Race and Other Clichés

Formalism is on the return. The romance with the formal properties of discourse seemed on the rocks for several decades starting in the 1980s when critics had their heads turned away from the literary by cultural studies and the politics of identity. Surely a renewed interest in form does not mean that cultural critique in the twenty-first century will pick up where New Criticism left off. Attention to form once implied an evasion of politics coupled with a retreat to identifiable patterns that gave meaning to literature. In contrast, form today circulates in an expanded sense that includes identity, social role, and political function in addition to the literary artifact. But the question remains how adequately can a “new formalism” grapple with configurations of race, especially since these configurations nowadays appear old, one tired leg of a tired mantra that intoned “race-class-gender” as criteria for evaluating a literary text? Formalists do not declare any hostility to examining race. Rather, these readers privilege form as a set of historically dynamic phenomena that offers alternatives to the putatively programmatic ways race is used in a politics of identity. Thus John Brenkman argues that a methodology that brings race (or gender or class) to the forefront “has nothing to say about” complex matters of the black middle class and distributive justice because identity is too static and fixed to account for the historically mobile nature of class formation (122). Similarly, Ellen Rooney suggests that focus on the thematics of identity produces a “sterile reading practice” that scripts conclusions in advance (30). Such critiques, Rooney’s in particular, are crucial to revitalizing the study of form as a significant tool in understanding social as well as literary texts. But the problem with such critiques is that they often turn out to be merely formal, devoid of the historically and culturally specific promise of a new formalism. For instance, Brenkman provides no example of the “gender/race/class paradigm of identity” that in his mind has flattened the interpretative landscape (122). Nor does Rooney’s opposition of formalism to “various modes of thematization” (a phrase that seems intended to conjure up the thematics of race and other identity categories) offer a historically specific