Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: In Defence of Paraphrase
- 1 Content and Form
- 2 Anthony Trollope on Akrasia, Self-Deception and Ethical Confusion
- 3 Justifying Anachronism
- 4 The Scourge of the Unwilling: George Eliot on the Sources of Normativity
- 5 Everyday Aesthetics and the Experience of the Profound
- 6 Robert Browning, Augusta Webster and the Role of Morality
- Epilogue: Between Immersion and Critique – Thoughtful Reading
- Index
Introduction: In Defence of Paraphrase
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: In Defence of Paraphrase
- 1 Content and Form
- 2 Anthony Trollope on Akrasia, Self-Deception and Ethical Confusion
- 3 Justifying Anachronism
- 4 The Scourge of the Unwilling: George Eliot on the Sources of Normativity
- 5 Everyday Aesthetics and the Experience of the Profound
- 6 Robert Browning, Augusta Webster and the Role of Morality
- Epilogue: Between Immersion and Critique – Thoughtful Reading
- Index
Summary
Teachers of Literature are apt to think up such problems as ‘What is the author's purpose?’ or still worse, ‘What is the guy trying to say?’
Vladimir NabokovWhatever it may have been in the past, the idea of content is today mainly a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.
Susan SontagIdeas in poetry are usually stale and false, and no one older than sixteen would find it worth his while to read poetry merely for what it says.
George BoasNear the end of Distant Reading, a collection of his influential essays on literary methodology, Franco Moretti writes that ‘formal analysis is the great accomplishment of literary study’, and that any alternative to it must show that it is somehow superior or at least equal. The claim is presented as if it is more or less obvious; what is necessary in Moretti's mind is not to justify formalism, but instead to show that his variation on formalism can offer new insights. But that phrase – ‘the great accomplishment’ – should give one pause. Why, exactly, is formalism the most significant achievement of literary criticism, and what conception of literature lies behind this claim?
Caroline Levine's award-winning book Forms shares the same basic sense of the nature of literary criticism. ‘One of the great achievements of formalism’, she tells us, ‘has been the development of rich vocabularies and highly refined skills for differentiating among forms.’ Indeed reading for form is ‘what literary critics have traditionally done best’. Susan Wolfson, in the book that initiated the ‘New Formalism’, similarly holds up formalism as the element of literary criticism that is worth preserving. She is ‘struck by how tenacious the subject has proven’; quoting Geoffrey Hartman approvingly, she notes how hard – and by hard she means impossible – it is to move beyond formalism. Levine's version of formalism and her justification for it differs significantly from Moretti's – and Wolfson's differs from both – but all three writers share the same basic sense that the greatest thing literary studies has done is to think about form.
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- Reading Ideas in Victorian LiteratureLiterary Content as Artistic Experience, pp. 1 - 38Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020