Formalism is a critical position, which contends that the aesthetic, visual, and structural features of a work of art are more important than its connection to wider social phenomena or narratives. In the context of literature, this refers to elements such as narrative, genre, and setting.

However, ‘new formalists’ in literary studies have recently identified ways in which aesthetic forms can be interconnected with social forms, such as companies, classrooms, friend groups, and informal networks. This has led to research exploring what happens when different types of forms meet and how they work together to orient and organise how we understand and imagine the world around us.

Nevertheless, little has been done to understand the interplay between aesthetic forms and the natural world, which is especially critical in our current era of climate crisis. Critics of global capitalism tend to view modernist forms as emerging at the same time as ecological degradation and injustice. They also toggle between large, structural narratives, such as capitalism and patriarchy, and the granular details of lived experience without bridging the gaps between these scales.

The necessity of bridging those gaps is one of the key challenges for literary criticism today. Professor Phillips asks: How can we better identify the links between aesthetic and ecological forms so we can learn from them, and ensure that literary studies helps navigate climate change?

First, he argues that it is useful to recognise the close similarities between material conditions and aesthetic forms. Doing so would allow scholars of modernism to reconsider how aesthetic and social forms have framed narratives of lived experience.

Next, Professor Phillips outlines what it might look like in practice to ask formalist questions about ecological objects. He argues that it would involve injecting formalism with the materialist vocabulary of human and nonhuman agency, which refers to the idea that aspects of the natural world have an agency that does not fit into human-centric narratives. This would enable us to recognise the capacity ecological objectives have for co-creation with cultural forms. Professor Phillips calls this ‘formalist materialism’. 

This approach is not intended to explore the ontologies of nonhuman matter, nor anthropomorphise ecological objects. It is not, in other words, about imagining what it is like to be a tree, or about personifying nonhumans. Rather, it recognises the complex, multi-faceted role of ecology in shaping stories, mythologies, and figures of speech about the material world.

Professor Phillips draws on Dr Anahid Nersessian’s work to explore the benefits and pitfalls of this approach. Nersessian’s new formalist reading of eighteenth-century literature helps reveal the limits of human understanding at a given historical moment. She argues we should guard against projecting present-day knowledge and anxieties onto the past. Professor Phillips makes a similar argument about early-twentieth century literature. Acknowledging the lack of ecological knowledge in that time helps deepen our appreciation for both the continuities and disparities between their world and ours today.

Professor Phillips also cites Dr Stacy Alaimo’s work on material feminism. Dr Alaimo explores how socio-political powers use binary conceptions of nature to marginalise minorities. She complicates and destabilises typically gendered binaries, such as ‘nature and culture’, ‘body and mind’, and ‘resource and agency’. In doing so, her work explores human and social concerns alongside nonhuman activities. This is useful for Professor Phillips’s work, as it allows us to appreciate the interactions between humans and ecological forms that might otherwise be overlooked.

Professor Philips then turns to two modernist writers, Karel Čapek and Virginia Woolf, to explore how these ideas might work in practice.

On visiting London in 1924, Czech writer Karel Čapek wrote about English parks. His work is part admiration, part lampoon, and was popular with English readers. In one section, he suggests that English parks have become associated with social and political ideas, such as Conservatism, golf, and the House of Lords. He also expresses surprise at seeing a man leaving the path to walk across a lawn. Here, he comments that the man’s feeling entitled to cross the grass suggests a great deal about his character and worldview. Professor Phillips notes how this reflects gendered notions of adventurers, property owners and imperialists.

As a contrast to Čapek’s travel narrative, Professor Phillips draws on a famous scene from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in which the female protagonist walks onto an Oxbridge lawn and is immediately reprimanded. She soon realises that she has accidentally flouted an accepted code of conduct: only fellows and scholars are allowed to walk on the grass, while others (including women) must keep to the path. This provides an interesting counterpoint to Čapek’s observations. For Woolf, the lawn reinforces patriarchal structures, while, for Čapek, it reinforces ideals of ‘male liberty and leisure’. 

While we don’t have adequate vocabulary to express how experiences in nature are gendered, these texts show us that this has long been imagined in literature. It also invites us to explore further how modernist texts have imagined ecological forms, like parks and trees, to have been active participants in cultural traditions, social structures and power dynamics.

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How, then, do we go about making formalist-materialist readings of modernist writers? For Professor Phillips, the first step is recognising the implications of ‘nescience’, which Dr Nersessian defines as ‘thinking that is caught between knowing and unknowing’.

This can be applied to modernist works like Čapek’s which seem to connect social and political narratives with ecological forms in prescient ways. For example, in one essay, Čapek discusses the human influence on the geology of the Czech Republic, hinting at the ‘Anthropocene’ long before the term was coined. While the author might have sensed the influence of humans on the natural world, he could not have truly known the extent of it. For Professor Phillips, what Čapek thought about environmental issues of his time is important, but so too are the ecological realities that have come to light since. In other words, Čapek’s historical moment and intent matter, but so too does the way we interpret his works today for what they might mean in our moment of the Anthropocene.

Another element to a formalist-materialist reading is to draw on Dr Stacy Alaimo’s research on the ways in which social structures and nature are used to marginalise minorities. In Woolf’s novel Orlando, the English nobleman protagonist one day wakes up as a woman. As she comes to terms with her new form, she has a nostalgic vision of her English estate. This raises interesting questions about how non-normative gendered experiences shape interactions with the natural world. A formalist-materialist reading would explore how Woolf’s descriptions of ecological forms shape the aesthetic form of the novel, and how modernist texts influence our interpretations of the natural world.

For Professor Phillips, art is vital in our time of frightening environmental uncertainty. It provides a tool for understanding the world we have inherited. In particular, he argues, the key is to consider how present-day interpretations of aesthetic forms, like Čapek’s essays and plays or Woolf’s novels, can today help clarify how ideas from the past continue to shape the way non-scientists imagine issues like climate change today – and how they might be re-imagined as well. Ultimately, these writers invite us to look beyond our doom-filled predictions for the world, and imagine alternative futures, unconsumed by disaster.