Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present

In Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present, Tom Eyers writes, “Humanities scholarship in the United States and United Kingdom is perhaps more fragmented now than at any time in recent memory” (33). We might think of this fragmentation in terms of the ongoing culture wars, accounts of critical history that continually condemn the past in favor of the new, the never-ending supply of “theoretical subcultures” (33) competing to fill the void left after the demise of the romantic–modernist literary assumptions underwriting the paradigms that governed criticism through the 1980s, and of course, a job market that each year brings the university sponsorship of literary studies one step closer to extinction. Responding to this context, Eyers “propose[s] a new formalist apparatus for thinking literature” (33) that seems to return to the problem Paul de Man identifies in Allegories of Reading: the inability to move beyond the challenge...