Dynamic Form: How Intermediality Made Modernism

By Cara L. Lewis

Dynamic Form traces how intermedial experiments shape modernist texts from 1900 to 1950. Considering literature alongside painting, sculpture, photography, and film, Cara Lewis examines how these arts inflect narrative movement, contribute to plot events, and configure poetry and memoir. As forms and formal theories cross from one artistic realm to another and back again, modernism shows its obsession with form—and even at times becomes a formalism itself—but as Lewis writes, that form is far more dynamic than we have given it credit for. Form fulfills such various functions that we cannot characterize it as a mere container for content or matter, nor can we consign it to ignominy opposite historicism or political commitment.

As a structure or scheme that enables action, form in modernism can be plastic, protean, or even fragile, and works by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Evelyn Waugh, and Gertrude Stein demonstrate the range of form's operations. Revising three major formal paradigms—spatial form, pure form, and formlessness—and recasting the history of modernist form, this book proposes an understanding of form as a verbal category, as a kind of doing. Dynamic Form thus opens new possibilities for conversation between modernist studies and formalist studies and simultaneously promotes a capacious rethinking of the convergence between literary modernism and creative work in other media.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781501749186

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DYNAMIC FORM

HOW INTERMEDIALITY MADE MODERNISM

CARA L. LEWIS

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Reformulating Modernism

1. Plastic Form: Henry James’s Sculptural Aesthetics and Reading in the Round

2. Mortal Form: Still Life and Virginia Woolf’s Other Elegiac Shapes

3. Protean Form: Erotic Abstraction and Ardent Futurity in the Poetry of Mina Loy

4. Bad Formalism: Evelyn Waugh’s Film Fictions and the Work of Art in the Age of Cinemechanics

5. Surface Forms: Photography and Gertrude Stein’s Contact History of Modernism

Epilogue: The Consolations of Form

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

2.1 Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Apples (Pommes) , 1877–78

2.2 Roger Fry, cover for Cézanne: A Study of His Development , 1927

2.3 Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Skull (Nature morte au crâne) , 1896–98

3.1 Wyndham Lewis, Two Women , also called The Starry Sky , from the Dial , 1921

3.2 Constantin Brancusi, Golden Bird , 1919–20

3.3 Constantin Brancusi, View of the Studio: Bird in Space and Princesse X , 1924

3.4 Constantin Brancusi, Brancusi, Tristan Tzara, Berenice Abbott, Mina Loy, Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson in the studio , ca. 1921

3.5 Constantin Brancusi, Golden Bird , photograph ca. 1920

4.1 Page 281 from the first edition of The Balance, in Georgian Stories 1926

4.2 Page 290 from the first edition of The Balance, in Georgian Stories 1926

4.3 Page 287 from the first edition of The Balance, in Georgian Stories 1926

5.1 Alice B. Toklas at the door, photograph by Man Ray, from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , 1933

5.2 Gertrude Stein in front of the atelier door, from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , 1933

5.3 Pablo and Fernande at Montmartre, from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , 1933

5.4 Gertrude Stein in Vienna, from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , 1933

5.5 Gertrude Stein at Johns Hopkins Medical School, from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , 1933

5.6 Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in front of Joffre’s birthplace, from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933

5.7 Room with Gas (Femme au chapeau and Picasso Portrait), from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , 1933

5.8 Room with Oil Lamp, from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , 1933

5.9 Room with Bonheur de Vivre and Cézanne, from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , 1933

5.10 Homage à Gertrude, Ceiling painting by Picasso, from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , 1933

5.11 A Transatlantic, painting by Juan Gris, from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , 1933

5.12 Bilignin from across the valley, painting by Francis Rose, from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , 1933

5.13 Alice B. Toklas, painting by Francis Rose, from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , 1933

5.14 Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in front of Saint Mark’s, Venice, from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , 1933

5.15 Interior, 27 rue de Fleurus, 1912

5.16 Bernard Faӱ and Gertrude Stein at Bilignin, from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , 1933

5.17 First page of manuscript of this book, from the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , 1933

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this book began at the University of Virginia as I was trying to get beyond ekphrasis. That I got there at all—and anywhere since—is due to the enthusiasm and guidance of Michael Levenson, and I feel immensely grateful to have him in my corner. It is also thanks to Rita Felski’s incisive commentary: she knew what this book was about before I did, and to her I owe the title. To Jessica Feldman I owe its genesis in conversations that attempted to think literature and art together: thank you for your confidence in this book at the very beginning, and for reading chapters near the end. Thanks also to Victor Luftig for the heartening perspective checks and the chats about teaching, and to Jahan Ramazani and Stephen Arata for the steady encouragement. For their support in matters large and small during my time in Charlottesville and since then, I am indebted to Alison Booth, Stephen Cushman, Elizabeth Fowler, Bruce Holsinger, Clare Kinney, Victoria Olwell, Cynthia Wall, and the UVA Society of Fellows.

I am grateful for the assistance provided by three Summer Faculty Fellowships at Indiana University Northwest, and to my colleagues in the English Department there, especially Bill Allegrezza, Kate Gustafson, and Doug Swartz. Extra thanks go to Garin Cycholl and Brian O’Camb for sustaining conversations and for their feedback on some of these chapters.

Mahinder Kingra, Mary Kate Murphy, Bethany Wasik, and everyone else at Cornell University Press have been wonderful to work with: helpful, game, and responsive. The comments and suggestions offered by Michael Thurston and an anonymous reader for the press were invaluable in getting this book into its final form, as was Florence Grant’s careful copyediting. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University provided crucial assistance with images. For their help with illustrations, I also wish to thank Kerry Annos at the Barnes Foundation and Emma Darbyshire at the Fitzwilliam Museum. Tremendous thanks to Roger Conover, both for his own work to preserve Mina Loy’s legacy and for permission to quote from her work.

Part of chapter 2 appeared in a slightly different version as "Still Life in Motion: Mortal Form in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse," Twentieth-Century Literature 60, no. 4 (2014): 423–54. Excerpts from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf copyright © 1927 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, renewed 1954 by Leonard Woolf. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Excerpts from Pictures from The Moment and Other Essays by Virginia Woolf copyright © 1948 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, renewed 1976 by Marjorie T. Parsons. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Excerpts from The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume I 1915–1919 by Virginia Woolf published by The Hogarth Press are reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. © 1977. Excerpts from The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume III 1925–1930 by Virginia Woolf published by The Hogarth Press are reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. © 1980. Excerpts from A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume III 1923–1928 by Virginia Woolf published by Chatto & Windus are reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. © 1977. Permission to quote from the work of Virginia Woolf in the e-book has been granted by the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf.

Excerpts from The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, and images of three pages from the first edition of The Balance by Evelyn Waugh copyright © 1927, 1976, and 1980 by Evelyn Waugh, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC. Excerpts from Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh, copyright © 1958, reprinted in the United States by permission of Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Excerpts from Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh (Chapman and Hall 1930, Penguin Books 1938, 1996), copyright © Evelyn Waugh, 1930, notes and introduction copyright © Richard Jacobs, 1996, reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Excerpts from The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh, copyright © 1976, reprinted in the United States by permission of Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Excerpts from The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh (Chapman and Hall 1948, Penguin Books 1951, Penguin Classics 2000), copyright © 1948 by Evelyn Waugh, reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Excerpts from The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh by Evelyn Waugh, copyright © 1998, reprinted in the United States by permission of Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Excerpts from The Balance and Excursion in Reality from The Complete Short Stories by Evelyn Waugh (Penguin Classics 2011), copyright © The Estate of Laura Waugh, 2011, reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

Many friends provided help and inspiration as this project was getting underway and as it was getting finished. Thanks to Emily Richmond Pollock for always believing I could get this done, and for nearly eighteen years of steadfast friendship. Thanks to Emily Hyde, Emily Setina, and Lily Sheehan for numerous talks and emails that helped me over the finish line. Wonderful conversations about visual art and literature with Alix Beeston and Amy Elkins have shaped my thinking, and their clear-eyed commentary significantly improved earlier drafts of these chapters. To Madigan Haley: it is a joy to think with you, and your generous friendship and careful reading have been indispensable in helping me to finish this book and to embark on new projects. Thanks to Kyle Frisina for being one of my favorite people to read with since the fourth grade: it is a pleasure and a privilege to have shared the making of this grownup book with you, and it has benefitted enormously from your sharp intelligence and your well-timed words of encouragement.

Thanks to my extended families—Greg Chetel and Carolyn Graybeal, Lauren Chetel and John Lawson, Evelyn Graybeal, David Kronig, Stephen Nantier, Dick and Robin Porter, Russell and Ansley Campbell-Porter, Marguerite and West Bishop—for putting up with my work and for being proud of me. To my parents, Scott and Cappy Lewis: I owe you more than I could possibly account for here. Thank you for the unwavering love and support, and for making me a reader in the first place. To my sister Amanda, the instigator, motivator, and eternally buoying morning conversationalist: you are awesome, and I would care only half as much about art without your influence. Dan Chetel’s cooking and driving are the dynamic forces that have made this book possible. This book is better—as am I—because of your love: thank you, Dan, for everything.

Introduction

Reformulating Modernism

Now undoubtedly we are under the dominion of painting, declares Virginia Woolf in a 1925 essay simply titled Pictures. Were all modern paintings to be destroyed, she goes on, a critic of the twenty-fifth century would be able to deduce from the works of Proust alone the existence of Matisse, Cézanne, Derain, and Picasso; he would be able to say with those books before him that painters of the highest originality and power must be covering canvas after canvas, squeezing tube after tube, in the room next door.¹ The essay is, on the one hand, a rehearsal of the agon between literature and painting: Woolf pronounces a writer whose writing appeals mainly to the eye to be a bad writer (174), and she insists that painters lose their power directly they attempt to speak (176). Each artist should pursue the effects native to her medium, she implies, and not attempt to borrow the properties of other art forms. Perhaps this is why Woolf’s assertion of painting’s supreme status is predicated on an example that describes its annihilation—and why even in her future critic’s reimagination of painting, it remains separated from the world of writing, confined to the room next door with its tubes of pigment.

Yet Pictures is also, on the other hand, an invitation to think about intermedial exchange and influence. Woolf observes that no painter is more provocative to the literary sense than Paul Cézanne, because his pictures are so audaciously and provocatively content to be paint that the very pigment, they say, seems to challenge us, to press on some nerve, to stimulate, to excite (175–76). A Cézanne landscape stirs words in us where we had not thought words to exist; suggests forms where we had never seen anything but thin air (176). That Woolf lights on Cézanne is hardly surprising, since he was a favorite of the painters in her circle. What is curious is that Woolf fixates on the materiality of painting—a Cézanne is just paint, and is happy about it—and signals that somehow painters’ increased medium specificity is exactly what generates writing, what produces form. The novelist’s encounter with Cézanne is exhilarating, even vaguely erotic—evidence that the modernist writer is invigorated by The Loves of the Arts (173). Probably some professor has written a book on the subject, says Woolf to open her essay, but it has not come our way (173). This is that book.

It is extremely difficult, Woolf admits, to put one’s finger on the precise spot where paint makes itself felt in modernist writing (173). This book argues that we can locate that spot by acknowledging the provocations of Cézanne: if painting stirs words and suggests forms, then those words and forms demand our attention. To be more precise: painting makes itself felt in modernism’s literary forms, in modernism’s fascination with form itself. Here I expand my claim beyond the territory marked out by Woolf, who distinguishes painting as the art of the modern, just as sculpture influenced Greek literature, music Elizabethan, architecture the English of the eighteenth century (173). This book shows how the visual and plastic arts of the early twentieth century—painting, yes, but also sculpture, film, and photography—excite literature, shaping what we call modernism.

In one regard, mine is not a radical claim. Modernism has long been understood as a particularly active period for interarts exchange, and recent interventions have made clear exactly how deeply modernism engaged with new and popular media from film to radio and phonography.² But it is an argument that depends for its force upon a new and more specific understanding of what this exchange and engagement look like—on a detailed, expansive account of the encounter between literature and visual and plastic media in the first half of the twentieth century. To be sure, these encounters are biographical and collaborative, as when we think about Woolf’s interactions with the visual artists of the Bloomsbury group. Many similar personal connections can be traced in the references to fine-art objects and descriptions of real artworks scattered throughout modernist texts, such as Gertrude Stein’s anecdotes about her portrait painted by Pablo Picasso. All the writers at the heart of this study—Woolf, Stein, Henry James, Mina Loy, and Evelyn Waugh—were intimately familiar with the arts that surrounded them. Woolf was the sister of a painter and the close friend of several others; Stein, a famous salon host; and James, a notable author of art criticism. Both Loy and Waugh trained as visual artists before they ever became writers. They all went to the cinema. And precisely for this reason, we cannot limit our location of intermedial influence only to those spots where we find artworks name-checked. Modernist intermediality extends beyond biography and beyond ekphrasis, and visual and plastic media can make themselves felt without reference to preexisting, definable artworks. They do so, as this book demonstrates, in visual motifs, evocations of specific genres (such as the painted still life), and considerations of how we experience art (the sonic aspect of viewing a film in a theater, or the temporal dimension of viewing a sculpted object in the round).

To present a finely textured description of these and other modes of intermediality is both to read literature more closely and to be fully cognizant of the histories and conventions belonging to nonliterary arts, as these writers were. For that reason, I take Woolf’s colloquial synesthesia seriously (even to the point of reading her highly visual essay against the grain): when nonliterary media can make themselves felt in the work of modernist writers, then it is not only the eye that has fertilised their thought, but other senses, too (174). This book therefore emphasizes visual art alongside three-dimensional, plastic art and modes of encountering art that involve touch, hearing, and other senses. My attention to what is not exclusively visual, or not visual at all, seeks to address the neglect of these art forms in recent years, when visuality has become a key approach to modernist intermediality.³ Similarly, by embracing a range of old and newer nonliterary media—sculpture, painting, photography, and cinema—this book complements recent studies focused only on new media and technologies and simultaneously revises earlier studies limited only to the arts.⁴

This book shows how such an expanded, nuanced sense of modernist intermediality produces an altogether different understanding of modernist form from the one that circulates today. Literary critics have no difficulty recognizing that poets such as Ezra Pound heave over the conventions of verse by break[ing] the pentameter, isolating the image, or fracturing the epic.⁵ Nor is it controversial to remark James Joyce’s dilation of a single day out to the length of a novel, or, from an art historian’s perspective, to note the collective turn toward abstraction, as cubism, futurism, and constructivism pursue the possibility of nonrepresentational, nonobjective art.⁶ These and other specific examples of modernists’ challenges to received forms are easily articulated and readily accepted.

By contrast, the notion that modernism itself is a period of exceptional formal experimentation and investment is acknowledged and then sidestepped. Often, the idea is redescribed, as modernism becomes commensurate with a strict formalism that scholars need to reject or revise. As Mark Goble observes, rigorously formalist assessments of early-twentieth-century art and literature, which nobody has much championed for years, still manage to inform a model of modernism that persists as an object of skepticism and disfavor in modernist studies: an aesthetic of pristine self-regard and hypertrophied opacity that denies the historical conditions and politics of the period and assumes that the work of art should never permit itself merely to communicate with its audience.⁷ Method and object, in other words, have come to inform each other: old-fashioned methodology created a modernism in its own image, and now both kinds of formalism—critical practice and artistic style—have together fallen into disrepute. Such skepticism and disfavor are evident in the series of descriptors that critics use to elucidate the relationship between modernism and form. Urmila Seshagiri, for instance, refers to the longstanding modernist worship of form and the wonted sacredness of literary form within modernism, a movement she defines as the generation of authors who esteemed form to the near-exclusion of other considerations.⁸ Both these scholars expertly turn away from the models of modernism as formalism that they invoke. Seshagiri elaborates the defeat of form within a text that exemplifies late modernism’s imbrication with incipient postcolonial writing. And again pivoting away from the aesthetic, Goble pursues the possibilities of communication that emerge from modernism’s attraction to the idea of the medium—an attraction that he assures us need not be an impoverished aesthetic reifying an expired formalism and repudiating, in advance, those histories that have returned to modernism with a rightful vengeance.⁹

The problem with form and formalism on the basis of these accounts is clear. Form blocks out a clear view of other considerations writers may have had; formalism prevents scholars from contending with historical conditions and politics. Within modernist studies, formalism occupies a position opposite historicism and opposite political commitment, even opposite its traditional counterterms, content and matter. As the current conversation would indicate, form stands opposite what really matters.

There is, it turns out, a historical reason for formalism’s disrepute. As Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz outline in their introduction to Bad Modernisms, early twentieth-century appraisals of modernism stressed its confrontational quality, its affront and antagonism toward inherited standards of value for literary works, including approbation of the social order and uncritical endorsement of traditional forms.¹⁰ In this account, modernism casts itself as a youthful rebel, rudely discourteous to the styles, hierarchies, and customs that it inherits. But while modernism is initially bound up with bad times, bad feelings, and bad manners, its status is quite different by the middle of the twentieth century, when modernism’s various affronts have been enshrined by those educational institutions—the art museum, the university—charged with elucidating and transmitt[ing] modernist values as twentieth-century standards.¹¹ By the midcentury, then, modernism is middle-aged, enjoying comfortable institutional security. Within this setting, T. S. Eliot, the New Critics, and their heirs show how modernism was not at war against but rather continuous with tradition and thereby engineer a transformation in modernism’s reputation, from bad outsider to far-too-good insider.¹² Rebellion is converted into dignity and respectability—even doctrine. Thus modernism begins to suggest a persistent orthodoxy rather than a deliberate challenge, and as Michael Levenson summarizes, modernism arrives at the beginning of the twenty-first century [. . .] circumscribed as a history of techniques, a species of formalism.¹³

Modernist studies as a field—and especially the new modernist studies—defines itself against this model of modernism. Just as Bad Modernisms, an inaugural volume for the field, aims to recognize modernism’s original badness (or to make a goody-two-shoes modernism bad again), the field as a whole seeks to revive modernism’s buried histories and suppressed politics—or to refashion modernist studies from a passé formalism into an enlivened historicism. The field accomplishes this goal in two interrelated ways, first by redefining the word modernism and transforming the term from an evaluative and stylistic designation to a neutral and temporal one.¹⁴ Stripped of any trappings of class or snobbery, modernism now has no necessary relation to high culture or to difficulty, and the term has even been divested of its aesthetic meaning.

Second, under this banner, scholars have made repeated historicist interventions that seek to complicate or explode notions of modernism as formalist totality. As Christopher Bush puts it, the field’s dominant tendency is to valorize historical context against that aesthetic autonomy said to have been valued in the bad old days.¹⁵ In its present incarnation, modernist studies is "a field that defined itself as a break from a broadly New Critical consensus toward a New Historicist consensus, bridging the great divide of low and high cultures and sending scholars to the archives of the BBC, the FBI, and 1920s Vogue.¹⁶ With the field thus expanded vertically (to embrace low, middlebrow, and high culture) and horizontally (to encompass a wider geography), scholars of modernism can study virtually all cultural production from the first four decades of the twentieth century (and even this date range is artificially limited).¹⁷ Bringing new texts and artworks to light, important work in modernist studies frequently attends to its objects within particular contexts: critics locate and situate rather than explicate or evaluate. More culturally attuned and historically responsive understandings of the period have thus replaced old-fashioned, ‘purely’ formalist definitions of modernism."¹⁸ And as modernism has come to mean history, not form, so too has form been transmuted into archive, into medium.

At the present moment, then, scholars of modernism generally invoke form with little fanfare (if they invoke it at all) and simultaneously disdain formalism. This maneuver is especially crucial to those studies invested in intermedial examinations of modernism and in those topics immediately adjacent to form, such as medium specificity and aesthetic autonomy.¹⁹ Here it is especially obvious that modernists’ formal credos double down on the turn-of-the-century investment in the aesthetic as a separate sphere, as when Clive Bell defines significant form as lines and colours combined in a particular way to arouse specifically aesthetic emotions; when T. S. Eliot claims that the poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium; when Clement Greenberg tracks the avant-garde’s revolt against subject matter as the arts are hunted back to their mediums.²⁰ Taken together, these credos offer, at best, a strict formalism. At worst, such a formalism seems morally or politically suspect—so sequestered from the human that art becomes reified and inert, with the politics that underwrite its autonomy tending to fascism. And with modernism still lingering in living memory—unlike the more distant pasts of earlier literary periods—there is perhaps a more acutely perceived risk in dredging up its formal commitments.

It is exactly this conflation between bad formalism and modernism, I contend, that has kept the new modernist studies mostly at arm’s length from the new formalist studies. Although the two fields are roughly coeval, with precursor studies in the 1990s and a more significant presence after 2000, the new modernist studies has focused its attention on a global, multimedia expansion of the archive, while the new formalist studies has been elaborated in relation to earlier literary fields such as Romanticism.²¹ This book joins these two approaches together and shows them to be mutually beneficial. I aim both to insert an account of modernism within the new formalist studies (where most discussions address nineteenth-century and earlier texts) and to demonstrate the utility of new formalist methods within modernist studies (where theories of media and visual culture dominate). Specifically, I propose to bring the insights of the new formalist studies to bear on an intermedially defined modernism. Doing so, I argue, helps us to see that any formalist phobia is ill-founded, for two primary reasons.

First, as we have seen, formalism’s bad reputation conjures up exclusionary critical practices and immovable critical objects, an aloofness from politics and from history. Formalists are, as W. J. T. Mitchell so evocatively writes, either drudges who spend their days counting syllables, measuring line lengths, and weighing emphases, or decadent aesthetes who waste their time celebrating beauty and other ineffable, indefinable qualities of works of art.²² The new formalist studies has revised this picture so that reading for form, as the title of a key essay collection has it, is no longer synonymous with mere accounting or with unthinking reverence: rather, increased sensitivity to the complexity of literary form can attune us to its various and surprising work, its complex relation to traditions, and its interaction with extra-literary culture.²³ That such a program—if it indeed it is a program, since the new formalist studies remains a diffuse field—is highly compatible with the work that scholars of modernism have been doing should be obvious.²⁴

Indeed, the handful of exceptions to the generalized formalist phobia in modernist studies makes this compatibility plain. In the early years of the new modernist studies, Jesse Matz, for one, examined the impression’s unique capacity to generate form by focusing hope for the kind of unity that has long been the aspiration of the ‘aesthetic.’²⁵ Taking advantage of how the impression promise[s] totality without quite delivering it in an unmediated or unadulterated way, literary impressionism in the modernist period engage[s] before the fact in [. . .] feminist and neo-marxist forms of critique and thereby offers a highly productive record of the linkage, in representation, between perception and politics.²⁶ Modernist studies may have trended away from the formalist leanings that Matz thus demonstrated in 2001, but he has retained a special concern for aesthetics and, in 2016, traced impressionism from its origin as a late-nineteenth-century period style of art to its contemporary manifestations in a variety of forms of discourse and visuality.²⁷ By explicating and historicizing the impression—by seeking both to explain what really makes contemporary culture impressionistic and to redefine impressionism in terms of its fuller life as a transhistorical mode—Matz aims, as in his earlier work, to combine the new modernist studies’ contextually sensitive approach with highly specific, aestheticizing readings.²⁸

David James has likewise offered a view of modernist form refracted through contemporary literature. Recent fiction, he has shown, reinvigorates modernist techniques, especially the device of interior focalisation, which remains useful for evoking the sensation of social worlds.²⁹ This widespread revival demonstrates form’s political and ethical ramifications, since contemporary novelists prompt critical understandings of the worlds they depict and make form into a process of participatory engagement with the reader.³⁰ James is more explicit in his formalist commitment than Matz—and more willing to use the word form—and he recognizes that his insistence upon the centrality of the particularities of form might not sit well with the contextualizing impulses of the New Modernist Studies.³¹ James therefore defends his project and his practice of close reading with the assertion that a more thorough comprehension of the interaction between ‘technicist’ understandings of how fiction operates and the new modes of attention it demands [. . .] is surely the foundation for obtaining a firmer grasp of the novel’s capacity for critical work.³² Thus James, like Matz, makes the case that formalist reading is compatible with the political and social ambitions of the new modernist studies.

In this regard, their work aligns with one of the primary interventions of the new formalist studies, which has been to demonstrate repeatedly that formalism and historicism are not as far apart as we might think. Susan J. Wolfson, for one, has shown how Lord Byron’s heroic couplets, like other Romantic poetic structures, test the force of dominant forms (social and literary) in the poetics and politics of opposition.³³ In the traditional, ostensibly rigid form of the couplet, Byron stages questions about subjective autonomy, systems of political power, and protocols of gender, and only by attending to his forms can we see how the energies of freedom and eruption are set against the demands of constraint and conservatism.³⁴ Wolfson is the primary proponent of an historically informed formalist criticism, and by investigating how formalist poetics and practices can set the grain of aesthetics against dominant ideologies and their contradictions, even as (in the story we hear today) they are shaped by them, she points out that reading for form is congruent with historicist aims.³⁵ Formalist reading can permit the critic to answer questions rooted in historical context and saturated with political and social import. So too can the historicist critic’s desire to consider politics, to critique ideology, to account for context, be enhanced with considerations of the aesthetic. Their separation is a matter of sedimented habits that can be altered, since formalist criticism, either New Critical or post-New Critical, is not necessarily inimical to the analysis of referentiality desired by the historicist.³⁶ The new formalist studies, in fact, is careful to declare certain of its continuities with New Historicism, and to point out New Historicism’s own dependence on formalism.³⁷

No scholar has made this case with more clarity or force than Caroline Levine, who reads Cleanth Brooks against Mary Poovey in order to reveal that where the New Critical Brooks is too little a formalist, the historicizing Poovey is far more a formalist than she is willing to recognize.³⁸ Brooks evinces surprisingly little interest in the conspicuous differences among the forms he invokes, while Poovey shows a profound interest in the power of forms to organize and contain.³⁹ Levine offers this reading in the course of making her case for expanding our usual definition of form in literary studies to include patterns of sociopolitical experience—a move that has the advantage of dissolving the traditionally troubling gap between the form of the literary text and its content and context.⁴⁰ If, as Levine holds, formalist thinking is as valuable to understanding sociopolitical institutions as it is to reading literature, and if forms are at work everywhere, then modernist studies’ rejection of formalism has been shortsighted, or superficial.⁴¹ We have needed formalism, or we have been unconscious formalists, all along.

The second way in which the new formalist studies can assist scholars of modernism has less to do with history and politics and more to do with definitions of form. As Levine’s expansion signals, one of the primary moves in recent formalist work has been to adjust, widen, or multiply the definition(s) of form. Marjorie Levinson notices this phenomenon when she comments that essays in this vein proliferate "synonyms for form (e.g., genre, style, reading, literature, significant literature, the aesthetic, coherence, autonomy)."⁴² Longer studies tend to begin similarly, with extended etymologies or histories of the word form. Levine uses this tactic at the beginning of her book Forms to highlight how "over many centuries, form has gestured to a series of conflicting, sometimes even paradoxical meanings."⁴³ Angela Leighton makes the same move at the beginning of On Form to illuminate how the word is utterly familiar, yet also unspecific, abstract, aloof. [. . .] One reason for this complexity, even confusion of purpose, is that form, unlike other abstract nouns in English, has a multitude of meanings. There are more than twenty dictionary definitions of the word.⁴⁴ Ali Smith enumerates many of these definitions in a lecture also titled On Form:

Form, from the Latin forma, meaning shape. Shape, a mold; something that holds or shapes; a species or kind; a pattern or type; a way of being; order, regularity, system. It once meant beauty but now that particular meaning’s obsolete. It means style and arrangement, structural unity in music, literature, painting, etc.; ceremony; behavior; condition of fitness or efficiency. It means the inherent nature of an object, that in which the essence of a thing consists. It means a long seat, or a bench, or a school class, and also the shape a hare makes in the grass with its body for a bed.⁴⁵

That form is so slippery a concept, so multifaceted a word, should ease the minds of those concerned about its reification. As Smith’s list makes clear, form has never belonged only to the discourse of aesthetics.⁴⁶ And if the common element in all these definitions is that "‘form’ always indicates an arrangement of elements—an ordering, patterning, or shaping," then we should see already that these arrangements are not necessarily the totalizing structures that are so frequently derided.⁴⁷

As Levine especially has made plain, not all forms are equal, nor do all operate in the same way. She uses the term affordance to call our attention to the fact that each shape or pattern, social or literary, lays claim to a limited range of potentialities, a set of latent uses or actions.⁴⁸ Different forms, in other words, can do different things, and so we ought to specify the particular organizational capacity that a given form enacts when we discuss it: much of the meaning of a form derives from how its theoretical capabilities are put into action. Some forms, like the enclosure or the bounded whole, can seem to confirm the suspicions of modernist scholars by displaying a willingness to impose boundaries, to imprison, to create inclusions and exclusions.⁴⁹ This kind of perimeter might shut out history, politics, or context and thereby establish the work of art as a self-contained, autotelic art object. But these are by no means the only affordances of such forms, or of form in general. Although form does constrain, and although it can be hard to see its other affordances, these other affordances are crucial: forms can be at once containing, plural, overlapping, portable, and situated.⁵⁰ Form, in other words, describes many possible actions and relations that can obtain at the same time, or within the same social or cultural sphere. Literary texts, in particular, have the power to set forms against one another in disruptive and aleatory as well as rigidly containing ways.⁵¹ Distinct forms may work against each other, or in concert with each other, and any account of the full formal complexity of a literary work should acknowledge these shifting dynamics. As Smith puts it, in its apparent fixity, form is all about change; form, the shaper and molder, acts like the other thing called mold, endlessly breeding forms from forms.⁵²

These qualities of form are particularly clear in cases of ekphrasis, as Brian Glavey has recently demonstrated. Characterized by its imitative, generative nature, ekphrasis is for Glavey a fundamentally queer mode, in that it produces illusions of iconic form at the same time that its attempts at mimesis must always fail.⁵³ To think of the queerness of form, Glavey writes, is to recognize that, despite its association with stability and closure, it always also involves a sort of identity crisis.⁵⁴ Glavey’s conception of form therefore emphasizes its multiplicity: chimerical and unstable, form is for him a vision of impossible coherence produced via iterations of imitation and failure.⁵⁵ And formalism, accordingly, cannot be synonymous with the exaltation of the art object, nor with the sequestration of art away from the world. To the extent that ekphrasis is inherently formalist, it demonstrates that we should understand formalism as a relational rather than an ontological category: a way of attaching to objects rather than a testament to their autonomy.⁵⁶ Tracing multiple, sometimes conflicting, types of attachment, Glavey’s argument is congenial to my own. Our accounts of modernist form itself are rather different, yet in our shared attempt to wrestle with the complexities and contradictions of modernist form—our shared desire to replace the tendency to read modernist formalisms in all-or-nothing terms, as either as promising redemption or transcendence, on the one hand, or as symptoms of ideology or professional prestige, on the other—I take Glavey’s sensitive accounts of intermedial modernist form as exemplary.⁵⁷

Indeed, as I have outlined, form’s mobility and malleability are the qualities that the new formalist scholarship is only just beginning to articulate and explain, even if the play of form in cultures of reading has always been nothing if not mobile, variable, unpredictable.⁵⁸ Accounting for these affordances requires a responsive, flexible formalism—just the kind of method best suited to engaging with the wide range of formal experiments in modernism. Employing my own such method in this book—a blend of close reading, historical analysis, and art and media criticism—I aim to describe something akin to the moldy—or molding—form that Smith calls up: a kind of modernist form that is surprisingly dynamic. To be clear: like those scholars who eschew formalism, I am not interested in returning modernist studies to the ahistorical, apolitical posture of the mid-to-late twentieth century, nor do I want the pendulum to swing fully from historicism back to formalism. (As we have already seen, historicism and formalism may not be so distant from each other anyway.) It is my contention, rather, that an account of modernism’s many intermedial forms is crucial to but missing from the new formalist studies.⁵⁹ Furthermore, the new modernist studies’ expansion of the archive and excellent historical work on new media need to be complemented by a reevaluation of modernism’s forms as forms, by a reassessment of modernism’s formalism instead of a wholesale rejection of it.

I have hinted that dictionary deep dives are symptomatic of writing on form, that there is something about form that sends literary critics rushing back to the dictionary, to first principles. The first principles that anchor this study are three formal explanations or paradigms that have long grounded our understanding of modernism: spatial form, pure form, and formlessness. The first two categories represent critical commonplaces—one literary, the other art historical—about modernist form at its most orthodox and ahistorical; the third refers to the hazard that arises when that orthodoxy is abandoned and history reenters the picture. Most familiar to literary scholars of modernism is the spatial-form thesis. Its influence dates from 1945, when Joseph Frank noted the suspension of narrative progress and syntactic flow in the work of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, and asserted that these features defined a new spatial form in modern literature.⁶⁰ Though Frank was not himself a New Critic, his argument coincided with their interest in aligning poetic meaning with a synchronic structure in some metaphorical space, where the poem’s energies are contained in matrices of architectonic tension.⁶¹ Frank’s theory of spatial form managed to make the modernist novel into something like a very large poem, a crystalline structure that could be apprehended all at once in a moment of insight that followed reading.⁶² Literature could be conceived as having a motionless, atemporal form like those named in the titles of two exemplary New Critical volumes, Cleanth Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn and W. K. Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon—titles that testify to the midcentury desire to endow literature with the spatiality of an art object [. . .] as an attempt to preserve text from context.⁶³

The spatial-form thesis thus operates at the nexus