SOURCE: Koppen, Randi. “Formalism and the Return to the Body: Stein's and Fornes's Aesthetic of Significant Form.” New Literary History 28, no. 4 (autumn 1997): 791-809.

In the following essay, Koppen compares and contrasts the formal and aesthetic qualities of the dramatic works of Fornes and Gertrude Stein.

“To open the question,” as Shoshana Felman once prefaced a famous volume, let me begin with a modernist text on form. In The Meaning of Art, the art critic Herbert Read writes: “Form, though it can be analyzed into intellectual terms like measure, balance, rhythm and harmony, is really intuitive in origin; it is not an intellectual product. It is rather emotion directed and defined, and when we describe art as ‘the will to form’ we are not imagining an exclusively intellectual activity, but rather an exclusively instinctive one. … Frankly, I do not know how we are to judge form except by the...