所不同。或者，新形式主义试图通过将来自其他领域的越来越巧妙的隐喻应用于文学中来进行创新，因此，文学作品不再是“有机体”，而是“机器”或“网络”。文学形式不是“静态的”，而是“动态的”，“过程的”。弗雷德里克·詹姆森（Fredric Jameson）在1972年的《语言监狱》中已经指出了形式主义朝这个方向发展的趋势，他在书中写道，通过结构主义，“我们最终发现自己认为文学作品是语言系统实际上就是隐喻的应用。” 一年后，保罗·德曼（Paul de Man）在“符号学和修辞学”中指出了这一点。