Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network Paperback – January 3, 2017

This is a smart, timely, and immensely readable contribution to literary and cultural studies—essential reading for anyone interested in looking in fresh ways at the relationship between artistic and social forms. I like it a lot.

thanks

Interesting topic!

Smart, useful book

An interesting way of using literature to inform social commentary with good examples.

Beautifully written, thoughtful and surprising. An obligatory reading for any intellectual engaged both in culture and politics. This book is going to receive some important awards this year!

This immacutely written text covers a much wider range of subjects outside literary theory and should appeal to cultural and social theorists of all shades.The author embraces an overarching formalist methodology . This allows her to uncover the common characteristics that underline the organising principles of aesthetic compositions as well as sociopolitical constructions. The human mind seeks to grasp order and form in the diverse variegated social and natural worlds it encounters. Throughout the ages unraveling correspondences and isomorphisms was the preferred approach to grasp meaning . Contemporary theorists whether they use the term form or structure are not much different from the Medievalists who recognised correspondences between the macrocosm and microcosm, and elucidated a hierarchical order in the" great chain of being".Modern Formalists and Structuralists in turn uncover the underlying bounded whole in the organisation of a social institution or a creative literary work. They aim to elucidate the hidden design and the multiple interconnections between these wholes, the rhythms that shape their temporalities and the hierarchies that determine their operations. The wide ranging examples the author draws from the different realms examined ( Greek tragedy, modern soap opera, social institutions) are illuminating and illustrate cogently the four types of forms she distinguishes namely the whole, rhythm, network and hierarchy. The thorny question she doesn't answer is whether the foundation of these forms is ingrained in the human mind ( idealism) or whether any complex totality from a simple organism to a poem are determined by the same rules of organisation, mechanical, organic or mathematical.

refreshing but not that relevant

My own interest is in understanding forms in the social (and particularly business) world, and the psychology of living in this world. I purchased ‘Forms’ because it appeared to address similar issues from a different perspective, that of literary criticism, and has been well reviewed in that field.I was pleased to find many valuable insights – fresh ways of understanding that social world.However I’ve many reservations. The book is not easy to read for those of us not versed in the academic study of literature. It is written in the jargon of the subject, as though the author is addressing herself exclusively to people in her own field who (perhaps foolishly) have omitted to adopt her way of thinking. It is heavy going and sometimes repetitive. I sense that the book is compiled from lecture notes (students need to have difficult points reinforced). The text would have benefitted from a careful read-through by a non-specialist sub-editor.Issues that I find difficult to grasp appear to be taken for granted. I think of her continuous flipping between examples from real life and fiction as though they are one and the same thing, as though texts of fiction can be interpreted without a need to take account of the role of their authors in constructing them.My dissatisfaction was greatest at the end of the book. Chapter VI is a long analysis of the plot of a TV series I have not seen (and again, an analysis that does not seem to recognise that the plot has been constructed by a community of TV writers). I turned the page at the end of this chapter expecting a summary of the issues raised, but found none – that is the end of the book!So an important book of thought-provoking ideas – but it could have been so much better!