Formal Matters: Embodied Experience in Modern Literature

• Develops the novel concept of 'embodied form', which argues that embodiment is both a material shape and an organizing principle in literature
• Brings together early and mid-century formalist criticism with phenomenology and body studies to argue for the political potential of formalist approaches to embodied experience
• Offers a counterpoint to the discursive, socially constructed body and poststructuralist, historical materialist, and psychoanalytic approaches to the body in literature
• Provides an alternative to postmodernism's narrative of the unrepresentable by demonstrating how formalist aesthetic methods can express seemingly ineffable elements of embodiment
• Reassesses the relationship between embodiment and form in a range of modern European authors, including Primo Levi, Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, and Anne F. Garréta

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, Zoë Roth reassesses the relationship between embodiment and form in a range of modern European authors, including Primo Levi, Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, and Anne F. Garréta. 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.