The order of forms : realism, formalism, and social space / Anna Kornbluh.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kornbluh, Anna, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Formalism (Literary analysis).

Criticism.

Physical Description:

xii, 217 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Summary:

In literary studies today, debates about the purpose of literary criticism and about the place of formalism within it continue to simmer across periods and approaches. Anna Kornbluh contributes to--and substantially shifts--that conversation in The Order of Forms by offering an exciting new category, political formalism, which she articulates through the co-emergence of aesthetic and mathematical formalisms in the nineteenth century. Within this framework, criticism can be understood as more affirmative and constructive, articulating commitments to aesthetic expression and social collectivity. Kornbluh offers a powerful argument that political formalism, by valuing forms of sociability like the city and the state in and of themselves, provides a better understanding of literary form and its political possibilities than approaches that view form as a constraint. To make this argument, she takes up the case of literary realism, showing how novels by Dickens, Bront , Hardy, and Carroll engage mathematical formalism as part of their political imagining. Realism, she shows, is best understood as an exercise in social modeling--more like formalist mathematics than social documentation. By modeling society, the realist novel focuses on what it considers the most elementary features of social relations and generates unique political insights. Proposing both this new theory of realism and the idea of political formalism, this inspired, eye-opening book will have far-reaching implications in literary studies.

Contents:

Introduction: the order of forms: mathematic, aesthetic, and political formalisms

The realist blueprint: for a formalist theory of literary realism

The set theory of Wuthering heights: realism, antagonism, and the infinities of social space

The limits of Bleak house

Symbolic logic on the social plane of Alice's Adventures in wonderland

Obscure forms: the social geometry of Jude the obscure

States of psychoanalysis: formalization and the space of the political

Conclusion: sustaining forms.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

ebook version :

ISBN:

9780226653204

022665320X

9780226653341

022665334X

OCLC:

1089920777