Ross Wilson. Critical Forms: Forms of Literary Criticism, 1750–2020

Ross Wilson’s Critical Forms is a book about ‘different critical priorities and different critical personalities’. Disturbed by what he calls the ‘essayification’ of contemporary criticism—its flattening, that is, into a single genre of writing—Wilson seeks to reilluminate forms assumed, forgotten, dismissed, or maligned.

The title’s chiastic prioritization of form is provocative, pricking up the ears of those invested in the rise and fall of formalism’s reputation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is not, Wilson is clear, ‘a story about a form’; it is, he concedes, ‘a story about criticism in which the determining activity of form is crucial’. Whether literary criticism appears as a preface, a review or a dialogue is not arbitrary, Critical Forms argues, but shapes the tone, angle, conduct, and order of its ideas, permitting a distinctive orientation to the text which is its subject. Wilson’s project is really a gathering of the activities afforded by different forms of literary criticism: a survey of the verbs which might be attached to that act of writing about texts. Wilson, like Doug Battersby, Angela Leighton, and Caroline Levine elsewhere, parades the agency of form, confronting literary critics with its vigour within their own writing.

It is this conviction about the creative activity of literary-critical form which explains Wilson’s unease with the language of ‘creative criticism’ that formulation applied to a range of practices which experiment with the possibilities for critical writing. It is ‘the tacit assumption […]’ of an opposition between ‘sceptical critique’ and ‘inventive practice’, which bothers him, and which Critical Forms seeks to disprove, as the chapters do not recreate but return to familiar forms of criticism, coaxing, unravelling, and clarifying their personalities and attendant critical priorities. The preface, selection, review, lecture, dialogue, letter, and life-writing are not Wilson’s own radical recreations, nor even the experiments of contemporary critics struck by a crisis of the humanities, but standard versions of the critical act which Wilson salvages from invisibility (or inaudibility, as he notes in the case of the lecture), as he makes a case for critical writing as a major nonfictional genre. If ‘Dialogues’ seems to stand out as the least familiar and most experimental, perhaps this tells us more about the fate of that form in intellectual history than about Wilson’s choices.

Wilson’s is a project shared with Jonathan Kramnick, whose almost simultaneously published Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies has provided a convenient pairing. But it is a project aligned, too, I think, with Karolina Watroba’s method in both Mann’s Magic Mountain: World Literature and Closer Reading (2022) and Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka (2024). There, arguing that attention to the reception of these literary giants can permit a rereading of key moments in their fiction, Watroba sifts through fan letters, guidebooks, souvenirs, tweets, and Korean translations. Although Watroba’s explicit focus on non-professional readers is at odds with Wilson’s desire to return to forms degraded by the fraught and frenzied competition for disciplinary status (see his introductory engagement with Stefan Collini), her commitment to not writing off forms of response as trivial or trite resonates with Wilson’s determination to re-encounter forms dismissed as formulaic or boring.

There are moments when this framing risks nostalgia. The huge historical scope of the project, covering critical writing from the mid-eighteenth to the early twenty-first century, is for Wilson both a luxury and a problem. Wilson’s ability to lead his readers between literary periods almost without them noticing is compelling, but his coverage is inevitably uneven, short-changing contemporary criticism and its engagements with these forms. Certainly, his account of The Ferrante Letters (2020) and its time-warping ‘collective criticism’ is thrillingly constructed—but this reading is surrounded (not insidiously, but at least overwhelmingly) by readings of William Empson and Samuel Richardson. This is particularly striking in the final chapter on ‘Life-Writing’, which might have been enriched by a discussion of the bibliomemoir trend, and its negotiation of, or indecision about, the priority of autobiographical narrative or critical insight. Perhaps the avoidance of this material can be chalked up to a preference for shorter forms; attention to book-length criticism might have allowed an engagement with figures such as Mary Cappello, whose Life Breaks In (a mood almanack) (2016) offers a fascinating counterpoint to the earlier life-writing examples on which Wilson draws. Cappello does appear, briefly, in the chapter on ‘Lectures’, but I found myself craving a lengthier engagement. The publication of Lecture (2020) as part of Transit Books’ COVID-activated ‘Undelivered Lectures’ series speaks to Wilson’s interest in the gap between verbal and oral forms; the richness and precision of Cappello’s syntax as she describes the lecturer’s droning voice as a backing track for his audience’s thinking would, I think, have delighted Wilson the close reader.

The joy of his close readings cannot be overstated. Wilson’s ability to needle language, to pun with it, to unhinge its mechanics and to rehinge them in his own sentences, is wonderful. His reading of Johnson’s preface to the 1765 edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare deserves a special mention, as does his river-Musk (Amazon) pun as he quotes Steve Wasserman on reviews, and his response to Erving Goffman’s description of the itching, fidgeting, flies-down lecturer. Time and again, Wilson’s reader is delighted and surprised by his turn of phrase; she finds herself at the end of an argument different to the one with which she began, but whose ending makes total, urgent sense.

It is eerie to write about a book which has already interrogated the standard for that very response. I toyed with various forms for this review, each hoping to avoid that despisedness that Wilson diagnoses as characteristic of the form’s reception at the start of his chapter on ‘Reviews’. In one life, this is an Edmund-Wilson-style starred rating of Critical Forms against other academic monographs published in the same year. In another life (harder to claim that I have avoided) it takes seriously that same Wilson’s instructions to his Princeton students to smuggle their own writerly interests into other institutionally desired forms Wilson articulates the formal pressure on his own writing in the conclusion, that necessary if brief experimental piece which, he tells us in the introduction, ‘has amused, informed, annoyed, and mildly worried different readers of this book in typescript – including myself at different moments – in equal measure’. The resulting piece, entitled ‘The Winding-Up’ after Charlotte Brontë’s description of the final chapter of Shirley, is a dialogue between ‘Ross’ and ‘Wilson’: it reminds me of Anthony Burgess’s metafictional self-dialogue in Mozart and the Wolf Gang (1991). The critic’s self divides to ask about the outcomes of the project’s portrait of criticism; to prompt the inclusion of contemporary digital experiments; to point out contradiction and hypocrisy. By writing in this form, Wilson is able to stage rather than retreat into the inevitable inconclusion of a project dedicated to plurality. As he acknowledges in the introduction, ‘“monograph” […] glowers across at “variety”’; surely a monograph’s conclusion intensifies that glare.

Am I ‘amused, informed, annoyed, [or] mildly worried’? I think, in the end, that ‘Winding Up’ makes the book. As he finally acknowledges the irony of his position—a critic writing about criticism—and involves himself in one of the very forms which have stood as his critical subject, Wilson convinces me that nostalgia has been dissolved. Critical Forms emerges, in these final moments, as taking seriously critical conventions in order to recalibrate the very activity of criticism, thereby, through this gathering and analysing, creating a space for future experiments. This is not the history of a bygone genre. It is, as the introduction insists, ‘a story about criticism’: a story conscious of, and open to, its continuation by critics to come.