Speculative Formalism

"This thoughtful and ambitious book takes on a host of other critics and issues in contemporary critical debate, staking out a position of its own in a powerful and resourceful discussion. Eyers is an extremely smart and well-informed young critic.” —Jonathan Culler, author of Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature

“Tom Eyers renews our understanding of what formalism can mean in this wide-ranging study, which engages 'the critical present' by situating an incisive critique of contemporary trends such as 'surface' or 'distant' reading within the long arc of critical and philosophical discussions of formalism and form. Threading his way through a rich archive of literary and critical texts by major figures (Ponge, Crane, Stevens; Althusser, Badiou, de Man, Jameson), Eyers recovers an understanding of form as a site of conflict, and shows us how literary self-referentiality, far from constituting a prison house of language, actually opens literature to the world.”   —Marc Redfield, professor of comparative literature and English at Brown University and author of The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror

“Tom Eyers’s brilliant Speculative Formalism . . . is one of the better theory books to have appeared in recent years. . . . The book draws an important line in the sand with respect to reclaiming a space for the interpretation of literature and culture, and makes a claim for the revival of the humanities generally, which have become impoverished of late in the absence of serious hermeneutical reflection and practice.” —Herman Rapaport, Wake Forest University

"This book represents a radical innovation in literature studies." —Aktief