Search Results

Russian Formalist theory argued that biography should be studied scientifically as the history of form, rather than as a history of personalities, ideas, or content. In other words, the study of literature is not philosophy, sociology, theology, or mythology, but an exact science of the primary matter of text: the word, the language, the speech, and the stylistic device. Biographies of authors were thought of as belonging to the separate ‘series’ parallel to the evolution of literature. However, in practice, the lives and times of the writers were often found not so much to run parallel to as to be contingent upon the texts they produce, in a way that made it increasingly difficult to preserve the clinical purity of the ‘science’ of literature. Hence, to deal with this, Formalists formulated new terms such as ‘literary facts’ and ‘literary milieu’. This chapter discusses Yury Tynyanov, who sought to distinguish his books about the writers' lives from his ‘scientific’ works of theory and research by writing them in the form of novels that were closely associated with film scenarios and historical fiction. It examines his Pushkin, an unfinished biography that culminated his achievements and which marked the beginning of the merging of literary-historical research, biography, and fiction.

This chapter chronicles Prokofiev's two summers in Ivanovo, where he composed his illustrious Fifth Symphony, the prizes and medals awarded to him by Stalinist cultural agencies, his largely futile efforts to bring War and Peace to the stage, and the serious illness (ventricular hypertrophy) that would periodically incapacitate him. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the conception and reception of his Sixth Symphony, and the darkening of the political and cultural climate on the eve of the anti-formalist campaign of 1948.

This chapter sets the stage for the succeeding chapters by addressing a foundational cluster of questions inherent to the practice of linguistic typology: What does it mean to say that some grammatical feature is possible or impossible, or probable or improbable? Section 1.2 tries to pinpoint how one might identify a ‘possible human language’ and Section 1.3 raises some background issues relevant to the determination of why some language types appear to be more probable than others. Section 1.4 focuses on the major differences between formalists and functionalists with respect to the explanation of typological generalizations, using an extended published debate between Peter Coopmans and Bernard Comrie as a point of reference.

This chapter analyses the animal rights issue from legal, philosophical, and pragmatic perspectives. It argues that the best approach to the issue is a human-centric one that appeals to our developing knowledge and sentiments about animals, and which eschews on the one hand philosophical argument and a legal-formalist approach on the other. The chapter explains that on pragmatic grounds, people are not likely to want to give rights to animals and that some rights would be damaging to animals themselves. It also comments on the views of Steven Wise and Peter Singer.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to make a case for expanding our usual definition of form in literary studies to include patterns of sociopolitical experience like those of Lowood School. Broadening our definition of form to include social arrangements has immediate methodological consequences. The traditionally troubling gap between the form of the literary text and its content and context dissolves. Formalist analysis turns out to be as valuable to understanding sociopolitical institutions as it is to reading literature. Forms are at work everywhere. Chaotic though it seems, this brief conceptual history does make two things quite clear. First, form has never belonged only to the discourse of aesthetics. Second, all of the historical uses of the term, despite their richness and variety, do share a common definition: “form” always indicates an arrangement of elements—an ordering, patterning, or shaping.

This chapter revises accepted accounts of the relationship between neoclassical and Romantic poetics. It shows how the original premises and categories of neoclassicism, codified in Arts of Poetry such as Bysshe's and Gildon's, were modified in the light of the aesthetic theories of the Enlightenment to produce the eclectic genre-systems—part formalist, part cognitive—of works such as Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783). It is these generic classifications and theories, rather than the narrower, rule-bound doctrines of earlier neoclassical critics, which confronted Romantic writers, whose polemics against the ‘old imperial code’ conceal significant continuities with these earlier positions. The chapter also studies the impact on genre theory of the cult of genius and the concept of the sublime, and shows how new critical ideas were reflected in the shifting organizational principles of poetic anthologies.

This chapter deals with the positions of nominalists and formalists. Discourse-criterion nominalists, obsessed with ontology worry about applied mathematics, and either engage in rewriting mathematical text to remove quantifier commitments to abstracta, or else steep themselves in the tangled reanalysis of applied mathematical doctrine to show that scientific explanations and/or the justification of scientific doctrine don't turn on presupposing the truth of that doctrine. Traditional formalists, on the other hand, focus on pure mathematics, and hope to show that in-principle the replacement of mathematical proofs can be done by derivations; that is they hope to show the in-principle there can be a replacement of ordinary proofs in ordinary mathematics by sequences of sentences that take mechanically recognizable forms.

This chapter draws attention to the anthropological imagination of Aby Warburg, the great student of world culture and comparative mythology whose “Warburg Library,” founded in Hamburg, served as the meeting place for Weimar philosophers, historians, and cultural critics. Warburg determined the library's acquisitions from 1886 until his sudden death in October 1929. In December 1933 the library (approximately 60,000 books, plus slides, photographs, other materials, as well as the collective argument of the enterprise itself) was evacuated to London, to be linked as of 1937 to the University of London and fully incorporated into the university in 1944. The Warburg Institute's second-generation principal scholars, adherents, and administrators included Erwin Panofsky, Ernst Gombrich, Rudolf Wittkower, Edgar Wind, Frances Yates, and Anne Marie Meyer. In recent years, the methods and claims of visual culture and visual studies have embraced the legacy of Warburg's critique of formalist art history.

The introduction lays out the thesis, which is that the evangelical missionary movement contained within it paradoxes of power, culture, and influence. New movements of world Christianity were more likely to grow if they adapted to their indigenous culture, while evangelical missionaries inadvertently provided a type of faith that did that. Because indigenous Christians understood their language and culture better than missionaries did, missionaries were more likely to encourage these movements if they had less control and power over the movements. Since uncivilized Christians proved themselves quite capable of leading these movements, missionaries found the need to readjust conceptions of civilization. Evangelical missionaries adjusted in different ways, with the most noticeable differences occurring between formalist and antiformalist evangelicals. These adjustments became particularly challenging in areas of race, education, and conceptions of supernaturalism.

This chapter attempts to define three of the central components of the intuitionist-realist tradition: tradition's conceptualisation of the ‘problem’ of modernity; the proposed ‘solution’ to that problem; and the elaboration of an aesthetic vehicle through which such a solution can be realised. It explores the intuitionist realism in the work of Grierson, Bazin and Kracauer, in relation to the ‘problem of modernity’ and ‘totality’. All of them insisted that realist films should place the portrayal of social reality over formal or overly rhetorical experimentation. Grierson's primary concern was for ‘modern industrial society’, whereas Kracauer argues that the way to escape from ‘spiritual nakedness’ is through transcending the abstract relation to one's own experience of the world. The model of cinematic realism developed by Bazin can be differentiated from the Kracauer model in the sense that Bazin was more antipathetic to modernist or formalist art than Kracauer.

This chapter focuses on John Berryman, who situates himself at the center of what he calls “the world” and uses everything else in the world to define his self. The chapter includes a poet reacting to the critical atmospheres in which Berryman developed, which is described as having been spoken by someone who seems to have chosen the wrong form and genre. The chapter also examines how Berryman flouts the canonical expectations of mid-century formalist criticism and suggests how he breaks and defaces his form to depict an unusually wide range of mental states. The chapter points out an iridescence between a lyric reading of The Dream Songs and the ways Berryman undermines that reading. It then explains how Berryman transcribes the less-than-perfect mind, such as its irrationality and obsessions.

This chapter draws together multiple aspects of lyric. It discusses how Morgan Parker, Natalie Shapero, and Monica Youn assert the value of humor to a record of personal experience and consider how to handle feeling that is bound up with gendered expectations and critical discourse around mainstream poetry. It also mentions how Parker splices lyric with extraliterary enumerative forms and with dramatic monologue in order to document the experience of contemporary black womanhood in the United States. The chapter analyses Shapero's incorporation of splinters of the well-wrought formalist poem that convey ambivalence about a tumultuous contemporary world. It then explains how Youn dissects romantic obsession and reflects how it has been depreciated by avant-garde and traditional criticism.

This chapter presents a more formalist approach to Hell, showing that however Hell is defined or whatever people think being in Hell means, the ideas are influenced by the conventions and dynamics of narrative. It views Hell as a chronotope, which is a generically distinct representation of time and space in narrative, and looks at the representation of the image of the human subject in distinctive and particular ways. The chapter shows that people can challenge the traditional chronotropic representations of Hell as temporally fixed and spatially distanced, which makes it feared and revered as a theological absolute.

This chapter describes the second period of American legal history, the period of legal formalism. It specifically provides a discussion of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century legal formalism in the United States. The thesis of this chapter is that the commonly accepted idea of a ‘revolt against formalism’ in late nineteenth-century American intellectual life is, certainly so far as jurisprudence is concerned, a myth. It explores what, in the context of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American jurisprudence, legal formalism might be taken to mean. It also addresses how, before the advent of legal realism, American jurisprudence began, if only hesitantly, to question the premisses of formalist legal thinking. It is shown that the great forerunners of American legal realism, Holmes and Pound, were not committed anti-formalists.

This chapter reflects on the principle of 'angle of deflection' or 'measurable deflection'. This principle has been utilized superbly by Mark Cohen in his path-breaking work on Jewish economic activity in the Islamic world. But the principle of angle of deflection still has its critics. Some have seen in it a reflection of legal formalism. Whether law develops from within, as a consequence of an internal dynamic, or whether its motor force is social pressures and the personal predilections and ideologies of judges is an ancient jurisprudential question. The principle of angle of deflection is, however, not a jurisprudential but an evidentiary one. Both formalists and realists agree that the dominant motor force in a system does not operate to the exclusion of all else. The rule of the angle of deflection provides the historian with a criterion by which to assess whether or not a specific jurist in a specific case was influenced by outside considerations.

This chapter provides an analysis of the basic aspects of an “aesthetics of the machine”. It focuses on two pivotal moments in the twentieth century history of machine art, one being the 1968 exhibition “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age”, curated by Pontus Hultén. The other example is the opening scene of Filippo Marinetti’s first futurist manifesto, published in 1909, in which the advent of futurism is marked by a symbolically charged car accident that preceded Marinetti’s hymn to the new technical culture. From here, and drawing mainly on artistic examples from Hultén’s exhibition (incl. Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp and Jean Tinguely), the author highlights five distinct aspects that have characterized the “machine aesthetic” until the 1960s: the “associative” reference to the social meanings of technology, often used to make a provocative claim against the assumptions of artistic ingenuity; the “symbolic” reference to mechanics as a way to describe aspects of human culture and psychology; the “formalist” appraisal of the beauty of functional forms; the play with “kinetic” functions as a way to broaden the expressive potentials of sculpture; and the “automatic” operation of machines that underpins their functional independence and their existential strangeness.

This chapter discusses Russian imperial poetics and its Azeri translations in the work of Nikolai Gogol and Jalil Memmedquluzade. Taking up Gogol’s parodic prose as central to the Russian literary canon and Formalist poetics, I discuss Memmedquluzade’s interest in Gogolean parody as central to the development of a native Azeri prose canon and understandings of Russian and non-Russian ethnicity as well as the relationship between metropole and periphery through the period of revolutionary transition.

Chapter 4 investigates the issue of “regulatory takings” through an investigation of Oliver Wendell Holmes’ foundational case, Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, Antonin Scalia’s Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council and the takings theory of Richard Epstein. Epstein’s theory, a key theory for the modern resurrection of takings jurisprudence, is outlined and utilized as an example of formalist and deductivist legal reasoning. Epstein emphasizes the importance of bright-line rules and critiques Holmes’ Mahon “matter of degree” style of reasoning as incoherent and theoretically weak. As opposed to this, the argument offered in the chapter critiques Epstein’s assumptions, showing them to be empirically and formally weak. Indeed, his argument is only as strong as every link in his argument, and many of the links are controversial and easy to dispute. In contrast, the basic reasoning shown in Holmes’ opinion exemplifies a stronger braided style of argument as Peirce advocated for.