Speculative Formalism

Speculative Formalism engages decisively in recent debates in the literary humanities around form and formalism, making the case for a new, nonmimetic and antihistoricist theory of literary reference. Where formalism has often been accused of sealing texts within themselves, Eyers demonstrates instead how a renewed, speculative formalism can illuminate the particular ways in which literature actively opens onto history, politics, and nature, in a connective movement that puts formal impasses to creative use. Through a combination of philosophical reflection and close rhetorical readings, Eyers explores the possibilities and limits of deconstructive approaches to the literary, the impact of the “digital humanities” on theory, and the prospects for a formalist approach to “world literature.” The book includes sustained close readings of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Yeats, and Wallace Stevens, as well as Alain Badiou, Paul de Man, and Fredric Jameson.

The term "radical formalism" refers to strategies aimed at defamiliarising and revitalising conventional modes of formalistic reading and theorising form. These strategies disrupt and unsettle established norms while incorporating a metadiscursive awareness of their broader political implications. This volume presents a radical reconceptualisation of literary works from Greek and Roman antiquity. Engaging in an ongoing dialogue with critical theory and postcritique, as well as drawing inspiration from traditions rooted in Black art, poetry and philosophy-both directly and indirectly connected to the classical tradition-the essays in this collection explore subversions of canonical norms and resistances to the hegemony of textual order. This collection not only provides new, provocative insights into a corpus of texts that has exerted a lasting impact on modern literature and philosophy, but also challenges current interpretive methods, recasting the very practice of reading in relation to form, poetics, language, sound, temporalities and textuality.

Genealogies of Speculation looks to break the impasse between the innovations of speculative thought and the dominant strands of 20th century anti-foundationalist philosophy. Challenging emerging paradigms of philosophical history, this text re-evaluates different theoretical and political traditions such as feminism, literary theory, social geography and political theory after the speculative turn in philosophy. With contributions from leading writers in contemporary thought this book is a crucial resource for studying cultural and art-theory and continental philosophy.

In Life-Destroying Diagrams, Eugenie Brinkema brings the insights of her radical formalism to bear on supremely risky terrain: the ethical extremes of horror and love. Through close readings of works of film, literature, and philosophy, she explores how diagrams, grids, charts, lists, abecedaria, toroids, tempos, patterns, colors, negative space, lengths, increments, and thresholds attest to formal logics of torture and cruelty, violence and finitude, friendship and eros, debt and care. Beginning with a wholesale rethinking of the affect of horror, orienting it away from entrenched models of feeling toward impersonal schemes and structures, Brinkema moves outward to consider the relation between objects and affects, humiliation and metaphysics, genre and the general, bodily destruction and aesthetic generation, geometry and scenography, hatred and value, love and measurement, and, ultimately, the tensions, hazards, and speculative promise of formalism itself. Replete with etymological meditations, performative typography, and lyrical digressions, Life-Destroying Diagrams is at once a model of reading without guarantee and a series of generative experiments in the writing of aesthetic theory.

The Short Story after Apartheid offers the first major study of the anglophone short story in South Africa since apartheid’s end. By focusing on the short story this book complicates models of South African literature dominated by the novel and contributes to a much-needed generic and formalist turn in postcolonial studies. Literary texts are sites of productive struggle between formal and extra-formal concerns, and these brief, fragmentary, elliptical, formally innovative stories offer perspectives that reframe or revise important concerns of post-apartheid literature: the aesthetics of engaged writing, the politics of the past, class and race, the legacies of violence, and the struggle over the land. Through an analysis of key texts from the period by Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavić, Zoë Wicomb, Phaswane Mpe, and Henrietta Rose-Innes, this book assesses the place of the short story in post-apartheid writing and develops a fuller model of how artworks allow and disallow forms of social thought.

Anglophone Verse Novels as Gutter Texts draws on the notion of the 'gutter' in graphic narratives – the gap between panels that a reader has to imaginatively fill to generate narrative sequence – to analyse the largely overlooked literary form of the verse novel. Marked at all levels by the tense constellation of segment and sequence, and a conspicuously 'gappy' texture, verse novels offer productive alternatives to the dominant prose novel in contemporary fiction, where a similar 'gappiness' has become a hallmark, as illustrated by the loosely interlaced multi-strand plot structures of influential 'world novels' (Bolaño, Mitchell, Powers). The verse novel is a form particularly prolific in the postcolonial world and among diasporic or minoritarian writers in the Global North. This study concentrates on two of the most prominent areas in which verse novels distinguish themselves from the prose novel to read texts by Derek Walcott, Anne Carson, Bernardine Evaristo, Patience Agbabi and others: In 'planetary' verse novels from the Caribbean, Canada, Samoa and Hawai'i, the central trope of the volcano evokes a world in constant un/making; while post-national verse novels, particularly in Britain, modify the established paradigms of imagined communities. Dirk Wiemann's study speculates whether the resurgence of verse novels correlates with the apprehension of inhabiting a world that has become unpredictable and dangerous but also promising: a 'post-prosaic' world.

A ground-breaking analysis of the short form lineage in twentieth-century American poetry Proposes a new genealogy of 20th century and contemporary American verse Contains in-depth discussion of key American poets and movements Will appeal to graduates and scholars in both the modernist and contemporary fieldsReading a century of American poetry through the prism of short form, this book analyses the centrality of an aesthetic of brevity to American modernist verse. It begins with Imagism and devotes chapters to William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, Robert Grenier and Rae Armantrout. Montgomery combines his larger argument, which takes issue with epic-driven narratives of Modernist poetry, with sensitive and original readings of numerous short and short-lined poems. Suggesting a reappraisal of key movements as objectivism, Black Mountain poetry and Language Writing, he opens new lines of discussion around the major poets of the period

Digital spaces are saturated with metaphor: we have pages, sites, mice, and windows. Yet, in the world of digital textuality, these metaphors no longer function as we might expect. Martin Paul Eve calls attention to the digital-textual metaphors that condition our experience of digital space, and traces their history as they interact with physical cultures. Eve posits that digital-textual metaphors move through three life phases. Initially they are descriptive. Then they encounter a moment of fracture or rupture. Finally, they go on to have a prescriptive life of their own that conditions future possibilities for our text environments—even when the metaphors have become untethered from their original intent. Why is "whitespace" white? Was the digital page always a foregone conclusion? Over a series of theses, Eve addresses these and other questions in order to understand the moments when digital-textual metaphors break and to show us how it is that our textual softwares become locked into paradigms that no longer make sense. Contributing to book history, literary studies, new media studies, and material textual studies, Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History provides generative insights into the metaphors that define our digital worlds.