“The Foundation of This is laid in Truth of Fact; and so the Work is not a Story, but a History,” wrote Daniel Defoe at the beginning of The Fortunate…
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Contemporaries Essays, The After Archive
Contemporaries Essays, The After Archive
Math of the Non-visible
Siddhartha Lokanandi, who owns a bookstore and arts event space here in Kufürstenstrasse called Hopscotch, told me two things in our first meeting that he believes to be true about…
Contemporaries Essays, The After Archive
The After Archive: Introduction
After the end, or after the beginning, or after we started to write these essays everything changed. I wait for my ability to imagine a relationship with the past or…
Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 2
Afterword Form Now: As Limit and Beyond
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…
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…