Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Robert Sheppard; The Meaning of Form : Its Introduction

The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry
Robert Sheppard

I will be posting my chapter abstracts every day from now. See here for the hub post to the others: 

 
Introduction: Form, Forms and Forming

The central methodology that poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities through the means and meanings of form is introduced, via accounts of other ‘turns’ in recent literary studies (the importance of poetics is also underlined), leading to a reading of formalist criticism in the works of Derek Attridge, Susan Wolfson, Peter de Bola, Angela Leighton and others, which loosely owes to a longer post-Schiller aestheticist tradition of regarding form as a significant force. The cognitive anthropology of Lambros Malafouris, a theory of material engagement, is utilized to mediate the speculation that haunts this study: that form is a repository of cognition. Form as a force and cognitive entity, particular forms as elements of poetic artifice, and forming as active readerly engagement and transformation, are compared and differentiated.

See here for the hub-link to the research which lay behind the development of the thesis here.

For those who can buy the book, or order it for libraries, here are the places