To what extent is an artwork defined by its “form”? How do formal properties inflect our understanding of a work of art? Questions of form motivate the fundamental problems of literary study at a variety of levels. The very notion that an artwork has formal properties that can be abstracted from it and discussed on their own terms is a historical one, and, from antiquity on, has been laden with ontological and epistemological implications.

Indeed, thinking form is ontological and the historical at the same time, for the question of what will count as the salient features or structures of a work of art can only arise in relation to some theory (implicit or explicit) about the nature of the work. A lyric may be constituted as an object by a given historical mode of attention; a film or a television show may be understood as an “object” distributed through a set of mediations that can only be seen in relation to a particular state of economic development.

Members of this research group engage with these questions in projects that arise out of period and disciplinary concerns that range from the highly practical, (how do we conceptualize the relation of parts to wholes in a serial poem?), to the historical (what is the relation between the development of mathematical formalism and notions of literary form?), to the speculative (how could one produce a taxonomy of poetic form equivalent to that underlying the “music genome project”?). These are questions that are related at a conceptual level, and they can benefit from consideration alongside one another without losing their particularity.

The goal of this research group is, then, to tackle a familiar critical concept—and one that is frequently used quite loosely—in innovative ways so as to sharpen its heuristic edge. The group includes scholars from all disciplines in which form and formalism are key concepts—particularly literature, art history, musicology, philosophy and mathematics.