Issues

The title of this double special issue of Post45 invites us to consider whether each individual essay endorses, condemns, practices or in some way “unbinds” formalism. It also raises the question about…

Many things in this world haven’t yet been named; many things, even if they have been named, have barely been described. One of these is the practice of “reading” —…

In literary studies, queer theory came on the scene around 1990 wielding its formalism as the sign of its politics. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s cheeky description of queer theory…

Form, writes Ali Smith, can be “a matter of need and expectation,” offering “clear rules and unspoken understandings.” But in practice, she adds, form is “also a matter of breaking…

Enjoying a second act that seemed all but inconceivable a couple decades ago, form has recently reclaimed center stage in academic literary studies. This time around it claims greater power…

At fourteen years old, I took a job as a cashier at a Christian bookstore. The owners were Christian fundamentalist-lite, whereas I was coerced by my parents to attend a…

Dickens sees human beings with the most intense vividness, but he sees them always in private life, as ‘characters’, not as functional members of society; that is to say, he…

Twenty-eight fat televisions are stacked into a pyramid of sorts in the corner. In the darkened room, each screen plays the same short excerpt of Nina Simone’s 1964 performance of…

1. Look It’s unreasonably hot for an English summer. Moving through the humid chambers of the Victoria and Albert Museum feels like trudging through a steamed treacle pudding, an Edwardian…