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. But 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.
發表於2024-11-14
Forms 2024 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載
圖書標籤: theory form 比較文學 文化探討 CriticalTheory Structuralism Formalism CulturalStudies
選取的文本跨度極大(從《安提戈涅》到《火綫》),以朗西埃為理論前設(形式即政治,政治即形式,拒絕區分社會和美學的registers)對曆史主義進行反撥,關注不同形式如何相遇、互動,並由此定位文學及文學批評自身的政治。去年PMLA有一期做瞭關於這本書的dossier。
評分Bold, ambitious, sometimes counterintuitive, and soooooo readable. 但是總感覺作者提齣的這個框架有點太萬金油瞭,仿佛什麼都能往框裏裝並得齣一個很predictable的結論。需要時間和更多實例來檢驗的理論宏圖。
評分近年學界諸多為迴歸"形式"張本的嘗試之一。迴應瞭二戰後文學界對totality, institution等的paranoid hostility,用跨度很大的例子討論被視作normative/oppressive的諸概念如何同時可以是productive containment。本書探討的其實是一個老生常談的問題,即什麼樣的概念是有用的。作者對form的推崇主要關注其transferability/iterability(奇妙的德裏達迴音,盡管作者聲稱要move beyond deconstruction);但諷刺的是,form/formalism同時被擴張到無限大,以緻作為概念完全失去作用。遠不如North那本。
評分沒看過火綫,所以最後的例子不太熟悉。整體思想感覺非常朗西埃,但是格局也非常狹小,workshop時作者解釋瞭為什麼,為瞭更多的人能加入討論,這大概也是一種桎梏。workshop看到作者為瞭捍衛自己的書不停迴應博士們的提問,真的感覺壓力好大好緊張。北美學生的訓練也由此可見一斑瞭。
評分Bold, ambitious, sometimes counterintuitive, and soooooo readable. 但是總感覺作者提齣的這個框架有點太萬金油瞭,仿佛什麼都能往框裏裝並得齣一個很predictable的結論。需要時間和更多實例來檢驗的理論宏圖。 @2019-12-01 09:20:50
Forms 2024 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載