The term "radical formalism" refers to strategies aimed at defamiliarising and revitalising conventional modes of formalistic reading and theorising form. These strategies disrupt and unsettle established norms while incorporating a metadiscursive awareness of their broader political implications. This volume presents a radical reconceptualisation of literary works from Greek and Roman antiquity. Engaging in an ongoing dialogue with critical theory and postcritique, as well as drawing inspiration from traditions rooted in Black art, poetry and philosophy-both directly and indirectly connected to the classical tradition-the essays in this collection explore subversions of canonical norms and resistances to the hegemony of textual order. This collection not only provides new, provocative insights into a corpus of texts that has exerted a lasting impact on modern literature and philosophy, but also challenges current interpretive methods, recasting the very practice of reading in relation to form, poetics, language, sound, temporalities and textuality.

Raymond durgnat was a maverick voice during the golden age of film criticism. From the French new Wave and the rise of auteurism, through the late 1960s counter-culture, to the rejuvenated Hollywood of the 1970s, his work appeared in dozens of publications in Britain, France and the USA. At once evoking the film culture of his own times and anticipating our digital age in which technology allows everyone to create their own 'moving image-text combos', durgnat's writings touch on crucial questions in film criticism that resonate more than ever today. Bringing together durgnat's essential writing for the very first time, this career-spanning collection includes previously unpublished and untranslated work and is thoroughly introduced and annotated by Henry K. Miller.

Can attending to poetic form help us imagine a radical politics and bridge the gap between pressing contemporary political concerns and an ancient literature that often seems steeped in dynamics of oppression? The corpus of the fifth-century Athenian playwright Aristophanes includes some of the funniest yet most disturbing comedies of Western literature. His work’s anarchic experimentation with language invites a radically “oversensitive” hyperformalism, a formalistic overanalysis that disrupts, disables, or even abolishes a range of normativities (government, labor, reproduction, gender). Exceeding not just historicist contextualism, but also conventional notions of laughter and the logic of the joke, Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis uses Aristophanes to fully embrace, in the practice of close or “too-close” reading, the etymological and conceptual nexus of crisis, critique, and literary criticism. These exuberant readings of Birds, Frogs, Lysistrata, and Women at the Thesmophoria, together with the first attempt ever to grapple with the comic style of critical theorists Gilles Deleuze, Achille Mbembe, and Jack Halberstam, connect Aristophanes with contemporary discourses of biopolitics, necrocitizenship, care, labor, and transness, and at the same time disclose a quasi- or para-Aristophanic mode in the written textures of critical theory. Here is a radically new approach to the literary criticism of the pre-modern – one that materializes the circuit of crisis and critique through a restless inhabitation of the becomings and unbecomings of comic form.

Literature, Performance, and Somaesthetics views textual and extra-textual worlds as intimately connected, as forming a continuum, in fact. The essays – on literature, philosophy and the arts – gathered here derive their theoretical inspirations from two realms where embodiment and agency are particularly stressed: namely, from philosophical somaesthetics, a discipline proposed by Richard Shusterman in 1999, and from performance studies, remarkable for its current expansion. In most general terms, the point of convergence for somaesthetics and performativity is their stressing the agency of the embodied and sentient human self. The contributors explore the question of agency in its various manifestations. They examine the construction of literary characters, with emphasis on the representation of their corporeality and affectivity. They look into the problem of the formation of the literary canon as en-acted rather than established, and into literary history as retold rather than re-written. They also focus on the problems of literary reception, considering it on the physical, visceral level. While showing keen interest in performance studies and somaesthetics, the authors also bring in the expertise gained in their primary fields of research. Hence, the ideas explored in their essays are drawn from philosophy, literary theory, cultural studies, psychology, and hard science. The essays here are concerned with a variety of generic forms – epic literature, lyrical poetry, tragedy, experimental novel, thriller, literary history, theological treatise, documentary, flamenco and opera – in order to outline the field in the humanities where literature, philosophy and performance can meet, and where literary studies can benefit from the approaches offered by performance studies and philosophical somaesthetics.

The victims of environmental destruction are often sidelined in eco-theology and environmental discourse. Movements for ecological justice fail to take into account the voice of those at the grassroots. 'Alternatives Unincorporated' presents an environmental ethics that begins with those on the margins. Using the key example of the Narmada Dam in India and the popular resistance movement which built up against the project, the book examines the collective action of subaltern communities in caring for their local environment. The book frames these movements as theological texts that inform a life-affirming earth ethics. The aim of the book is to challenge prevailing social and ecological dynamics and to affirm the interconnectedness of social justice and environmental action.

>

Considering Butler's “tragic trilogy”-a set of interventions on Sophocles' Antigone, Euripides' Bacchae, and Aeschylus's Eumenides-this book seeks to understand not just how Butler uses and interprets Greek tragedy, but also how tragedy shapes Butler's thinking, even when their gaze is directed elsewhere. Through close readings of these tragedies, this book brings to light the tragic quality of Butler's writing. It shows how Butler's mode of reading tragedy-and, crucially, reading tragically-offers a distinctive ethico-political response to the harrowing dilemmas of our current moment. Deeply committed both to critical theory and political activism, Judith Butler is one of the most influential intellectuals today. Their ideas have touched the lives of many people, both readers and those who have never heard Butler's name. In encompassing gender performativity and sexual difference, vulnerability and precarity, disidentification and bodily interdependency, as well as the politics of protest, Butler's work is often predicated on a strong engagement with or proximity to Greek tragedy.

A study of postmodernism and African-American poets.

Walter H. Beale offers the most coherent treatment of the aims and modes of discourse to be presented in more than a decade. His development of a semiotic “grammar of motives” that re­lates the problems of meaning in discourse both to linguistic structure and ways of construct­ing reality stands as a pro­vocative new theory of rhetoric sharply focused on writing. He includes a comprehensive treatment of rhetoric, its classes and varieties, modes, and stra­tegies. In addition, he demon­strates the importance of the purpose, substance, and social context of discourse, at a time when scholarly attention has be­come preoccupied with process. He fortifies and extends the Aristotelian approach to rhetoric and discourse at a time when much theory and pedagogy have yielded to modernist assump­tions and methods. And finally, he develops a theoretical framework that illuminates the relationship between rhetoric, the language arts, and the hu­man sciences in general.

Poetics of Cognition investigates the material effects of experimental poetics using new evidence emerging from cognitive science. It asks: How do experimental poems “think” and how do we think through them? Examining experimental modes such as the New Sentence, proceduralism, projective verse, sound poetry, and visual poetry, Jessica Lewis Luck argues that experimental poems materialize not so much the content as the activity of the embodied mind, and they can thus function as a powerful scaffolding for extended cognition, both for the writer and the reader. While current critical approaches tend to describe the effects of experimentalism solely in terms of emotion and sensation, Luck shifts from the feeling to the thinking that these poems can generate, expanding the potential blast radius of experimental poetic effects into areas of linguistic, sonic, and visual processing and revealing a transformational potency that strictly affective approaches miss. The cognitive research Luck draws upon suggests that the strangeness of experimental poetry can reshape the activity of the reader’s mind, creating new forms of attention, perception, and cognition. This book closes by shifting from theory to praxis, extracting forms of teaching from the forms of thinking that experimental poems instill in order to better enable their transformative effects in readers and to bring poetry pedagogy into the twenty-first century.