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…
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Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 2, Peer Reviewed Articles
Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 2, Peer Reviewed Articles
Notes on Shade
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” —…
Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 2, Peer Reviewed Articles
Queer Formula
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…
Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 2, Peer Reviewed Articles
Zadie Smith’s Style of Thinking
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…
Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 2, Peer Reviewed Articles
Form contra Aesthetics
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…
Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 2, Peer Reviewed Articles
Formalism at the End Times: A Modest Account
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…
Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 2, Peer Reviewed Articles
Furnishing the Novel, Feeding the Soul: Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore
Old Romantics
folklore and evermore revisit the Lake District of first-generation Romantic English authors William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and their mutual friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Swift is also influenced by American…
Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore
folklore 2: folklore harder with a vengeance
If I were granted a retrospective COVID time travel wish, I would have hibernated through 2020, emerging every couple of months to stock up on snacks and the new Taylor…
Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore
Somethin’ ‘Bout a Truck
Until evermore, there hadn’t been a truck in a Taylor Swift song since her eponymous debut. On Taylor Swift, she spends a lot of time in trucks. The lost love…