Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present

by Dorothy J. Hale

In recent decades, literary critics have praised novel theory for abandoning its formalist roots and defining the novel as a vehicle of social discourse. The old school of novel theory has long been associated with Henry James; the new school allies itself with the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. In this book, the author argues that actually it was the compatibility of Bakhtin with James that prompted Anglo-American theorists to embrace Bakhtin with such enthusiasm. Far from rejecting James, in other words, recent novel theorists have only refined James's foundational recharacterization of the novel as the genre that does not simply represent identity through its content but actually instantiates it through its form. Social Formalism demonstrates the persistence of James's theoretical assumptions from his writings and those of his disciple Percy Lubbock through the critique of Jamesian theory by Roland Barthes, Wayne Booth, and Gérard Genette to the current Anglo-American assimilation of Bakhtin. It also traces the expansion of James's influence, as mediated by Bakhtin, into cultural and literary theory. Jamesian social formalism is shown to help determine the widely influential theories of minority identity expounded by such important cultural critics as Barbara Johnson and Henry Louis Gates. Social Formalism thus explains why a tradition that began by defining novelistic value as the formal instantiation of identity ends by defining minority political empowerment as aestheticized self-representation.

Genres: Theory

264 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1998

Reviews

[Justin Evans · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really, if your book is subtitled 'The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present,' it should be much longer than 225 pages. On the other hand, it felt *incredibly* long.

I'm guessing that this is a dissertation-turned-book, because it has an interesting and much-needed argument (that the Jamesian tradition is still really influential, not despite but because of the influence of Barthes, Booth and Bakhtin); it makes its points clearly but many times; and it hides those clearly made points in a mass of mind-numbingly dull, occasionally obfuscatory summary of the aforementioned theorists. Really, nobody needs eighty pages to summarize Bakhtin.

The book is also odd, because it's almost impossible to tell whether Hale values the tradition of 'Social Formalism' that she describes, or not. She describes its 'subjectivist' bases as a 'threat' to study of the novel; she also seems keen to defend her theorists from attack by others. Maybe it's just PhD burnout, whereby all of us get really irritated at the people we're working on, even though we fundamentally agree with them.

In any case, this would have made for three great articles. As a book, it suffers from the usual English-department 'Marxism,' which bears roughly the same relation to Marx that Hollywood romantic comedies bear to English Romanticism. And if she hadn't been so keen to point out the 'contradictions' in the thinking of people as smart as she is (most egregiously, the 'contradiction' between subjectivity and social constructivism, which was decontradicted by Hegel, then Feuerbach, then Marx, then Durkheim, then Weber, then the Frankfurt School and so on and so on), this would've read much more easily, I suspect.

On the upside, it's very well written *for a book of 90s literary criticism.* This is like saying "book x is very short for three volume Victorian novel," but still, it must have taken some effort on her part, and I'm thankful for it.