front cover of The Burden of Rhyme
The Burden of Rhyme
Victorian Poetry, Formalism, and the Feeling of Literary History
Naomi Levine
University of Chicago Press, 2024
A major new account of Victorian poetry and its place in the field of literary studies.

The Burden of Rhyme shows how the nineteenth-century search for the origin of rhyme shaped the theory and practice of poetry. For Victorians, rhyme was not (as it was for the New Critics, and as it still is for us) a mere technique or ahistorical form. Instead, it carried vivid historical fantasies derived from early studies of world literature. Naomi Levine argues that rhyme’s association with the advent of literary modernity and with a repertoire of medievalist, Italophilic, and orientalist myths about love, loss, and poetic longing made it a sensitive historiographic instrument. Victorian poets used rhyme to theorize both literary history and the most elusive effects of aesthetic form. This Victorian formalism, which insisted on the significance of origins, was a precursor to and a challenge for twentieth-century methods. In uncovering the rich relationship between Victorian poetic forms and a forgotten style of literary-historical thought, The Burden of Rhyme reveals the unacknowledged influence of Victorian poetics—and its repudiation—on the development of modern literary criticism.
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front cover of Deviant Logic, Fuzzy Logic
Deviant Logic, Fuzzy Logic
Beyond the Formalism
Susan Haack
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Initially proposed as rivals of classical logic, alternative logics have become increasingly important in areas such as computer science and artificial intelligence. Fuzzy logic, in particular, has motivated major technological developments in recent years.

Susan Haack's Deviant Logic provided the first extended examination of the philosophical consequences of alternative logics. In this new volume, Haack includes the complete text of Deviant Logic, as well as five additional papers that expand and update it. Two of these essays critique fuzzy logic, while three augment Deviant Logic's treatment of deduction and logical truth. Haack also provides an extensive new foreword, brief introductions to the new essays, and an updated bibliography of recent work in these areas.

Deviant Logic, Fuzzy Logic will be indispensable to students of philosophy, philosophy of science, linguistics, mathematics, and computer science, and will also prove invaluable to experienced scholars working in these fields.



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front cover of Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values
Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values
A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism
Max Scheler
Northwestern University Press, 1973
A lengthy critique of Kant's apriorism precedes discussions on the ethical principles of eudaemonism, utilitarianism, pragmatism, and positivism.
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front cover of The Order of Forms
The Order of Forms
Realism, Formalism, and Social Space
Anna Kornbluh
University of Chicago Press, 2019
In literary studies today, debates about the purpose of literary criticism and about the place of formalism within it continue to simmer across periods and approaches. Anna Kornbluh contributes to—and substantially shifts—that conversation in The Order of Forms by offering an exciting new category, political formalism, which she articulates through the co-emergence of aesthetic and mathematical formalisms in the nineteenth century. Within this framework, criticism can be understood as more affirmative and constructive, articulating commitments to aesthetic expression and social collectivity. 
 
Kornbluh offers a powerful argument that political formalism, by valuing forms of sociability like the city and the state in and of themselves, provides a better understanding of literary form and its political possibilities than approaches that view form as a constraint. To make this argument, she takes up the case of literary realism, showing how novels by Dickens, Brontë, Hardy, and Carroll engage mathematical formalism as part of their political imagining. Realism, she shows, is best understood as an exercise in social modeling—more like formalist mathematics than social documentation. By modeling society, the realist novel focuses on what it considers the most elementary features of social relations and generates unique political insights. Proposing both this new theory of realism and the idea of political formalism, this inspired, eye-opening book will have far-reaching implications in literary studies.
 
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