Reading for Form

Susan J. Wolfson, Marshall Brown, Susan J. Wolfson, Marshall Brown

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780295986487
• eBook ISBN: 9780295805481
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Literature

Reflecting varieties of theory and practice in both verse and prose from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, these essays by many of America's leading literary scholars call for a reinvigorated formalism that can enrich literary studies, open productive routes of commerce with cultural studies, and propel cultural theory out of its thematic ruts. This book reprints Modern Language Quarterly 's highly acclaimed special issue Reading for Form, along with new essays by Marjorie Perloff, D. Vance Smith, and Susan Stewart, and a revised introduction by Susan Wolfson. With historical case studies and insightful explorations, Reading for Form offers invaluable material for literary critics in all specializations.

INDEX

Adorno, Theodor, 17, 21–22, 84, 177, 184, 204–8, 216, 221–22

Aers, David, 105n9

Aesthetic, 26, 33, 43–44, 80–84, 88, 92, 96–97; ideology (and critique of), 203–6

Alter, Robert, 101n6

Althusser, Louis, 10, 45–46, 47

American writing, 153, 155–56

Anonymity, 236

Antanaclasis, 275

Apollinaire, Guillaume, and “Zone,” 197

Apostrophe, 213–14

Arac, Jonathan, 275n21

Arapaho, 172

Argument, poetry of, 148–49

Aristotle, 117, 120, 127, 164n23, 300n17, 308–11

Armstrong, Nancy, 254

Arnold, Matthew, 268

Ashbery, John, 178, 215

Attridge, Derek, 14, 119n29

Auerbach, Erich, 51

Augustine, 62, 123n35, 126n40

Austen, Jane, and Emma, 19, 231–55 passim

Avant-garde, 152; Dada, 152; Surrealism, 152; Futurism, 152

Bach, J. S., 157, 172, 173–74; Passion according to Saint Matthew, 159–62, 175; ms. preparation, 161

Bachmann, Ingeborg, 193

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 55, 60, 61, 231, 324

Bal, Mieke, 305

Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 63

Banfield, Ann, 241

Barrell, John, 131n5, 137n9, 237

Barthes, Roland, 11–12

Baudelaire, Charles, 56, 287, 312, 315

Beckett, Samuel, 196, 198–200

Beebee, Thomas O., 87

Beginning, 156, 158–59

Belsey, Catherine, 119n30, 126n39

Benjamin, Walter, 51n3, 205, 216, 218, 285n3, 287, 294

Bennett, Joan, 118n28, 120–21

Bennett, Tony, 10

Bentham, Jeremy, 62, 238

Berg, Alban, 167n25

Bernstein, Charles, 178

Bernstein, Richard, 121n31

Bérubé, Michael, 32, 39–40

Bina...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Reading for Form
• Form and Contentment
• Hating and Loving Aesthetic Formalism: Some Reasons
• Medieval Forma: The Logic of the Work
• Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Reinterpreting Formalism and the Country House Poem
• “Among Unequals, What Society”: Paradise Lost and the Forms of Intimacy
• Formalism and History: Binarism and the Anglophone Couplet
• The Signature and the Initial in Zukofsky’s “A”
• “Sound Scraps, Vision Scraps”: Paul Celan’s Poetic Practice
• Everybody Hates Kant: Blakean Formalism and the Symmetries of Laura Moriarty
• Jane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form
• The Foreign Offices of British Fiction
• The Slaughterhouse of Literature
• Formalism and Time
• Contributors
• Index