Towards a politics of form

Chantal Mouffe has repeatedly argued that every artistic form has a political dimension. In one iteration of this argument (2013: 91), the political theorist writes that ‘artistic practices play a role in the constitution and maintenance of a given symbolic order, or in its challenging, and this is why they necessarily have a political dimension’. Before her, Fredric Jameson (1981: 81) proposed to read ‘the literary text in such a way that the latter may itself be seen as the rewriting or restructuration of a prior historical or ideological subtext’, that is, as a textual rendering of a given historical moment. For Jameson, aesthetic forms are inherently ideological, involving fantastical resolutions of current social contradictions as well as ‘sedimented’ forms of earlier such resolutions. Further, the usual protocols for interpreting a literary text represent sedimentations of ‘its previous readings and its accumulated institutional interpretation’ that function as ‘forms of the conceptual legitimation of this society’ (Jameson et al., 1982: 72–3). Jameson thus highlights the necessity of reading not only aesthetic forms but also modes of interpretation in politically acute ways. Before Jameson, Ian Watt (1957) located the expression and performance of middle-class bourgeois ideology in the narrative prose typical of the novel. Subsequently, and more in the spirit of Mouffe’s constitution than Jameson’s sedimentation, Joseph Slaughter (2007) has posited that the narrative form of the Bildungsroman has lent shape to human rights discourse and law, leading not only to calls for the recognition of individual and group rights but also to exclusions of those who are not incorporated into rights-lending sovereignties.

Building on this work on the sedimentation, constitution and maintenance of the political in the aesthetic, this special issue seeks to unite the formalist analysis of texts with readings that aim to uncover how structures of social power are expressed in and by, as well as challenged by, aesthetic forms. More broadly, the politics of form¹ begins to address the need for the development of a political analysis of aesthetic and narrative forms, to articulate specific models and methods for performing such analysis and to reflect on the politics of the work that is thereby undertaken.² Specifically, our desire is to politicise narratological and formal analysis while retaining the form specificity that has been a feature of narratology.

The attentive reader shall note that there has been no talk of ‘literature’ thus far or of the ‘literary’, but rather of narrative and aesthetic texts. ‘Narrative’ here is understood to exist along a continuum of texts and phenomena and to refer to those that more or less allow themselves to be narrativised, that is, to be cognitively processed as stories or as having story-like elements, or narrativity, that trigger the story-detecting processes in those who interact with them. Highly narrative texts tend to have more verbal elements, yet mono-images may also be narrativised (Wolf, 2011). Accordingly, we understand form to go beyond the prose text types upon which so much narrative analysis was once based to include various types of narrative aesthetic texts and to do so with their generic and medial specificity in mind. In this vein, our contributors work with novels (Daniel Hartley, Frederik Van Dam, Jan Alber), life narratives (Jan Alber), historical novels (Corina Stan), documentary films (Stefan Iversen and Henrik Skov Nielsen), drama (Paul Stewart, Corina Stan), short prose works (Paul Stewart) and even multimodal texts, such as Susan Lanser and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s case study, Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine, which includes narrative text and other narrative and non-narrative elements such as photographs, charts, maps, cartoons, and quotations from poems and folk songs.

The move away from a politics of the literary or of literature to a politics of form and the rich range of text types our contributors address bespeak several developments in literary studies to which we shall at least briefly gesture. The first pertains to the expansion of literary studies to include cinema, television, other visual and multimodal texts and cultural phenomena in gradual if sometimes contentiously occurring overlaps with media and cultural studies; the second relates to the notion that what was once referred to as ‘the literary’ may not just be located in intrinsic, linguistic textual features, but may also be signalled via a given text’s framing as literary, aesthetic or fictional or its use of non-textual rhetorical strategies. As we see in Stefan Iversen and Henrik Skov Nielsen’s case studies, for example, two documentary films highly invested in current political events employ experimental uses of fictional discourse to challenge the political and ideological commitments of their audiences.

All seven essays in this special issue illuminate the work their selected texts perform to challenge and, at times, reify dominant power structures, received histories, master narratives and ideological positions. They articulate a politics of form whose aim is to distinguish between instances in which forms are used innovatively to query or challenge dominant ideology and those in which they function to support it. To illustrate conjunctions between formal politics and content, one may turn to controversial texts such as the FOX television series 24 (2001–2010, 2014). 24 provides a good case in point for discussing some of the challenges of developing the type of politics of form at which this issue aims. In the first case, with its pro-torture, jingoistic and retributive politics – it was, after all, called ‘the Jack Bauer torture hour’ (Series/24) – the series was premised on the ubiquity of terrorist threats to the United States in the post-‘9/11’ era and the necessity that outlaw maverick characters like Bauer, the fictional head of the Counter Terrorist Unit, do ‘whatever it takes’ in order to combat the ceaseless danger of terrorist infiltration. 24’s punitive and pro-Bush regime, War on Terror politics were much criticised by journalists, the Human Rights Watch and law professors at West Point, who insisted that the series was detrimental to the training of future military officers in Iraq as it suggested that torturing terrorist suspects was necessary (Mayer, 2007: n.p.). According to the series’ twisted Utilitarian logic as performed in a ceaseless repetition of ticking-bomb scenarios, torture is a highly desirable security measure.

The form of the series successfully performed the United States’ sense of perpetually heightened peril. Cohering with the panicked atmosphere caused by the imminent menace of an exploding bomb that might kill eight million people (Season 2), the series’ aesthetics functioned to render the always-dangerous passage of time visible, audible and visceral. Every season represented a day, and every episode an actual hour with a visible digital clock ticking the seconds away in which the hidden bomb or other lurking threat might figuratively – or even literally – ‘go nuclear’. Split-screen action allowed for multi-perspectivity and up to eight renderings of simultaneously occurring events, necessitating a high level of audience engagement to decipher various narrative strands. The ‘real time’ aesthetics produced by the screen time’s cohering with the time the events would actually take to occur – a quite unusual match between what narratologists call discourse and story time – the sound and image of a ticking clock at the centre of the screen and framing commercial breaks: all of these features contributed to the breathless adrenaline rush of 24’s effective formal aesthetics. And this is not to mention the series’ emphasis on visual securitisation techniques and surveillance technologies in the fictional Counter Terrorist Unit, all hallmarks of a new economy of hyper-visibility in the period that followed the events of 11 September 2001.

As 24 clearly demonstrates, formal aesthetic innovation by no means equates with political progressiveness, if we take political progressiveness in this case to equate with a stance critical of the so-called War on Terror; likewise, formal aesthetic conservatism does not necessarily bespeak political regression. As Brian Richardson (1994: 321; cf. also Cohn, 1995a; 1995b; Fludernik, 1996: 366) has repeatedly pointed out, ‘ideological stances are frequently enmeshed with practices of narration, but never in a way that can be reduced to an easy equation’. Indeed, as this series and the case studies examined by our contributors indicate, one of the guiding principles of our articulation of a politics of form is that a form–function homology cannot possibly capture the diverse relationships a single narrative text may occupy relative to the various ‘dominants’ by which it is shaped and with which it is in dialogue. In this respect, our issue aims to avoid the pitfalls that lead to the emptying of the two terms ‘politics’ and ‘form’. Although he is working with verse, as opposed to narrative form, Simon Jarvis’s (2010) call for a poetics of verse and his arguments about the ways in which the two terms ‘politics’ and ‘style’ in ‘the formula politics of style’ are typically emptied of meaning share two important features with our programme for a politics of form: the first is the aforementioned imperative to avoid ascriptions of form–function homology; the second is the necessity of operating on a level of much finer-grained analysis.

The effort to map out and articulate a politics of form in this issue interacts with two recent developments in literary and narrative criticism. The first of these is the rise of New Formalism, a renewed explicit attention to the formal elements of literary texts that may or may not be viewed as indicative of their material settings. New Formalism describes a resurgence in formalist approaches to literature that has occurred over the last decade, one that Frederik Van Dam describes in this special issue in relation to Victorian studies as part of an ideological commitment to liberalism and civic republicanism. In general, one may diagnose recurrent historical swings between more formalist and text-centred forms of literary and aesthetic criticism and more contextualist ones. In the former camp we might count Russian Formalism, New Criticism, classical narratology and New Formalism, and in the latter, Cultural Materialism, Foucauldian and New Historicist analysis, along with feminist, critical race, queer, postcolonial studies and other more cultural studies-oriented approaches. Many observers have detected a current retreat from more politically engaged literary and aesthetic criticism, particularly within North America, to a more text-centric practice. Amongst these observers, Marjorie Levinson (2007: 559) distinguishes between two main camps within the New Formalism: those who ‘want to restore to today’s reductive reinscription of historical reading its original focus on form’ and those who ‘campaign to bring back a sharp demarcation between history and art’. Outstanding examples of New Formalism include Alex Woloch’s (2003) work on the ideological valence of literary character-systems, Franco Moretti’s theory of the uneven and combined development of literary forms within the capitalist world-system in Distant Reading (2013) and Caroline Levine’s (2006) ‘strategic formalism’. This politically oriented formalism can be further sub-divided into those critics who see in form a reproduction of dominant political values – what Fredric Jameson (1981: 76) calls the ‘ideology of form’ – and those, like Levine (2006: 626) herself, who argue that ‘literary forms participate in a destabilizing relation to social formations, often colliding with social hierarchies rather than reflecting or foreshadowing them’.

Our own approach is to allow for a position that might lie somewhere between Jameson and Levine. This would acknowledge that narrative and other aesthetic forms develop out of what is inherited and thus constitute expressions of the dominant and the residual, yet they may also express aspects of subordinate or emergent cultural formations. Specific narrative and formal structures may function as historically situated bearers of dominant cultural values or as markers of critique that are aimed at uncovering structures that enforce domination and subordination; alternatively, they may express more negotiated and ambivalent standpoints, especially, as we see in many of this special issue’s essays, where a single text responds in varying ways to different ‘dominants’, such as class, race and political power.

The second recent development with which this issue interacts concerns efforts within narratology – the science of narrative and narrative theory – to develop more contextualist and ideologically aware forms of analysis. This differs from classical narratological analysis, which sought to discover universal patterns of narrative texts and to isolate their minimal units and attendant functions. This universality allowed narratological models originally found to structure literary prose to be fruitfully applied to any manner of narrative instances, including literary genres other than prose, factual narratives and narratively constructed multimodal texts. More critical and contextual forms of narrative studies have subsequently challenged the universality of narrative categories as being in themselves historically embedded and hence reproductive of the social systems and forms of knowledge of which their moments of articulation partake. Within the pages of this issue we find a narratologist at the forefront of this type of criticism: Susan Lanser. As Lanser pointed out as early as 1981, specific narrative perspectives may be assumed for political reasons (100), and narrative situations may be used to express an explicit ‘ideological stance’ (1992: 53, 73) by employing formal variations that suggest a non-hegemonic standpoint. Since Western readers have been acculturated into assuming the masculinity, Whiteness and socially privileged status of the narrators who recount their stories, narrative stance has to be clearly demarcated as non-masculine, non-White, non-Western and non-materially privileged in order to designate difference; alternatively, paratextual signals such as cover images of protagonists may serve to denote non-majority positions.

Having made narratologists aware of their neglect of issues of gender and sexuality, also in relation to ideology, Lanser has subsequently moved on to address narratives of contemporary political events using narratological means, a topic to which we shall return. Thus feminist narratology altered narratology’s understanding of narrative parameters altogether by demonstrating that supposedly universal narrational structures have to be examined with regard to their potential reinforcement of hierarchies of gender and heteronormativity (for an overview, see Shen, 2005). Lanser’s work remains seminal not only for this branch of narratological research but also for other context-related work that focuses on how narrative categories alter according to the political commitments expressed in them, for instance in relation to race oppression (Foster, 1993) and to intersections of gender prejudice with other forms of domination (Lanser, 2013). The aim of this issue is to use Lanser and other feminist and queer analyses of ideological stance as expressed through marked narrative and formal means, but to expand on these explications beyond exclusive attention to those formal means that are employed to express positions related to gender difference or non-normative sexuality.

The efforts of feminist and queer narratologists have run tandem to research in critical race theory and narrative studies, including among others Asian American narrative studies, intercultural narrative work and postcolonial narratology. These race-, ethnicity- and culture-oriented narrative studies have added awareness of how an author’s or narrator’s subordinate social-political status may lead to the critical use of stylistic features as a manner of speaking back to power. Frederick Luis Aldama (2009: 5), for example, ‘details how Latino author-artists use and transcend the techniques of mainstream comics to reach the cognitive and emotional faculties of their reader-viewers’. Reflecting on the consequences of this type of analysis for classical narratological categories, Joseph Jonghyun Joen (2014: 799) asks: ‘What happens when the abstractions of narrative theory, the textual features usually parsed and taxonomized as discrete phenomena and effects, are instead held in dialectical relationship to more positions, less abstracted social histories?’ Specific techniques such as signifying and double-voicedness have been documented as ‘a re-semanticization of the familiar meaning to have a “decolonized”’ sense (Gates, Jr., 1988: 51). Individual studies ask how race- and ethnicity-oriented perspectivity interacts with formal textual features (McIntire, 2012; Sohn, 2014; Puxan-Oliva, 2015), or work towards developing an understanding of how narratives of race interact with legal as well as social practices (Gutiérrez-Jones 2001; Kim, 2013).

We believe postcolonial narratology has remained only anticipatory, at least in terms of terminological and modular precision. For a sample overview, one might look to Gerald Prince’s 2005 essay with its proposal that ‘every category at the narrating level should be reviewed in the light of postcolonial affinities and, if necessary, revised to accommodate narrative structures and configurations which these affinities might call for or suggest’ (379), a recommendation that has not yet been fulfilled. Similarly, Didier Coste (2007) made a call for a non-Western and decolonising narratology. While postcolonial research continues to rely on Homi Bhabha’s (2004 [1994]) powerful equivalence of nation-making with narrativising, Bhabha’s project of employing narratological concepts to document processes of constructing decolonialised identities has also been criticised for distorting narratological categories (Fludernik, 2003).

Postcolonial research may then remain too diversified in its range of context-dependent pursuits to develop a central methodology. This is a lacuna that Sarah Copland and Divya Dwivedi attempted to address programmatically in the two panels they organised on postcolonial theory and narratology for the 2013 conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. Work presented in these panels is joined by other analyses of narratology and postcolonial studies in a volume Dwivedi has co-edited with Henrik Skov Nielsen and Richard Walsh, Narratology and Ideology: Encounters between Narrative Theory and Postcolonial Criticism. This volume includes, amongst others, essays on narratological concepts that can productively inform postcolonial studies, such as narrator, author, focalisation and fictionality. As Copland’s work in Narratology and Ideology attests, narrative theory’s fine-grained distinctions among the various audiences addressed in a narrative communication (flesh-and-blood audience, authorial audience and narratee) are essential to understanding the complexities of narrative communication in Western authors’ prefaces to colonial-era and postcolonial South Asian writers’ novels, so as to avoid the pitfalls of universalising such prefaces as inherently colonising, appropriative or hijacking (Copland, forthcoming). At the same time, postcolonial theory’s attention to the power structures at play in such prefaces functions to politicise narrative theory’s formally supposedly universal categories.

Juxtaposed with these developments in literary and narrative studies, a varied and heterogeneous body of recent work has addressed the political effectivity of aesthetic forms. In Sartwell’s (2010: 1) formulation of this political aesthetics, ‘The political “content” of an ideology can be understood in large measure actually to be – to be identical with – its formal and stylistic aspects.’ This work has been directly or indirectly inspired by predominantly French contemporary continental philosophy, not least that of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou. Jacques Rancière’s concept of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (le partage du sensible) has produced new ways of conceiving of the relation between politics and aesthetics. For Rancière (2009: 24), politics is inherently aesthetic, since it presupposes ‘a particular sphere of existence, of objects posited as common and as pertaining to a common decision, of subjects recognized as capable of designating these objects and putting forward arguments about them’. Actual political occurrence involves a disruption of this distributary system so as to render it and its allocations of social positions visible. We would also count Mouffe among those thinkers who do not allow for any strict division between fields of activity belonging to the political and the aesthetic.

One of the arguable weaknesses of these philosophical approaches to politics and form, however, is their tendency to overlook narratological analysis with its exquisite attention to form–function relationships. This is arguably a blind spot they share with many analyses of narrative undertaken within the parameters of cultural studies, which is alternatively criticised as historically relativist or anecdotal. Indeed, the politically motivated analysis of literary and cultural phenomena that has been the hallmark of Anglo-American cultural studies has been derided for its lack of methodological cohesion and insufficient attention to the formal properties of narrative texts. In 1999, Robyn Warhol, for instance, argued that cultural studies had missed out on the conceptual and structural rigour of narratological analysis due to its desire to distance itself from ‘new-critical formalism’ (343). And as that pre-eminent integrator of formalist-narratological and cultural critical work Mieke Bal (2009 [1985]: 35) wrote during the Eighties, just as cultural studies was gaining critical predominance, ‘approaches that reject structural analysis because it is not political, are missing an important point of narrative theory’. It is thus the reconciliation of ‘aesthetic and political’ analysis that Bal (x) has called for: political critique with the methodological rigour and conceptual stringency that have been the traditional hallmarks of narratology.

Answering these calls, while also politicising them so as to understand narratological analysis as itself a vehicle of critique, this issue wishes to take up Roy Sommer’s (2012: n.p.) call for ‘the integration of formal and contextual approaches’. A politics of form thus aims to address potential weaknesses in preceding efforts to combine narratology with attention to the cultural-historical conditions in which narratological models and individual narratives are produced and received. On the one hand, these contextual narratologies may remain utopian and uncritical in their interest in inclusivity, thereby de-politicising textual features that are intended to provide a critique of, or perhaps even to bolster, the status quo. On the other hand, such approaches have been accused of being too biased in their aims and thus insufficiently narratologically informed.

Yet this issue also has a more specific history that resides within its editors’ and contributors’ work in narrative studies, which coheres with efforts by other politically – and ideologically – engaged narratologists to develop form–function models in a manner that also accounts for historical, material, cultural and ideological embedding. For some time, the editors and many of the contributors have been working to overcome what has been called the ‘narrowness’ of traditional narratology, a subject that Greta Olson (2013b) took up in her talk on the contemporary narratology panel at the conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative in Manchester. The awareness of a ‘narrow-tology’ was first voiced by Ansgar Nünning (2012), who in anecdote and later in published form described a young student’s misspelling of the science of narrative as an unconscious critique of traditional structuralist narratology. Working towards an expansion of the field, Olson (‘Questioning’ and ‘Visual Unreliability’, forthcoming a, b) has critiqued the traditional ascription of personal failings and untrustworthiness in Boothian models of unreliability, including in her own earlier work (2003) on the subject. Such models assume that moral or perceptional failings in the narrator cause the narrating figure to tell her or his story insufficiently, inaccurately, misleadingly or in a contradictory manner. They depart from the assumption that narrator and narratee are communicative equals and thus share a Gricean premium on communicating relevantly. These models fail to see when unreliability is being used as a strategy for exercising critique of the dominant modalities of power inscribed in a given communicative situation.

In addition to her aforementioned work on audiences in the narrative communications of Western-authored prefaces to colonial-era and postcolonial South Asian novels, Sarah Copland (2008) has responded to the universalising tendencies of cognitive narratology by bringing conceptual blending theory into conversation with a cross-cultural approach that elucidates the functioning of textual blends, such as metaphors and analogies, in mid-century Anglophone travel narratives written by Chiang Yee for English and Chinese readerships. Copland connects conceptual blending to individual and group identity formation, the complexities of negotiating similarity and difference in cross-cultural encounters, and a cross-culturally more open-eyed and open-minded way of seeing and thinking relationally.

By establishing criteria for the politicised use of narrative forms including multimodal texts, by self-reflexively historicising and contextualising narratological concepts and by applying the results of this analysis to the refinement of narratological models, this special issue aims to bridge theoretical gaps between narratology, critical theory and cultural analysis. The work performed in this issue points programmatically to several tasks that the articulation of a politics of form may accomplish:

(1)	To continue to self-reflexively critique existing narrative and other form-related categories to determine their ideological commitments.Such a critique recognises that formal categories in themselves are historically contingent and based on the social expectations of those who devise them and the particular settings in which they arise. Focusing particularly on forms of ideology as they are transported by, mediated in or disrupted through narrative textual means, a politics of form aims to expand critical narratological work beyond discussions of ideological stance and to question the universality of terms such as character, narrator, voice and narrative temporality altogether. This entails diagnosing the ideological commitments that formal categories may partake of through what Jameson, amongst others, calls historicisation. This bears particularly on a relativisation of narratological categories. Furthermore, the analysis of intermedial texts with other types of form specificity than those found in literary prose may contribute to the bracketing of certain elements of narratological analysis as historically situated, determined and potentially limited. This entails the recognition that classical narratological models may perpetuate, if inadvertently, hierarchies of privilege and power in their assumptions of universality.
(2)	By elucidating the limitations of basic narratological categories based on their material situatedness and historical framing, one may work to further refine narratological concepts for greater and more precise applicability. Unreliable narration, for example, may be employed ironically, as Booth (1983 [1961]) saw it, when it occurs between similarly socially situated agents, but not when it is used subversively to comment on the determinedness of communication by the more powerful party. Similarly, a prefatory paratextual communication may, by contemporary standards, seem appropriative or hijacking, but attention to its forms of address to multiple audiences in a different historical context reveals much more nuanced and complex dynamics.
(3)	To differentiate between categories and formal characteristics once thought universal to determine when they are used critically, neutrally or ambivalently, and thus to determine nuances and sub-divisions within these categories. To recognise a marked usage is then to mitigate the universal applicability of a category such as narrator unreliability in an effort to refine that category and the model of narrative communication to which it belongs. Thus, just as unreliability has been demonstrated to function as a form of ideological critique in situations in which speakers are socially unequal, thereby laying bare the assumptions of benevolent equality behind these categories (Olson, 2003; forthcoming a; Puxan, 2007), so other basic categories such as voice and narrator may be shown to be in need of further refinement (Bekhta, 2015; forthcoming). Indeed, as universal categories such as narrator have to be distinguished in terms of the prevailing gender binary to account for different kinds of usage of standard voice by women narrators and for varying audiences’ expectations about differences in narrative voice based on gender bifurcation, so the category of narrator may have to be further refined and sub-divided in terms of other prevailing hierarchies of social differentiation. Recognising the insights of decolonial, material and intersectional analysis, the universal narrator or hypothetical filmmaker etc. also needs to be demarcated in terms of these categories of social divergence.
(4)	To work towards developing narrative analysis as a viable type of political critique. A politics of form based on narrative categories but interacting with other forms of textual analysis, such as form-oriented television and film studies, can be used to refine categories to show how such models can be expanded; as in some types of political aesthetical analysis and in cultural narratology, this will result in an elucidation of the narrative features of actual historical events. Form-related interpretation constitutes an effective type of political analysis, and narratological concepts and models can be used to articulate the form–function specifics of complex political situations so as to better understand them. We see this work being performed by Lanser and Rimmon-Kenan in their work in this issue, yet still with an attachment to a notion of aesthetic text in Side by Side. In a panel organised by Olson for the conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative in 2016 on Narrative Analysis as Political Critique, Lanser and Rimmon-Kenan, amongst others, took a step further in uniting narrative analysis with political analysis and activism. In the most striking elucidation of this critical position, one that was divorced entirely from a reading of a representational text, Irene Kacendes (2016b) discussed the ways in which scholars, and narratologists specifically, respond to breaking news of sociopolitical crises, such as the trauma of migration to and arrival in refugee camps. Her case study was the 2015 rapes of 30 Syrian boys by a cleaner at the Nizip Refugee Camp in Antep, Turkey. Kacandes drew on the conversational dynamics of co-witnessing (2001; 2009; 2016a) to analyse who is speaking, listening and overhearing scholars’ responses to such breaking news, paying particular attention to the constructions of personhood and non-personhood implicit in, and the allied, identificatory and exclusionary positions being expressed in, the choice of pronouns (singular ‘I’ vs. plural ‘we’ and definite article ‘the’ vs. indefinite article ‘a’). On the same panel Olson discussed the problematic nature of recent representations of migrant women in Germany, whether they take place in popular medial form in photographs or in legal position papers about the need for extra gender-specific protections for these women. Whilst intended to elicit sympathy and/or to assert claims to the right to legal protection, such representations may inadvertently serve to reify the victim status of those who are depicted in them and to reinforce the superior status of Western non-migrant women. The juxtaposition of a paper about the need for scholars to call witness to the suffering of others with one about the dangers of representing human rights abuses from a position of social dominance brings up a fundamental issue in eliciting a politics of form. Whose politics are we discussing and verifying? What normative standards operate in such an analysis?
(5)	To avoid moralistic judgements of aesthetic texts. The present editors witness in their own and in colleagues’ cultural studies work a tendency to pathologise texts, that is, to diagnose their formal qualities with an eye to rendering them in terms of their intrinsic if sometimes also contradictory or ambivalent support of the dominant. This may lead to a moralisation of texts that is cloaked as political critique. In the larger context of her discussions of the necessity of political pluralism and dissension, Mouffe describes this tendency as follows: ‘In fact, given that we find ourselves today in what Danto calls the “condition of pluralism”, lacking generally agreed criteria by which to judge art productions, there is a marked tendency to replace aesthetic judgements by moral ones, pretending that those moral judgements are also political ones’ (2008, 13). Returning to the textual example with which this introduction began, the television series 24, we see that what the pursuit of a politics of form through the tracing of form–function features offers is an understanding of the relation between the aesthetic and the political, which can then serve as the scaffolding for a moral judgement. One might, for instance, assess 24 negatively if one is not sympathetic to the securitisation regime that the series endorses, but a War on Terror supporter would judge otherwise. By adopting a political analysis based on the elucidation of how formal elements relate to cultural-political stances, these viewers might, at least, share an understanding of the ways in which the series operates, aesthetically and politically, even if they reach different moral judgements about these operations.
(6)	To reflect on the politics of the work that is undertaken in pursuit of a politics of form. The pursuit of the aforementioned tasks may itself be a political undertaking, relative to the ‘dominants’ that structure narratology, the ‘dominants’ that structure the Western academy and broader social frameworks in which narratology has emerged, and the ‘dominants’ that structure the social frameworks in which the texts being read were produced. For example, the articulation of the ways in which specific forms are used politically in a given instance or of the assumptions that underlie the seemingly neutral, universal or apolitical narratological categories used in such analysis is itself a political act; this action seeks first to expose ideological commitments and then, if possible, to challenge the relevant ‘dominants’. This special issue calls for and, hopefully also, models a self-reflexivity about the political act inherent in the pursuit of a politics of form. Without attributing conscious agendas or unconscious motivations to our contributors, we note as an example of this reflexivity that Susan Lanser and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan acknowledge that ‘the ways in which [they] read the clashing narratives of the [Israeli–Palestinian] conflict, as well as different stages within them, are necessarily conditioned by [their] respective – and ultimately more similar than divergent – backgrounds and beliefs’. In other words, the deep-rooted similarities they find in the Palestinian and Israeli accounts of the conflict, despite the proliferation of surface-level dissimilarities, may be, in part, a product of the reading strategies they bring to the text, a situation they reflect on with precisely the reflexivity about the pursuit of a politics of form that this issue advocates. Accordingly, Lanser and Rimmon-Kenan reflect on their choice to alternate ‘Israeli–Palestinian’ with ‘Palestinian–Israeli’ and on the dangers or limitations of ‘a Westernisation of the language of writing as well as of the narratological tools [they] employ and interrogate’.

Thus far the present editors have dedicated this introduction to the discussion of a programme for a politics of form as well as the intentions and goals of such a programme. In turn, we now wish to introduce the ways in which each of this special issue’s contributions specifically addresses the goals stated above. Moreover, we describe how each of the contributors to this special issue has investigated the following questions, which were posed by the editors with an eye to moving such a programme forward.

-	How can narratological or other formalist analyses of text be reconciled with postcolonial, feminist, critical-race, class-sensitive and intersectional reading strategies?

Contributor Corina Stan takes up this question vis-à-vis mid and late twentieth-century re-castings of the social, political and religious ideals of Winstanley and the Diggers from the seventeenth century, while Jan Alber does so in relation to late twentieth-century Australian indigenous narratives, Daniel Hartley in terms of literature at the intra-core periphery of the modern capitalist world-system, and Stefan Iversen and Henrik Skov Nielsen in relation to documentary films set in neo-colonial and post-genocidal contexts.

-	How are specific concepts and models of formalist analysis challenged when they are opened to political and contextual issues?

Contributors Stefan Iversen and Henrik Skov Nielsen address this question relative to the concept of fictionality as a rhetorical strategy distinct from the genre designation ‘fiction’, while Daniel Hartley does so with regard to the concept of stylistic ideologies, an expanded definition of ‘style’, Frederick Van Dam in relation to paraphrase, and Susan Lanser and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan in terms of narrative voice, temporality, narrative agency, character formation and possible worlds.

-	In which conditions did prevailing formalist and narratological models come to be? How might they also be viewed as historically contingent?

Contributor Frederik Van Dam takes up this question relative to the roots of formalism and the potential of paraphrase to uncover links between Victorian liberalism and civic republicanism, whilst Daniel Hartley does so with respect to world-literature scholarship’s conception of style.

-	How do the forms of specific narrative texts express political critique?

Given this question’s centrality to the pursuit of articulating a politics of form, every contributor to this special issue addresses it explicitly, yet does so in importantly different ways. Paul Stewart, for example, reads Beckett to demonstrate that the more social form of the theatre fails in its attempts to protest against prevailing political conditions, whilst prose, in its relation to the Bildungsroman, is political precisely because it adheres to an asocial conception of man. Stefan Iversen and Henrik Skov Nielsen in turn investigate how the documentary films The Act of Killing and The Ambassador challenge the political and ideological assumptions of their audiences through radical experiments with documentarist strategies and fictional discourse.

-	How might regarding textual form as inherently political help critics to resolve current debates about the appropriate objects and methods of textual analysis?

Contributor Frederik Van Dam takes up this question vis-à-vis the recuperation of paraphrase as a methodology for textual analysis. Daniel Hartley addresses it by emphasising the importance of shifting from an analysis of style to an analysis of stylistic ideologies, and Stefan Iversen and Henrik Skov Nielsen discuss the value of shifting from a focus on genre designations to an assessment of fictionality as a rhetorical strategy. Susan Lanser and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan model reflexivity about the political and ideological bases of their choice of an object of study (the English-language version of Side by Side) and their methods of analysis.

Our arrangement of the essays in this issue traces a movement from a first pairing that addresses the core question of how a politics of form may reconfigure what we do when we do textual criticism, while at the same time historicising and revising core literary critical concepts (as Daniel Hartley does with regard to style, and Frederik Van Dam does with respect to formalism and paraphrase), to a second pairing that interrogates foundational concepts in narratology and literary criticism whilst also demonstrating the political work such forms perform within specific contexts (Stefan Iversen and Henrik Skov Nielsen on fiction, fictionality and pseudo-documentary films; and Paul Stewart on drama, prose and social and asocial conceptions of man). The issue then proceeds to present a third pairing of essays that looks at the range of forms used to do the work of representing and engaging with sociopolitical issues in a contemporary context (Corina Stan on contemporary class struggles and the historical recuperation of Winstanley and the Diggers, and Jan Alber on Australian indigenous identities in contemporary literature). The issue culminates with an essay that adds to the aforementioned interests a significant degree of critique about its authors’ political and ideological investments in investigating the politics of form (Susan Lanser and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan on Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine).

The essays assembled here elucidate and perform aspects of the project of articulating a politics of form. Such a methodology may enable the once politically neutral if not quietest enterprise of narratology to de-narrow itself and become more critical about the social, political and geographical situatedness of the positions from which it has previously analysed textual narrative forms. In turn, an awareness of the political commitments and material embedding of narratological categories once thought universal and ahistorical may allow narrative analysis to contribute to more nuanced interpretations of current political phenomena. Similarly, the development of a politics of form may assist practitioners of cultural studies to become more articulate about how the texts and phenomena they treat operate on a concrete, formal level and to avoid making pathologising moral judgements in a vocabulary that suggests political critique.

We address this issue to researchers who, like ourselves, are interested in combining political and form-specific types of analyses and in thinking a politics of form forward.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Greta Olson is Professor of English and American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Giessen and Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities ‘Law as Culture’ in Bonn. Since 2010, she has served as a general editor of the European Journal of English Studies and is with Jeanne Gaakeer (Appellate Court of The Hague, Erasmus School of Law, Rotterdam) the co-founder of the European Network for Law and Literature. She writes about and also wishes to facilitate projects on cultural approaches to law, the politics of narrative form, migration and punitivity, critical media and American studies, and feminism and sexuality studies. E-mail: [email protected]

Sarah Copland is Assistant Professor of English at MacEwan University. She joined MacEwan’s English department in 2012 after a visiting assistant professorship at Kenyon College in Ohio (2011–2012) and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellowship and visiting scholar appointment with Project Narrative at the Ohio State University (2009–2011). Her research interests are in modernism, narrative theory, and short story theory, and her current book project is entitled Front Matters: The Rhetoric and Pedagogy of Modernist Prefaces. She has published work on modernist narrative, rhetorical and cognitive approaches to narrative theory, and short story theory in Narrative, Modernism/Modernity, Blending and the Study of Narrative (de Gruyter, 2012), and the forthcoming Narratology and Ideology: Encounters between Narrative Theory and Postcolonial Criticism. Postal address: Department of English, 6-229 City Centre Campus, 10700-104 Ave., Edmonton, AB, T5J 4S2, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]

Acknowledgements

The present authors thank Dan Hartley for his contributions here to our discussion of political aesthetics. Further, we wish to express our gratitude to Maren Walinski, Madeline Kienzle and Lisa Beckmann for their research and support in completing the issue, and Stefanie Rück for proofreading the introduction.

Notes

1. Our title ‘The Politics of Form’ was inspired by the work of contributor Daniel Hartley, who used the phrase in reference to Marxist literary theory (2014, and in earlier manuscript and lecture form). Greta Olson (2013a) used this title for her keynote ‘“The Politics of Form”: Analyzing Post-Post “9/11” Critical Texts’ at a conference on the Poetics of Politics in Leipzig. Available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jatnpWiUf0 g.

2. The following conferences indicate the current interest in balancing materialist and contextual readings of aesthetic texts with formal analysis: ‘The Politics of Form in Greek Culture’ (London, June 2016, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/ias-events/the-politics-of-form-in-greek-culture), ‘The Politics of Form: What Does Art Know about Society?’ (Berlin, November 2016, http://www.zfl-berlin.org/veranstaltungen-detail/items/the-politics-of-form-what-does-art-know-about-society.html), ‘The Politics of Form/The Form of Politics’ (https://www.acla.org/politics-formthe-form-politics) and ‘Global Realism: Capital, Empire, and the Politics of Form’ (Kent, April 2015, https://www.kent.ac.uk/english/research/conferences/Global%20Realism%20Conference%20April%202015.pdf).