Forms at Work

Since the beginning of the 20th century, formalism has had a venerable tradition in literary studies. A notable upsweep of interest in, proposed approaches to, and scholarly debates about form and new formalist methods in the study of literature and culture has been evident in recent years. New formalist perspectives offer intriguing analytical possibilities that move beyond focusing solely on the formal features of texts to also consider contextual relations. This volume explores the horizons and heuristic potential opened up by new formalisms of the 21st century that focus on the cultural work of form. It aims to put the conceptual and analytical potentials offered by new formalist approaches on display as well as under scrutiny. Its articles present critical new-formalist examinations of early modern, Victorian, modern and contemporary Anglo-American literature as well as a television series, films, and a graphic novel. With these case-study analyses, the volume demonstrates the wide-ranging applicability of a renewed and growing field in the study of literary and culture.


CONTENTS


Preface and Acknowledgements .................................................................................. vii

ELIZABETH KOVACH, IMKE POLLAND AND ANSGAR NÜNNING
Introduction: Towards a New Formalism?
Conceptual and Theoretical Explorations ..................................................................... 1

I. THE CULTURAL WORK OF FORMS IN ANGLO-AMERICAN LITERATURE
FROM THE EARLY MODERN TO THE VICTORIAN PERIOD

KATHRIN BETHKE
Love’s Accountants: Double-Entry Bookkeeping
and the Sonnet Form in Early Modern England ......................................................... 25

CHRISTINE SCHWANECKE
Worlds of Sighs, Stories, and Music: The Cultural Work
of Alter-Generic and Intermedial Forms in Jacobean Tragedy ................................... 41

SIJIE WANG
Conflictive Forms, Reformative Conflicts:
The Inversion of Hierarchies in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko .......................................... 55

ALEXANDER SCHERR
The Fragment at Work: Thomas Carlyle’s Novel Sartor Resartus (1834)
as Implicit Theory of Form and Model for Cultural Change ...................................... 71

II. THE CULTURAL WORK OF FORMS
IN MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

WOLFGANG HALLET
The Cultural and Social Power of Semiotic Forms in the Novel ................................ 87

ALENA HEINRITZ
Forms of Work as Work of Form: The Poetics of Work and Labor
in Texts by Tret’yakov, Platonov, and Shalamov ..................................................... 105

MAREIKE GLIER
The Journals of Jim Elliot (1948–1955):
Affordances and Constraints of the Modern Spiritual Diary .................................... 121

DANIELA HENKE
‘Unreadable’ Texts. An Analysis towards the Ethics of Form
on the Basis of Holocaust Fictions by Thomas Lehr and Thomas Harlan ................ 133

MICHAELA BECK
From Plural to Impersonal: We-Narration
and Neoliberal Paradigms of Feeling in Contemporary U.S. Novels ....................... 151

KATRIN BECKER
Intersections of Class and Narrative Discourse:
Forms at Work in Zadie Smith’s NW ........................................................................ 167

ALEXANDRA EFFE
Forms at Work in Testimony: A Cognitive New Formalist Approach ..................... 185

III. THE CULTURAL WORK OF FORMS IN CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
JULIA VAEßEN
Cultural Models, Character Reception, and the Relevance of Form ......................... 205

REGINA LEONIE SCHMIDT
The Either-Or Decision – Illustrating Binary Forms at Work
by Means of the Patient’s Dilemma in Grey’s Anatomy (2005–) ............................. 223

EWELINA PEPIAK
Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Métissage and Whiteness in French Multicultural Comedy ..................................... 239

MAX BERGMANN
From Database Cinema to YouTube Aesthetics:
Digital Network Structures and Filmic Form ........................................................... 257

SARAH J. LINK
“The Camera Never Lies”: Form and Objectivity
in Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith’s Fell: Feral City ......................................... 273

JULIA CAROLINE BÖCKLING
“Privacy Is Theft”: The Form of the List
in Depicting Social Media Engagement in Dave Eggers’ The Circle ........................ 291

Notes on Contributors ............................................................................................... 305