Formalist literary criticism fetishizes form and erases real-world activism

Evidence

When literary studies becomes uncoupled from worldly concerns, we frequently witness, alongside an excessive regard for ahistoric philosophy, an accompanying historically indifferent formalism that treats the study of aesthetics as the literary scholar’s definitive calling. Questions of social change and power become projected onto questions of form so that formal categories such as rupture, irony, and bricolage assume an inflated agency through what Anne McClintock has called “a fetishism of form:”The question is whether it is sufficient to locate agency in the internal fissures of discourse. [This] runs the risk of what can be called a fetishism of form: the projection of historical agency onto formal abstractions that are anthropomorphized and given a life of their own. Here abstractions become historical actors; discourse desires, dreams and does the work of colonialism while also ensuring its demise. In the process, social relations between humans appear to metamorphize into structural relations between forms—through a formalist fetishism that effectively elides the messier questions of historical change and social activism. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 88

Categorization

• XREF: Speaks to the reader’s stated purpose to be read primarily for scholar-activist visibility-making; anchors the literature strand’s justification within the polyad. — connects to: Activism without reflection is as unauthentic as verbalism without action — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 258; Claimed literary universality masks class privilege in liberal humanist criticism — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 233; Formalist short-lyric analysis conceals its practitioners’ reactionary class ideology — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 222

Broader Connections

• Claimed literary universality masks class privilege in liberal humanist criticism #expands (0.75) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 233
• Activism without reflection is as unauthentic as verbalism without action #contradicts (0.72) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 258