Overview

Demonstrates the embodied foundation of figurative, poetic and literary language and form Formal Matters re-examines the postmodernist insistence that the body escapes signification by turning to an unexpected source: early and mid-century formalisms. Bringing together formalism's endeavour to give shape to the ineffable with postmodernism's discursive body, the book argues that embodiment or the experience of the lived, corporeal body is not what resists representation but what constitutes form. Working at the intersection of formalist criticism, phenomenology and body studies, Zoe Roth reassesses the relationship between embodiment and form in a range of modern European authors, including Primo Levi, Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Anne F. Garreta and Hannah Arendt. Through close textual analysis, Formal Matters provides a new method for grasping embodied experience where it appears most attenuated and fragmented. It provides an original account of the body's relationship to language and representation, while also reinvigorating formalist methods with political potential.

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9781474497503

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"Zo� Roth's Formal Matters combines subtle, nuanced, and intelligent analyses of texts by Samuel Beckett, Anne F. Garr�ta, Maurice Blanchot, Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi and a passionate plea for a ""corporeal turn."" Roth launches a literary tropology whose categories will become indispensable while demonstrating that a new positioning of the body is the key for a rejuvenated literary theory. --Jean-Michel Rabat�, University of Pennsylvania, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences."

Author Information

Zoe Roth, Associate Professor of French in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University.

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