Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies

[...]the last part of the essay demonstrates a strategic formalist reading practice by turning to a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a site where literary and social forms collide to produce surprising and unintentional political effects. [...]forceful and portable but not under the control of their inventors or users, the historical spread of techniques illustrates a crucial gap between intentionality and effect, between the desires groups have for consolidating power and the results that follow from particular strategies. [...]the metaphor of childhood carries with it its own form-the lifespan-that itself suggests that Britain will decline and age, like other empires, while currently "immature" nations have the capacity to grow strong and powerful. [...]the rhetoric of colonial aggression is always potentially haunted by the threat of Britain's impending decline.11 On an even larger scale, liberalism itself is not a single form, but a constellation of overlapping and interconnecting principles of social organization, which are themselves capable of conflict. Or to put this another way, the reader is herself excessively formalized, too likely to fall into patterns of thought that she merely imposes on the text without attending to its difference from herself. [...]close reading-scrupulous attention to that which is not the reader-interrupts the routines of convention. 7In his classic essay on Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, Hall both registers their call for particularism and subjects it to convincing critique. 8As Hartman put it several decades ago, "those who have tried to ignore or transcend formalism tend often to arrive at results more abstract and categorical than what they object to"

Loại tài liệu:

Article - Bài báo

Tác giả:

Levine, Caroline

Đề mục:

English literature

Nhà xuất bản:

Indiana University Press

Ngày xuất bản:

Summer 2006

Số trang/ tờ:

Định dạng:

pdf

Định danh tư liệu:

https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2006.48.4.625

Nguồn gốc:

Victorian studies, Volume 48, Number 4, Summer 2007, Pages 625-657

Liên kết:

ISSN 0042-5222

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Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies

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