New Formalism of/on The Contemporary: Pennsylvania Literary Journal (Volume 4)

New Formalism is no more a rebaptized deconstruction than it is a reanimated New Criticism. But in a sense one can trace the beginnings of the New Formalism to the work of the only deconstructionist to take on New Historicism directly even as it was just beginning its ascent—J. Hillis Miller. At the end of his 1986 MLA Presidential Address, “The Triumph of Theory,” Miller warns that the material base—that ground of irrefutable referentiality that historicism assumed as a platform on which it could situate its tools of critique—is not beyond questioning. In other words, form subsists even at the pith of matter; one cannot posit or predicate a material base without being aware that this positing is au fond, or at least en passant, formal.