Formal critics all begin with a truth that ideological critics too often neglect; form is in itself interesting,
even in the most abstract extreme. Shape, pattern, design carry their own interest—and hence meaning—for
all human beings. What some critics have called “human meanings” are not required; nothing is more
human than the love of abstract forms. —Wayne C. Booth, introduction to M. M. Bakhtin’s Problems of
Dostoevsky’s Poetics