02/23/2026
You are invited to a public lecture by PhD candidate Emily Dickson, on March 6, 1 pm in UC 1105 and on Zoom. Please email Leanne Trask for the Zoom link.
Re-forming Formalism: A New Approach argues for a renewed significance of formalism, as method and theory, for the study of the visual arts. Bringing together art historical and aesthetic theoretical insights both past and present, this lecture aims to establish the basis for such an approach, developing a view towards what formalism can and should be, grounded in an account of what forms are and how forms act. Through a combination of historical inquiry and contemporary theorizing, Re-forming Formalism attempts to address the serious charges formalism has faced historically—particularly by prominent critical theorists in the second half of the twentieth century, including by Terry Eagleton and Jacques Derrida—while at the same time seeking to move past these.
Beyond the questions posed to art history, this lecture considers more generally: what is the meaning, and what are the stakes, of framing analyses formally? What affordances do formalist analyses provide us—that is, what possibilities are made available by formalists on the basis of and in coordination with what limits—and how do we use these affordances to serve as bases of a formalist ethics? This lecture builds upon the larger dissertation research, where investigations of Immanuel Kant, Aloïs Riegl, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Simmel, György Lukács, Henri Foçillon, and Karl Marx, among others, are mobilized in order to argue that the forms of art are not closed off from the world but remain, in certain key respects, open to the forms of life. Formalism, on this account, does not merely articulate these interstices; it also draws us closer to—it puts us “in a bind with,” writes Judith Butler—the greater life of forms of which we are a part. Arguing that it is no longer justifiable to uphold without question those assumptions that have led to its ongoing rejection and neglect, this lecture positions formalism as a valuable analytic and theoretical tool, and as a meaningful ethical and evaluative framework, in and for the present.
