Russian Formalist News Today

Michael Dirda's list of almost-overlooked books: "The History of the Hobbit," "Life at Play" and a trove of Proust manuscripts are among them.

“The demands of poetry and painting, of expressivity and formalism, collided in his work and would come to no easy resolution,” wrote Barrett Watten of Frank O’Hara in Artforum’s March 2008 issue. O’Hara’s legacy is defined by dichotomies—of “high” and “low,” privacy and disclosure, contrivance and sincerity, celebration and elegy. Watten finds cause to let these contradictions lie in Lytle Shaw’s 2006 book, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of the Coterie. “The disparity of ...

Jessica Merrill traces the emergence of Russian Formalism and its impact on literary form.

A journal of Art, Culture and Politics, Published by the University of Chicago

A journal of Art, Culture and Politics, Published by the University of Chicago

Theory of the Novel Instructors: Armstrong and Garréta Intended for graduate students and advanced undergraduates who want to pursue some area of novel, fiction, or narrative studies, this course examines a set of concepts that should provide them access to 1) the modes of thinking that characterize novels across the modern and contemporary periods and several different national traditions, 2) the various ways that critical theory has defined those concepts, and 3) reading the novel as a con...

Abstract This essay looks at the history of the novel, starting from the influential postwar critical insistence on the importance of the novel as a nineteenth-century genre. It notes that this tradition singularly fails to take account of the history of the novel in antiquity–for clear ideological reasons. It then explores the degree to which the texts known as the novel from antiquity, such as Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, Petronius’s Satyricon, or Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, constitute...