Speculative Formalism ─ Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present

Speculative Formalism proposes a new theory of form and formalization, with particular reference to literature. Tom Eyers claims that literature works not through any kind of reflection or mimesis, nor through any overrunning of literary forms by their historical contexts or determinants. Rather, he argues that literary texts, insofar as they are able to at least partially break free from their prior determinants and refigure those determinants anew, embody a formal speculative capacity that prevents their final absorption or neutralization by those prior conditions, even as the result may well be stasis or immobility rather than, say, contestation or critique. This capacity will be shown to be as enabling of a transport outward from literature’s seemingly sealed bounds of form and formalism as methods are more regularly assumed to ignore just such a transport, sealing literary language within itself. Speculative Formalism, as a theory of literary form in particular, will identify a shared incompletion across both literary language and its various outsides—materiality, history, politics, nature—that, far from preventing literature from interfacing with those outsides, rather makes such a nonmimetic reference possible, in a connective movement that puts impasses to creative use.

TOM EYERS is an assistant professor of philosophy at Dusquene University in Pittsburgh.