Toward Formalism 2.0: From Aristotle to Levine

This essay examines the on-going discourses around the notion of literary structural form or how form is structured; it suggests problematizing the conventional theories and perspectives around this idea be a part of furthering them into the next level of teaching a novel idea of form in literature. In so doing, its argument aims to explore the limit and scope of the discourse concerning the artistic form of literature in the twenty-first century. With this dual purpose, it investigates the traditional discourse around the concept of form, particularly from Aristotle through modernism to post-structuralism since the Greek philosopher with his critical position has become unknowingly posited as a forerunner of modern organic form. I illustrate this case by adducing the case of a poem by William Wordsworth and different critical observations of it. At the same time, I argue that the recent argument of Caroline Levine in particular should be proffered as an example of the potential subject of form in literature. Levine expands the typified boundary of the literary forms beyond the level of the text itself. This article tries to demonstrate the rising notion that form in the study of literature in the twentieth-first century is involved with interactive relationality or in-betweenness.