... as mere inhibitions, stylistic constraints provided Rich with patterns she could play with and against. In turn, formal rules allowed her to think critically about different social and political limits. This article hopes to encourage a more nuanced appreciation of Rich’s formalist period, highlight its...

... political effectiveness precisely within formal autonomy. By tracing the presence of the Cadillac in US rhetorics of race, the nature of the dozens as a formally hermetic expressive form, and the signifying potential of conspicuous consumption, I demonstrate the radical and utopian content of Ellison’s...

..., Wicomb aligns her text with a formal inventiveness that (in her view) emphasizes the power of language to free us rather than (merely) entrap us. The author’s analysis thus both draws on and departs from Derek Attridge’s discussion of modernism in David’s Story , suggesting that Benjamin’s radical...

... fiction. Drawing on contemporary critiques of intimacy by Lauren Berlant and Leo Bersani, I argue that sociality in Woolf’s writing is an unhealing scar, a problem of subject-world relation that necessarily persists, but that in doing so, stimulates Woolf’s formal inventiveness. Registering impersonal...

... formal features, such as the adopted/fostered characters’ abrupt discovery of their adoptive status and the presence of psychological discourses in representing the distress of learning that new information. They come to very different conclusions, however, about the root cause of the adopted characters...

... or to the external world, Lawrence’s prose converts stained glass’s organizing principles into syntax, foregrounding the contrasts and overlaps between nouns and adjectives, independent and dependent clauses, and words’ multiple repetitions. In doing so, he formalizes a conceptual parallel: the non-verbal medium’s...

... and has significance for environmentalist ethics. This article traces the stylistic and formal influence of cosmopolitan and metropolitan experience upon Butts’s evocations of rural Dorset before looking at her work’s ethical implications in more detail. It examines some of the tensions that arise...

... Billy Elliot , and more collectivist, formally innovative texts like GB84 . In rallying to defeat the NUM, Thatcher invoked the idea of “enemies within” and posited herself as an able combatant, domestically and abroad, conjuring fears of household sanctuaries threatened by the unwillingness of miners...

... documentary film, Mass Observation, and the publications of Victor Gollancz Ltd., the article considers how, while marking a kind of formal shift away from a late Victorian discourse of poverty, this development maintains that earlier discourse’s disciplinary agenda. In examining three case studies—John...

...Francisco E. Robles This essay argues that Tomás Rivera’s seminal Chicano text . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra is a polyvocal and deeply communal work whose formal inventiveness illuminates the imaginative lives of migrant workers. Contesting the dominant critical reading of the book...

... after wave of theory and canon- expansion, the advent of a self-validating “formalism” as simply the next trend is hardly something to be welcomed. Formal scrutiny of a lyric poem—its rhythms and meter, its syntax and rhyme—can only take a reader so far in engaging with the poem itself in a fully...

...—has made critics wary of assigning character any independence from its formal function. Dorothy J. Hale’s new book, The Novel and the New Ethics , aligns with Moi’s call for a critical return to character but proposes a different understanding of the modernist legacy. For Hale, it is precisely...

... of repetition itself or produced by it, both Park and Tang indicate other directions that formalism, whether new or old or ongoing, might profitably take. Tang observes similar figures at work in her study of traumatic repetition (analogy, for instance) and adds new ones. Mirroring in particular...

... modern enterprise, stranded like silty, barren islets in an archipelago of indiffer- ence within the floodwaters of “hysterical realism” and post-imperial romance? Is their untimeliness of that sort—reactive, backward-looking, formally nostalgic? Surely not. It would be preferable to argue...

... (2), “an insistence that the visual arts be seen as part of the ‘argument’ of Pound’s work, providing a model that is not restricted to the formal” (7). In the current critical parlance, “visual culture” usually refers to all cultural artifacts and activities with a visual component...

... into the experience of their readers, while the other aims to demonstrate how some modernist authors created works that modeled heightened forms of receptivity for their readers. While one holds up the aesthetic autonomy guaranteed by formal narrative techniques meant to distance readers from texts, the other prizes...

... out questions about poetry and politics not anticipated in A Street in Bronzeville, questions about what poetic form revolutionary poetry should take. In particular, poems she titled ballads that are not formally ballads (“the sonnet-ballad” [1949] and “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Em...

..., as Oser indicates, of a “gnostic remove[d] from moral life” (123). It is true that The Waste Land predates by five years Eliot’s formal conversion to Christianity, and Oser identi- fies the Eliot of this poem as “a Christian skeptic” (83). But it seems to me unmistakable that the Eliot of The Waste...

... associates with postmodernism. With this focus on the genre’s emergence, however, the chapter never delivers a properly formal analysis beyond Rosen’s characterization of it as “a malleable form adaptable to diverse purposes” (47). While it’s easy to imagine other genres submitting to precise formal...

... mimetic strands of fiction began to merge by the late 1970s and that this formal synthesis more truly represents the wider stream of American postmod- ern fiction. Although Steiner cites Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) and Philip Roth’s The Anatomy Lesson (1983) as examples, the oppositional...