Recent debates within literary studies have increasingly polarized around the methodological divide between New Formalism and Historical Poetics. New Formalist critics posit that literary forms possess an autonomous, vital agency, effectively shaping historical contexts rather than merely serving as passive reflections of them. These critics indict older, rigid historicist models for reducing literature to an epiphenomenal symptom of broader socioeconomic forces. Conversely, proponents of Historical Poetics contend that New Formalism relies on an impoverished, transhistorical conception of 'form' that ignores the diachronic instability of literary devices. From the vantage of Historical Poetics, the cognitive habits and interpretive frameworks of readers are strictly historically contingent; thus, a sonnet read in the nineteenth century cannot be said to perform the same cultural work as its sixteenth-century counterpart. However, this historicist critique itself risks a discrete form of reductionism. By insisting that a text's formal elements are entirely circumscribed by the contemporaneous reading practices of its original audience, Historical Poetics struggles to articulate a coherent framework for the enduring, unmediated aesthetic resonance that ancient texts frequently exert upon modern readers—a phenomenon that New Formalists effortlessly attribute to the intrinsic, transhistorical endurance of literary form.
Which of the following inferences about the proponents of Historical Poetics is most strongly supported by the passage?
- They would maintain that if an ancient text profoundly moves a modern audience, this aesthetic impact cannot be primarily driven by the autonomous agency of the text's formal components.Answer
- BThey believe that older historicist models were ultimately correct in asserting that literature is merely an epiphenomenal symptom of broader socioeconomic forces.
- CThey argue that a text's formal elements are entirely circumscribed by the reading practices of its original audience, a dynamic which successfully explains the enduring aesthetic resonance of classical texts.
- DThey posit that the formal elements of a literary text possess a vital agency capable of fundamentally altering the historically contingent interpretive frameworks of its original audience.
- EThey assume that modern readers lack the sophisticated interpretive frameworks necessary to fully comprehend the cultural work originally performed by sixteenth-century sonnets.