Research Catalog

Title

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

Author

Kornbluh, Anna

Publication

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

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xii, 217 pages : illustrations; 23 cm

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.

Subjects

• Formalism (Literary analysis)
• Criticism

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages [195]-206) and index.

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.

Call Number

JFE 20-2977

ISBN

• 9780226653204
• 022665320X
• 9780226653341
• 022665334X
• 9780226653488 (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

• 2019019113
• 40029619566

OCLC

1089920777

Author

Kornbluh, Anna, author.

Title

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

Publisher

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

Copyright Date

©2019

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages [195]-206) and index.

Other Form:

ebook version : 9780226653488

Other Standard Identifier

40029619566

Research Call Number

JFE 20-2977