Faulkner and the New Formalism

I just spent a little time with a recent essay on New Formalism, an uncomfortable label for recent critical work that tries to pay more attention to the literary form of a work. For the last twenty years or so, literary scholarship has focused mostly on New Historicism and other forms of cultural and/or ideological criticism. That is, literary scholars spend their research time trying to uncover ways in which the historical and cultural context of a work made its way into the work itself, or how the ideology of a period is instantiated in a work. Very little attention is paid to the shape of the work. I use that word reluctantly, I should say, because it's a little misleading to talk about a work of print in three-dimensional terms more fitting for sculpture. But it's a useful way to think about something like what a novel is.

I would like to say that this article does little other than to describe a "movement," or a kind of trend in some recent critical work. I don't think that it tells me much about how to go about doing it. I want to ask questions about what Faulkner does to the novel itself, and I want to think about how he changed the reader's (and the writer's) expectations for what a novel really is. But I'm not sure yet about the best way to do that. It's too much like an influence study, which is so intangible as to be meaningless.