1 - The Corporeal Urn

Summary

Form and embodiment are inseparable. Without a thorough investigation of the body’s relation to literary form we fail to fully understand either one. By bringing together formalist methods with the body’s political dimension, Formal Matters moves beyond exploring how literature represents bodies or how the body constitutes a literary theme. I tie an attention to aesthetic form with bodily experience via the notion of ‘embodied form.’ This helps account for both the political treatment of the body – what appears through representation – and embodiment’s agential capacity to shape, rather than merely to reflect, the political sphere. One of this book’s major arguments is that postmodernism’s discourse of the failure of representation has become an unhelpful master narrative that renders bodily experience fundamentally unknowable, and it thus relegates it to a realm outside of political representation. Postmodernism has privileged the subjection, fragmentation, and objectification of the body over lines of enquiry that reclaim embodied agency. By contrast, Formal Matters is driven by two impulses. First, it constructs a path beyond the impasse that language cannot fully capture the body and, conversely, that the body fundamentally escapes representation. Second, it provides a formalist methodology that is able to account for embodied experience where it appears most attenuated and eclipsed. In contrast to the postmodern insistence that language cannot fully capture the object it seeks to represent, I argue that embodiment is not what escapes but what constitutes form. It is thus able to mold the political realm in ways that have not yet been fully acknowledged.

The need to challenge the master narrative of unrepresentability has never been more urgent. The fetishism of the virtual, the posthuman, and the cyborg have increasingly relegated bodily materiality to an inconvenience – an obstacle to immortality and boundless knowledge. At the same time, the politics surrounding mass displacement and containment frequently objectify racialized and gendered bodies, turning them into anonymous sites of biopolitical control. Embodied materiality either vanishes or turns into brute biological matter.

How can we return vitality to form without subjugating either the body or literature to politics? Formal Matters takes up this challenge by recovering older concepts of form that were once the preserve of formalist literary criticism and aesthetics.