Formalist Analysis Research Articles

Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāma Narratives as Epic Episodes: A Case Study

Abstract The article begins with a recapitulation of attention to the Shāhnāma in America and proceeds to an overview of the Shāhnāma in the context of the epic species of narrative, with attention to Hamid Dabashi’s critique in The Shahnameh: The Persian Epic as World Literature of Western writing on world literature and Ferdowsi. The article also here reviews Amin Banani’s much reprinted essay first called “Ferdowsi and the Art of Tragic Epic.” There follow a suggestive list of Shāhnāma parts and a conclusion that, as a whole, it seems not to function as a single narrative, but rather as a collection of epic episodes. As an illustration, the article turns to the story of Rustam and Suhrāb. First comes a cursory American formalist analysis of “The Tale of Sohrab” in Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings translated by Dick Davis. Then comes a discussion of poetic features and effects in Mujtabā Mīnuvī’s edition called Dāstān-i [story of] Rustam va Suhrāb az Shāhnāma.

Formalism and Power of Language: Unravelling the Narratology of Final Fantasy XVI

Using the framework of formalist analysis, this study examines how language serves as a source of power in shaping the narrative depth, character development, and thematic exploration of Final Fantasy XVI. This research involves analyzing various types of language, from dialogue and narration to symbolism, metaphor, and simile. The research methodology employed is qualitative analysis, allowing for an in-depth examination of the linguistic complexities present in the game through textual analysis and content analysis. By thematically dissecting language and applying techniques from formalist linguistics, such as Deixis Analysis, the study aims to determine how game creators purposefully use linguistic techniques to construct emotional connotations and expressive effects. Additionally, it explores how witty dialogues between characters contribute to the development of story-related themes. This study reveals how the linguistic fabric of Final Fantasy XVI functions as an effective tool in crafting an engaging and powerful story. It draws players deeper into the game's world and evokes their sympathies for the various forces at play. Furthermore, the research highlights the intentional use of linguistic devices to enhance narrative immersion and emotional impact, showcasing the intricate interplay between language and storytelling in video games. Through this analysis, the study underscores the significance of linguistic elements in video game narratives, providing insights into how language can be manipulated to create compelling and immersive experiences for players.

Foreclosed futurity and genres of care in Barbara Peabody’s The Screaming Room

ABSTRACT Medical humanities scholars such as Arthur Frank have long argued that subjects being able to tell the story of their lives within a coherent, linear temporal framework is beneficial to the patient’s wellbeing. These models for understanding patient identity, however, often provide a binary model of identity where a subject either has a coherent, linear life narrative, or is a “narrative wreck.” This article argues against the supposition that a comprehensible life trajectory is necessary for narrative self-articulation. It does this through theorizing a concept of foreclosed futurity to describe when a narrative is written without the sense of a clear and foreseeable future. Through engaging with John Frow’s formalist analysis of genre, and the affect theory of Lauren Berlant and Brian Massumi, this article provides a reading of Barbara Peabody’s The Screaming Room that demonstrates how narrative identity can be maintained within the “crisis ordinariness” of a foreclosed future.

A formalist analysis in how Lewis Carroll portrays Alice character in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

The researcher of this study article presents a formalist analysis of Alice's characterization in the novel "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" from the point of view of the author of the fictional work Lewis Caroll. This research article explores how Alice's actions, dialogues, and interactions contribute to her characterization, emphasizing the traits of curiosity, open-mindedness, empathy, and assertiveness. It also investigates the role of each episode in shaping Alice's journey and highlights the importance of dreams, growth, and her encounter with the Caterpillar. The article concludes by emphasizing the formalist perspective and references various dissertations, conference proceedings, and books related to the analysis of Alice's character in the novel.

George Eliot's Italian Roads: Mobility, Temporality and the Crises of Realism in Romola and Middlemarch

Critics have read Eliot's Romola (1862–3) and Middlemarch (1871–2) as historical novels, as examples of the female Bildungsroman or as oddities and successes, respectively, within Eliot's realist oeuvre. This essay brings these strands of enquiry together in a formalist analysis, suggesting that these must not be seen as separate but connected debates about time, space and Eliot's novelistic poetics. Using Bakhtin's idea of the meaning-making nature of the chronotope, the essay reads momentous ‘road’ scenes in Eliot's two novels. As I argue, the road chronotope does not just represent moments of crisis for the protagonists and is, thus, an agent of narrative and mental change, but it also creates the symbolic, generic and affective registers in which these two novels operate. The road chronotope reveals Eliot's self-conscious experimentation with realism as she grapples with history, the individual's place in the world, and also sympathy, which is central to both her novels and her realist poetics. On a broader scale, the essay thus participates in ongoing scholarly debates about nineteenth-century novelistic form while also acknowledging the current ‘mobilities turn’ in analyses of Victorian fiction.

Strange Forms

Strange Forms

Science Fiction in Translation: Perspectives on the Global Theory and Practice of Translation ed. by Ian Campbell

Reviewed by: Science Fiction in Translation: Perspectives on the Global Theory and Practice of Translation ed. by Ian Campbell Lorenzo Andolfatto Triangulating SF in Translation. Ian Campbell, ed. Science Fiction in Translation: Perspectives on the Global Theory and Practice of Translation. Palgrave Macmillan, studies in global science fiction, 2021. xvii+359 pp. £109.99 hc, £87.50 ebk. Tackling science fiction in translation from a global perspective is a daunting endeavor. On the one and obvious hand, any single volume will always fall short in tracking the many translation flows connecting literary lineages worldwide; on the other and more pernicious one, English-language scholarship on this topic will tend to veer toward English as its main frame of reference, reinforcing from the standpoint of theory what sf scholar Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. describes as English’s “Grand Central Bottleneck” stifling non-Anglophone authors from reaching global audiences. These concerns inform and, more importantly, are challenged by the essays collected in Science Fiction in Translation, a much welcome intervention at the generative intersection between sf and translation. An organic consensus emerges from the sixteen chapters presented in this book: that the relation between sf and translation extends well beyond the contingency of the translational exchange—the rendition of sf stories from one language to another. As Rachel Cordasco states in the opening chapter, these are fields connected “in the terms of transformation that they share” (19), one unfolding between the poles of estrangement and cognition, the other between foreignization and domestication. The terms are indeed transferable: informed by the linguistic invention of the novum, sf fabulation can be considered as a narrative process of translation through which what is estranging is rendered back into cognizable terms; similarly, the foreign text presents itself to the translator as an estranging novum, persisting as such, albeit domesticated to varying degrees, in the target reader’s experience. As editor Ian Campbell further remarks, both sf and translation generate “remainders”: in one case, the foreignness of the translated text, whose “sharp edges” poke through the translator’s efforts (Campbell, 5–6); in the other, the reader’s familiar assumptions, to which the estranging effect of the sf text remains anchored. Finally, whereas sf has been historically used by European writers to “either glorify or critique colonialism,” as Erin Twohig notes in her chapter on “Speculative Orientalism” (139), translation has been similarly mobilized in support of the “operative viewpoint” of the colonizer (as argued in Alexis Brooks de Vita’s “The Clockwork Chrysalis” [292]) as well as “a form of resistance against ethnocentrism and racism, cultural narcissism and imperialism, in the interests of democratic geopolitical relations” (Lawrence Venuti qtd. in Sara Martín’s “Militant Translation” 41). The essays collected here develop around these junctures, presenting a variety of approaches to translation that include close reading, applied linguistics, formalist analysis, gender deconstruction, and postcolonial critique, as well as case studies spanning from French, Catalan, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, and Hungarian to Arabic, Bengali, and Chinese. The breadth of this spectrum foregrounds translation, not only in its “linguistic transformative sense,” but also as a process of “cultural transaction” (Suparno Banerjee, “Ghosts, Aliens, and Machines” 265), [End Page 121] whose instantiations—as Virginia L. Conn brilliantly shows in her analysis of Wang Jinkang’s “The Reincarnated Giant” [Zhuansheng de juren, 2005/tr. 2018]—are often symptoms of shifting national identities, global postcolonial repositionings, and embodied “hierarch[ies] of worth” (230). In both senses, the genre of sf, intertwined as it is with the project of imperial modernity, presents a most productive frame of reference for examining the multiple tensions underlying transcultural literary exchange. As many of this book’s contributions show, beneath the unspoken claims or aspirations of universality upon which these processes rely, they resist ethnocentric assumptions that manifest themselves in translation as domesticating strategies of “invisibility” and “hypertextuality” (Amélie Lespillette, “Philip K. Dick in French” 146), obfuscation (R.B. Lemberg’s “Ungendering the English Translation of the Strugatskys’ The Snail on the Slope), and “cross-cultural erasure” (Brooks de Vita 295); at the level of sf representation we find discourses of othering (Twohig), technoorientalism (Yen Ooi, “Translating the Chinese Monster in Waste Tide”), and pathological nationalism (Conn...

Comparative Formalistic Analysis of Daud Kamal and Emily Dickinson’s Selected Poems

From the perspective of formalist critics, form is important and content is secondary. Unlike the traditional criticism of literature, formalism focuses on form of a given text and endeavours to dissect meanings and theme. The current research work is focused on comparative formalist analysis of Daud Kamal’s poem Ode to Death and Emily Dickinson’s poem I heard a fly Buzz-when I died. These poems are taken for formalistic analysis because these are one of the best poems written by poets in terms of their style, diction and themes. Furthermore, this study investigates literary devices that are used in the selected poems. The study utilizes qualitative approach by using a textual analysis.

Nuts and Bolts: Collective Action, the Divestment Movement, and Jane Addams

This essay describes the author's quest for effective, large-scale political actions to stop the burning of fossil fuels. What are the nuts and bolts of collective organizing at scales large enough to effect substantial change? Frustrated both by widespread public pessimism and by the politics most often articulated in literary studies, Levine finds a working political model in the divestment movement; a methodological model in formalist analysis; and a theory of collective aesthetics and politics in post-Victorian Jane Addams.

From Political Economy to Economics Through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social, edited by Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, and Sarah Winter

Reviewed by: From Political Economy to Economics Through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social ed. by Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, and Sarah Winter Eleanor Courtemanche (bio) From Political Economy to Economics Through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social, edited by Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, and Sarah Winter; pp. xiii + 287. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, $119.99, $84.99 paper, $64.99 ebook. This fascinating and useful volume of essays marks a new stage in the study of political economy from the standpoint of Victorian studies. This subfield, with its origins in New Historicism and the "New Economic Criticism," has developed new branches in response [End Page 521] to recent work on environmental crisis, the history of slavery, and critiques of inequality that sharpened after the global financial crisis of 2008 (5). This subfield of Victorian studies has always had an edge of ideology critique, in its claim that axioms of economic law have been abstracted from their historical and social contexts and then used to dominate discourses of capitalist experience. Yet it was also defined at the outset by a rather abashed bracketing out of Marxism, as in The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Interface of Literature and Economics (1999), which claimed that "most literary critics' knowledge of economics begins and ends with Karl Marx" (edited by Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen [Routledge], 12). In response, scholars drilled down specifically on the British tradition of political economy, including the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus, as well as representatives of the neoclassical or marginalist turn such as William Stanley Jevons and Alfred Marshall, and a vast, shadowy host of otherwise-forgotten economists. The goal was to carefully disentangle this theoretical tradition from its oversimplification as "capitalist ideology," and to read it for its own internal contradictions and use of literary terms, as well as its historical embeddedness in an age of turbulent industrialization and imperial expansion. That subfield was mapped out by Catherine Gallagher, Mary Poovey, and Regenia Gagnier between roughly 1985 and 2005 in work that articulated the crucial transition between "political economy," a term that admits that economics is a field structured by power, and "economic theory," which naturalizes its prescriptions with narrow mathematical certainty (10). As its title suggests, this volume follows in this tradition by defending the "social" against the presumably anti-social abstractions of economic theory. Its general thrust is to defend the empirical and inductive—observed social life and historical impasses—rather than to follow the path of formalist analysis laid out by Jean-Joseph Goux and Marc Shell, or of Marxist-semiotic analyses of money and credit as themselves fictional. The autonomy of fictional or aesthetic ways of knowing is not the main point here. But the banishment of Marx is over, and this volume is a welcome opening in Victorian studies to some non-British and even radical approaches to economic history. The volume's introduction frames its task in terms of this critical genealogy, stressing its allegiance to historical rigor and aversion to presentism. But it also defines its intervention as making the connections between contemporary capitalist crisis and the study of the nineteenth century more "directly" than earlier work—perhaps more in the line of Audrey Jaffe's The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock Market Graph (2010), which connected Victorian and contemporary obsessions with stock market graphs (7). I am not sure any of this work will ever give a University of Chicago economist even a momentary twinge of regret about their discipline's limitations. However, in an age when neoliberalism seems to be cracking under multiple pressures, the opportunities for critical engagement with economics extend beyond rereading the classics. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), which used novels by Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac to illustrate a world of inherited financial inequality that might be returning, is referenced by several writers as a new interdisciplinary interlocutor. Though unified by their engagement with nineteenth-century political economy, the essays in this volume splinter out in many directions, each engaging with a new set of contemporary theorists and problems. [End Page 522] The essays...

Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England

Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England

Our Cherished Moments of Involuntary Realism: Charles Harrison, Modernism, and Art Writing

In May 1969, Charles Harrison reviewed Morris Louis’ exhibition at the Waddington Galleries in London. Months later, he helped to install the exhibition When Attitudes Become Form at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Harrison also wrote the catalogue text, published in Studio International. Those two texts marked a significant point in Harrison’s career. They were indicative of his disillusionment with modernist criticism, and of his burgeoning interest in the work of post-minimal and conceptual art. In this respect, the two essays mark a transition from modernism to post-modernism in the space between a formalist analysis of the art object and a more dispersed field of artistic practice, where a changed relationship between art practice, criticism, and curating was taking place. However, in the 2000s, Harrison came to reflect upon this cardinal moment. Harrison referred to his recollected experiences of the late 1960s as a ‘cherished moment of involuntary realism’, opening up issues around art writing which remain pertinent to the practice of art history.

Zum Konzept musikalischer Gestik

When hearing music as music, we hear motion in it, action even. Much of this action is gestural in quality. Richard Wagner’s writings about musical gesture as intimately linked with dramatic gesture, speak of this quality. The corporeality implied in Wagner’s understanding, however, has been largely abstracted away in music aesthetics and music theory since then. The dominant term in formalist analysis is Gestalt, namely, the structure of ideal motion. It appears devoid of the sensual, stripped of its actual bodily feeling and replaced by an act of imagination; in the music aesthetics of Carl Dahlhaus, Roger Scruton and Jerrold Levinson, and in the semiotic approach of Robert Hatten, for instance, the term gesture is retained, but conceptually limited to a metaphoric use: to talk of musical gesture there is to transfer its meaning from the domain of bodily expression. The latter concept does not explain how the transfer makes sense instead of being arbitrary to the musical experience (it only states that it does, and leaves the role of its apt application to the expert critic). My purpose in this text is to rethink the concept of musical gesture, integrate its actual sensual dimension, and hint at its rich potential for the analysis of music. I argue that the proprioceptivity of bodily gestures is extremely rich, spanning kinetic, haptic, topological, even emotional characteristics, all included in their understanding as felt in the lived body. Keeping this in mind, the audio-visual-tactile perception of one’s gesture when making a sound oneself, by sliding one’s hand over a piece of paper, say, provides the experiential backdrop to an empathic completion of a gesture as heard. A heard sonic shape thus becomes more than a Gestalt: it acquires a feel; ambiguous to some degree, but grounded in the very mundane experience of one’s own very refined gestural repertoire. This widened concept, I argue, elucidates music as being something not only understood, but something grasped and felt. I show this elaborated concept of musical gesture to be relevant to the understanding of expressivity in large scale thematic variation, taking Brahms’s Intermezzo op. 118,6 in E-flat Minor as an illustration. Provided one views music as something that occurs in aesthetic experience, then gesture is here shown as intersubjective and musically immanent.

Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848

Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848

Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848. Clare Pettitt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xv+348.

<i>Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848</i>. Clare Pettitt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xv+348.

To Dally with Dalí: Deepfake (Inter)faces in the Art Museum

This essay focuses on the nascent symbiotic relationship between deepfakes and art museums and galleries, as demonstrated by three case studies. The first one, housed at the Dalí Museum in St Petersburg, Florida, is a life-size talking avatar of the artist generated from archival footage. The second one, Warriors by James Coupe, revisits Walter Hill’s 1979 film of the same name using deepfake algorithms to insert visitors’ faces into key scenes, sorting them into gangs based on data-driven analysis of their demographic and economic markers. Finally, Gillian Wearing’s fake ad, Wearing Gillian, uses deepfake technology to enable a series of actors to appear on screen with the artist’s face as a way of interrogating questions of identity in a networked digital world. Based on these works, my article examines museums’ employment of deepfakes for advertising, audience engagement, and educational outreach, and the curatorial, ethical, and creative opportunities and challenges involved therein. While deepfake esthetics will be discussed wherever relevant, this is not a formalist analysis; my goal is not to focus on close readings of the deepfake pieces themselves, however fascinating their esthetics. Instead, I will look at the promotional and critical discourse around them in order to unpack the ways in which the acquisition of creative deepfake works by cultural institutions functions as a legitimizing force that is already shifting the narrative regarding the artistic value and social functions of this technology.

Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution. Ian Duncan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xiii+290.

<i>Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution</i>. Ian Duncan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xiii+290.

Unconventional Experiments: Teaching Early Modern Women Writers

Abstract: This article discusses an approach to teaching early modern women's writing that uses book history and formalism as its main tools. It argues that digital editions of the poetry of Mary Wroth, Hester Pulter, and Margaret Cavendish enable new ways to study these works. Paul Salzman's Wroth edition places different versions of the same poem (including digitized images of the holograph manuscript) side by side, which shows how a misreading of her first sonnet occurred. The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making is producing multiple editions of Hester Pulter's 120 poems, plus additional "curations" that bring contextual materials, including poems by male writers, into dialogue with the poems. Close readings of Pulter's poems demonstrate a poet of formal sophistication. Liza Blake's edition of Margaret Cavendish's Poems and Fancies highlights material issues by offering detailed textual notes that compare the three very different printed versions. Her digital edition also suggests pathways for formalist analysis, such as proposing Cavendish as a metaphysical poet, as does the work of Lara Dodds, which suggests we embrace Cavendish's supposed "bad writing." After a brief analysis of Cavendish's generically experimental Sociable Letters , this article turns to a recent example of recovery research in the discovery of Dorothy Calthorpe's manuscripts and ends by suggesting future trends in the field. These include analyzing known works from multiple perspectives and studying a wider range of sources that more accurately reflects early modern conceptions of authorship.

Alexander Lobanov: The Reception of the Political in Soviet Outsider Art

The analysis of the oeuvre of the outsider artist Alexander Lobanov (1924–2003) reveals the mechanisms of influence of Soviet visual propaganda. This article examines the total influence of ideology and visual narratives on an artist even when they seem to have been completely excluded from artistic life (in Lobanov’s case, due to his deaf mutism). The author refers to Irving Goffman’s self-presentation theory, the works on political power and its influence by Boris Groys, and the works of psychologists on the peculiarities of compensatory activity in the deaf and mute. The work is relevant as it reflects the importance of outsider artists as part of the art process. The author mostly refers to works by Lobanov in non-Russian and Russian private and institutional collections, as well visual propaganda from the Soviet period. Works by Lobanov and other Soviet outsider artists have not been studied from the perspective chosen by the article’s author. The artist’s oeuvre is examined by Élisabeth Anstett from the discourse point of view, connected with visual images from Soviet propaganda. The author of the article singles out the peculiarities of the appropriation by the outsider artist of the ideological visual narrative, the circle of borrowed images (militarism, hero, Stalin – “the father of nations”), and certain approaches (recurrence, ornamentality, and the presence of text). As a result of an artistic and formalist analysis, the author reveals specific borrowings of approaches and stylistics from the Soviet art (poster, illustration, and easel painting) of the 1930s to the mid‑1950s. Additionally, an important aspect of the study is that the author reveals the peculiar intellectualisation of compensatory mechanisms in the construction of social representation addressing the dominant images of visual Soviet propaganda. The interdisciplinary approach of the research, with certain exceptions, could be used to analyse the creative work of other Soviet outsider artists.

A Formalism Reading of Maugham’s “The Three Fat Women of Antibes” and “Rain”

This paper focuses on a formalist analysis of Maugham’s two stories “The Three Fat Women of Antibes” and “Rain” and it offers a discussion of some major aspects of the work as a whole: genre, narration, character relations, and setting. The aim is to provide a sense of Maugham’s art of the short story with an assessment of the vital elements of what makes a short story successful in the work of William Somerset Maugham and an exploration of how his work exposes the experience. The main part of this manuscript provides a detailed analysis of selected short stories by Maugham. Especial emphasis is placed on the author’s gifted talents which shows the diversity of Maugham’s literary legacy that made him the most popular writer of his time. The study discloses that conducting a formalist analysis is supposed to be a good way in understanding literary works.