A radically new way of thinking about form and context in literature,
politics, and beyond Forms offers a powerful new answer to one of the
most pressing problems facing literary, critical, and cultural studies
today—how to connect form to political, social, and historical
context. Caroline Levine argues that forms organize not only works of
art but also political life—and our attempts to know both art and
politics. Inescapable and frequently troubling, forms shape every
aspect of our experience. Yet, forms don't impose their order in any
simple way. Multiple shapes, patterns, and arrangements, overlapping
and colliding, generate complex and unpredictable social landscapes
that challenge and unsettle conventional analytic models in literary
and cultural studies. Borrowing the concept of "affordances" from
design theory, this book investigates the specific ways that four
major forms—wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks—have
structured culture, politics, and scholarly knowledge across periods,
and it proposes exciting new ways of linking formalism to historicism
and literature to politics. Levine rereads both formalist and
antiformalist theorists, including Cleanth Brooks, Michel Foucault,
Jacques Rancière, Mary Poovey, and Judith Butler, and she offers
engaging accounts of a wide range of objects, from medieval convents
and modern theme parks to Sophocles's Antigone and the television
series The Wire. The result is a radically new way of thinking about
form for the next generation and essential reading for scholars and
students across the humanities who must wrestle with the problem of
form and context.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781400852604
Publisert
2014
Utgiver
Vendor
Princeton University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter