KEY THEME: FORM Flashcards
Caroline Levine’s definition of Form (in Forms)
‘an arrangement of elements-an ordering, patterning, or shaping’
Caroline Levine’s definition of Form (in Forms)
‘an arrangement of elements-an ordering, patterning, or shaping’
1811-1855 Simon Eliot
chart displays increase in price of fiction books; colossal change in ratio as well as huge increase in newspapers and magazine titles
change in situation of fiction in relation to other books on sale in marketplace
1814-46: fiction only 16.2 per cent of books on sale; by 1890s mix of subjects very different, fiction towers over all other forms.
Although books were an important feature of the period, the real success story (in terms of sales, readership and profit) were cheap newspapers and magazines.
3-decker novels dominate, but always in competition with other forms like penny dreadfuls and magazines e.g. The Cornhill Magazine
fun fact
DICKENS NEVER READ THE BRONTES !!!
What is a novel OED
(n) 4b: A long fictional prose narrative, usually filling one or more volumes and typically representing character and action with some degree of realism and complexity… frequently contrasted with a romance
Mikhail Bakhtin ‘Discourse in the Novel’
‘the style of a novel is to be found in the combinations of its styles ; ‘The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized’
what matters socio-politically is…
the internal stratification of those speech types/languages/voices
KEY POINT BAKHTIN
the novel can live comfortably with incoherence
split between critics who want to see plot as the mechanism for organisation….
and those who see the narrative as something which that sort of organisation fails for
Cleanth Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Novelists try to impose structural coherence
‘Plot is the principle of interconnectedness and intention which we cannot do without in moving through the discreet elements, incidents, episodes, actions-of a narrative: even such loosely articulated forms as the picaresque novel display devices of interconnectedness, structural repetitions that allow us to construct a whole’
Forster, Aspects of the Novel 1927 (hostile description of mechanistic style of novelists)
‘The plot of the novel is its logical intellectual aspect…[the novelist] is competent, poised above his work, throwing a beam of light here, popping on a cap of invisibility there’
Forster ‘in the losing battle
that plot fights with the characters, it often takes a cowardly revenge’
Macherey’s analysis of Verne in ‘Jules Verne: The Faulty Narrative’ in Macherey’s Theory of Narrative Production
‘Macherey’s analysis of Jules Verne suggested that a text could be defined by its ‘absences’ or silences’- Freud;’the hysteric text’
Form is always coercive…
what is the balance between plurality and incoherence?
Robert Scholes ‘Afterthoughts on Narrative II’ in On Narrative
‘the function of anti-narrative is to problematize the entire process of narration and interpretation for us…. Traditional narrative structures are perceived as part of a system of psychosocial dependencies that inhabit both individual growth and significant social change’
Robert Scholes - can we do without narrative form?
‘it seems to me likely that [narrative processes] are too deeply rooted in human physical and mental processes to be dispensed with by members of this species. We can and should be critical of narrative structuration, but I doubt if even the most devoted practitioner of anti-narrativity can do without it.’
Beginning of Jane eyre
- scene of reading draws you into subjective protective posture
- pathetic fallacy; mirror
- perversity given early on
Beginning of WH
- unusual framing narrative device (ill-equipped to tell story, comes with romantic suppositions and self-aggrandising voice within frames; no discernible narrator, no date = emotionally elusive _+ pseudonym, element of wanting you to be in the wrong place.
- voice is wrong; ‘a capital fellow!’
Beginning of Middlemarch
- no ‘I’; generality is pitched, anonymity and openness
- pastoral - child toddling in countryside; sentimental; impulse towards heroic lifel
- deliberately sophisticatedly naive
poem as a living, breathing organism; as shown by
Whitman’s revising LOG even on his death-bed, ‘Who touches this book touches a man’ ; similar to Tennyson’s constant revising poetry
Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the secret of form or
expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance? Was the good or
the evil genius dominant in those beams? Probably the evil; else why was
the effect that of unrest rather than of undisturbed charm? Why was the
wish to look again felt as coercion and not as a longing in which the
whole being consents?’
- effort to understand what beauty is, how refractive that beauty is - not just aesthetic; what is that dynamic quality that does/doesn’t appeal; uncertainty about what you’re watching puts you in same position as Daniel Deronda
- Mismatch between her external beauty and her lack of moral development and adult seriousness;
Professor Donald McKenzie
would rip off parts of books and asking ‘is this still a book’ - where does a book begin? preface?
What is a preface
a type of holistic statement that tries to shape the experience of the style of the book
1811-1855 Simon Eliot
chart displays increase in price of fiction books; colossal change in ratio as well as huge increase in newspapers and magazine titles
change in situation of fiction in relation to other books on sale in marketplace
1814-46: fiction only 16.2 per cent of books on sale; by 1890s mix of subjects very different, fiction towers over all other forms.
Although books were an important feature of the period, the real success story (in terms of sales, readership and profit) were cheap newspapers and magazines.
3-decker novels dominate, but always in competition with other forms like penny dreadfuls and magazines e.g. The Cornhill Magazine
What is a novel OED
(n) 4b: A long fictional prose narrative, usually filling one or more volumes and typically representing character and action with some degree of realism and complexity… frequently contrasted with a romance
Mikhail Bakhtin ‘Discourse in the Novel’
‘the style of a novel is to be found in the combinations of its styles ; ‘The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized’
what matters socio-politically is…
the internal stratification of those speech types/languages/voices
KEY POINT BAKHTIN
the novel can live comfortably with incoherence
split between critics who want to see plot as the mechanism for organisation….
and those who see the narrative as something which that sort of organisation fails for
Cleanth Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Novelists try to impose structural coherence
‘Plot is the principle of interconnectedness and intention which we cannot do without in moving through the discreet elements, incidents, episodes, actions-of a narrative: even such loosely articulated forms as the picaresque novel display devices of interconnectedness, structural repetitions that allow us to construct a whole’
Forster, Aspects of the Novel 1927 (hostile description of mechanistic style of novelists)
‘The plot of the novel is its logical intellectual aspect…[the novelist] is competent, poised above his work, throwing a beam of light here, popping on a cap of invisibility there’
Forster ‘in the losing battle
that plot fights with the characters, it often takes a cowardly revenge’
Macherey’s analysis of Verne in ‘Jules Verne: The Faulty Narrative’ in Macherey’s Theory of Narrative Production
‘Macherey’s analysis of Jules Verne suggested that a text could be defined by its ‘absences’ or silences’- Freud;’the hysteric text’
Form is always coercive…
what is the balance between plurality and incoherence?
Robert Scholes ‘Afterthoughts on Narrative II’ in On Narrative
‘the function of anti-narrative is to problematize the entire process of narration and interpretation for us…. Traditional narrative structures are perceived as part of a system of psychosocial dependencies that inhabit both individual growth and significant social change’
Robert Scholes - can we do without narrative form?
‘it seems to me likely that [narrative processes] are too deeply rooted in human physical and mental processes to be dispensed with by members of this species. We can and should be critical of narrative structuration, but I doubt if even the most devoted practitioner of anti-narrativity can do without it.’
Beginning of WH
- unusual framing narrative device (ill-equipped to tell story, comes with romantic suppositions and self-aggrandising voice within frames; no discernible narrator, no date = emotionally elusive _+ pseudonym, element of wanting you to be in the wrong place.
- voice is wrong; ‘a capital fellow!’
Professor Donald McKenzie
would rip off parts of books and asking ‘is this still a book’ - where does a book begin? preface?
What is a preface
a type of holistic statement that tries to shape the experience of the style of the book
the aesthetic form of the poem is…
the conduit of meaning
Ralph Waldo Emerson ‘The Poet’
1844: ‘For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem - a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature witha . new thing’
poem as a living, breathing organism; as shown by
Whitman’s revising LOG even on his death-bed, ‘Who touches this book touches a man’ ; similar to Tennyson’s constant revising peotry
dramatic monologue
poem in the form of a speech or narrative by an imagined person, in which the speaker inadvertently reveals aspects of their character while describing a particular series of events
