Forms: A Conversation with Stephen Harrison

Date
Fri March 17th 2017, 12:30 - 1:30pm
Event Sponsor
Department of Classics
Location
110-112
Forms: A Conversation with Stephen Harrison

The recent book by Caroline Levine, Forms: whole, rhythm, hierarchy, network, provides much food for thought. (The publisher's blurb is below.)

The department will host a discussion on the book on March 17th (week 10), in the usual Friday lunchtime slot. Professor Stephen Harrison, visiting this term from Oxford, has graciously agreed to lead the conversation with a few remarks. He will summarize the key arguments of the book, point out some of the problems it raises, and suggest some connections with the history of genre theory as applied to classical (and other) literature. 

Please join us for what promises to be a wide-ranging discussion. Copies are available in the department library and electronically via SUL (URL below) so you can read the book in advance, which we strongly urge.

Stephen Harrison (Fellow and Tutor in Classics, Corpus Christi College, Oxford; Professor of Latin Literature, University of Oxford)

Forms offers a powerful new answer to one of the most pressing problems facing literary, critical, and cultural studies today—how to connect form to political, social, and historical context. Caroline Levine argues that forms organize not only works of art but also political life—and our attempts to know both art and politics. Inescapable and frequently troubling, forms shape every aspect of our experience. Yet, forms don't impose their order in any simple way. Multiple shapes, patterns, and arrangements, overlapping and colliding, generate complex and unpredictable social landscapes that challenge and unsettle conventional analytic models in literary and cultural studies.

Borrowing the concept of "affordances" from design theory, this book investigates the specific ways that four major forms—wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks—have structured culture, politics, and scholarly knowledge across periods, and it proposes exciting new ways of linking formalism to historicism and literature to politics. Levine rereads both formalist and antiformalist theorists, including Cleanth Brooks, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Mary Poovey, and Judith Butler, and she offers engaging accounts of a wide range of objects, from medieval convents and modern theme parks to Sophocles's Antigone and the television series The Wire.

The result is a radically new way of thinking about form for the next generation and essential reading for scholars and students across the humanities who must wrestle with the problem of form and context.

Ebrary copy (single-user access!)

https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/10733347https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/10733347

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