This chapter adopts techniques from historical poetics to understand the queerness of American poetry before 1850. It suggests a set of techniques and methods as descriptive of queer historical poetics. It places poetry in its historical context to determine how queerness has changed across early American history. By examining poetry from Puritan New England, eighteenth-century American satires, verse of the American Revolution, and poetic collaborations from the early Republic, this chapter shows how poetry was understood to be queer in colonial American and the early republic. It suggests a relationship between queerness and formalism that looks for the ways queer sociabilities and ordinary queerness appeared in traditions of American poetry, and how these forms might challenge our idea of queer poetry as always intent on being radical, deviant, or innovative. Queer historical poetics restores sexuality to discussions of the formalist and poetic traditions of American poetry before 1850 while borrowing from queer studies the demand for relevancy.

This chapter explores Wittgenstein’s two references to the arts in 4.014. The first is his musical example of the unity of language and the world; the second his allusion to the fairytale The Gold-Children by Brothers Grimm. The chapter argues, first, that Wittgenstein’s early notion of logic incorporates forms that for Kant belong to transcendental aesthetic, namely, space and time. Second, it spells out how this commitment motivates Wittgenstein’s musical example and why it is crucial to draw a distinction between transcendental form and empirical structures made possible by that form. Finally, the chapter argues, pace Peter Sullivan, that the unity of language and the world is guaranteed by the metaphysical subject as their common origin. If the fairytale is read as a condensed illustration of Wittgenstein’s position, then this common origin is signified by a golden fish.

The final chapter considers how Ilf and Petrov responded to the cultural crackdown, show trials, and purges that confronted them when they returned to the Soviet Union. In the travelogue’s penultimate chapter, “Anxious Life,” the anxiety that the writers attributed to capitalism provided an ambivalent and ironic framework for their explicit and implicit comparisons. Emphasizing the “anxiety” caused by the Stalinist purges, the chapter considers a range of possible readings of Ilf and Petrov’s claim that Soviet people were calmer and happier than Americans. The chapter concludes with an analysis of American and Soviet reviewers’ varied responses to the travelogue and asks: To what extent did Ilf and Petrov’s epic American road trip confirm their presuppositions? Did it allow them to glimpse the United States, the Soviet Union, and perhaps themselves anew?

This chapter takes stock of the various definitions and valuations the essay has accrued over the course of the history of American literary theory and criticism. Starting with the historical-materialist criticism of the Great Depression era and moving on to the New Criticism of the 1940s and ’50s, then delving into the myriad structuralisms and poststructuralisms of the Cold War and postcommunist eras, before concluding with contemporary critical trends, it tracks the discipline’s trajectory in the American context, all the while zeroing in on the essay’s shifting position therein. The chapter throws into relief the fundamental dialectic between hermetic formalism and committed social criticism that has shaped literary studies in the United States since its rise early in the twentieth century and teases out the way this perennial vacillation has rendered more or less appealing, and more or less useful, the essay as a form and object of analysis.

Chapter 11 turns to a discussion of the competing arguments concerning the new public nuisance law advanced by practicing attorneys, interest group allies, judges, scholars, and law-and-economics professors. Almost all criticisms of the new public nuisance law have been negative, characterizing expansion of public nuisance law as illegitimate and dysfunctional. These critiques are examined through the lens of various categories of criticism: (1) traditional, (2) formal, (3) institutional, (4) rule of law, (5) democratic theory, and (5) law and economics. The critics all draw on negative examples from the mass tort public nuisance cases in the 21st century (lead paint, firearms, opioids, vaping, climate change). At least one commentator, however, has offered tempered praise for the new public nuisance law as the second best solution to community-wide harms. She believes that the development of the new public nuisance law is in the finest traditon of a flexible, developing common law to meet changed circumsatnces. This commentator would permit continued development of the new public nuisance law, enhanced with several guardrails and transparency in proceedings.

This chapter explores Claudia Jones’s poetics of carcerality and politics of Black internationalism, linking conventions of poetic form to an ever-growing collective of revolutionary women. Jones’s poetry proposes a remapping of diaspora as a circuit of solidarity between women workers and revolutionaries that stretches from Puerto Rico to West Virginia to China and Russia. The extensive corpus of writing about Jones has yet to focus its attention on her poetic devices, and in particular her crafting of rhyme, syntax, and stanza structure. This chapter thinks through some of the ways that poetic tropes and schemes not only emerge from and reflect conditions that might be called diasporic, but also present unique visions of south–south movement and radical responses in their own right. Jones’s poetry challenges transhistorical claims about what poetry is, claims that have sometimes been produced through classroom-based pedagogies and genealogies.

This chapter explores the slow and uneven property reform path ushered in by the short-lived liberal reformers that gathered around Baron von Stein. After Stein’s resignation, the discourse of property modernization was shortlived and the reconcpetualization of property was carried on by two leading,moderately conservative Roman law scholars who had been close to Stein’s cicle: Barthold Georg Niehbur and Friedrich Karl von Savigny. Animated by sincere scholarly devotion, and yet not shy to use Roman law and agrarian history to support their political agenda, Neihbur built a powerful narrative equating the liberation of the German peasantry to the struggle of the dispossessed Roman free peasant. Simultaneously, Savigny outlined a new Romanist architecture for the law of property designed to enable and protect the full mastery of the owner’s will over a physical thing.

Chapter 6 shows how Cicero establishes a normative framework for the writing of literary history. Across the dialogue and through the various speakers he offers a sustained critique of literary historiography. Several fundamental tensions and conflicts emerge: absolute versus relative criteria in assessing literature and building canons; presentism and antiquarianism; formalism and historicism; and the recognition that all literary histories are subject to their crafters’ emphases and agendas.

Can there be something like a “Wittgensteinian” literary criticism? If so, what could it possibly be, given that Wittgenstein sought to make us give up the craving for generality? Through an analysis of “The Avoidance of Love,” Stanley Cavell’s epochal 1969 essay on King Lear, Toril Moi shows that a reader inspired by Wittgenstein does not have to set out to apply a given theory, or to answer certain “Wittgensteinian” questions. Rather it entails a wish to acknowledge the concerns of the text, and respond to them. For Wittgensteinian critics, the text is not an object to be “approached” but action and expression. The critic sets out to answer questions that matter to her, and stakes herself in her own perceptions and judgments in the act of reading. “The problem of the critic, as of the artist,” Cavell writes, “is not to discount his subjectivity, but to include it; not to overcome it in agreement, but to master it in exemplary ways.” To do this requires training. This chapter sets out the implications of all these claims, argues against formalist views of literature and reading, and insists on the fundamental role of human judgment, and acknowledgment in the work of criticism.

Chapter 2 describes Kant’s developing views of free beauty and of “form,” a term widely used throughout all phases of his aesthetics. If Kant is a formalist of some kind, which kind is he? The chapter argues that there are strong, moderate, and weak formalisms in Kant’s aesthetic theory, both early and late.

The modern period (1800–1500) saw important innovations as philosophy of music moved in dramatically different directions. The first innovation was the incorporation of philosophy of music into philosophical systems, either absolute idealist or Marxist. These philosophers also held that music provides important insights into reality. In this stream of philosophy of music are found the seeds of Continental philosophy of music. The other, diametrically opposed, development was the rapid rise of formalist approaches to philosophy of music. These writers stressed the autonomy of musical beauty. A third stream within modern philosophy of music is continuous with earlier thinking about music. It opposed formalism without adopting a grand weltanschauung. Ontology of musical works emerges as a topic for philosophical discussion. Thinkers discussed include Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche, Ernst Bloch, Adorno, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Nicolai Hartmann, Carroll C. Pratt, Susanne Langer, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Hanslick, Edmund Gurney, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), R. G. Collingwood and Roman Ingarden.

The contemporary period (since 1950) has seen a complete rupture between the Continental and analytic schools in philosophy of music. Continental figures have focused on music’s relationship to its context. Feminists have investigated the impact of oppression of women on music. Analytic philosophers have focused on the relationship between music and emotion, and on how this relationship bears on questions about the value of music. The division between formalists and anti-formalists has persisted into the contemporary period. Questions about the ontology of music have been widely debated. Popular music has received increased attention. Figures discussed include Susan McClary, Heide Göttner-Abendroth, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Attali, O. K. Bouwsma, John Hospers, Alan Tormey, Nelson Goodman, Peter Kivy, Stephen Davies, David Davies, Malcolm Budd, Andy Hamilton, Jerrold Levinson, Edward T. Cone, Leonard B. Meyer, Jenefer Robinson, Roger Scruton, Kendall Walton, Theodore Gracyk, Andrew Kania, Monroe Beardsley, Gilles Deleuze, Richard Wollheim, Lydia Goehr, Julian Dodd and Nichlas Wolterstorff.

This chapter explores the emergence (not always explicit), the uses and the misuses of proportionality analysis during a crucial period of Peruvian democracy: the transition of the 2000s, following the collapse of the Fujimori regime. The history of the principle of proportionality in Peru is associated to the development of judicial review and the expansion of constitutionalism. Its increasing presence in judicial reasoning reveals progress in terms of the effectiveness of constitutional rights and the defense of democratic institutions, but also an alarming trend toward its formalistic use. Since the Constitutional Tribunal has been the main actor behind this process, the chapter mainly focuses on its decisions, but some decisions by the Supreme Court and by administrative courts are also covered, given its recurrent use by the judiciary at large and its role in decentralized judicial review, especially in the context of ordinary criminal procedures where the legality of pretrial detention is examined.

This chapter subjects the revival of formal and classical law values in contract law to critical examination. The emergence of a commercially oriented contract law is explored across a number of contract developments over recent years: the reassertion of party autonomy and the emphasis on contract law as default rules; the return to a formalist style of contract interpretation; the marginalisation of equity and considerations of public policy in contract; the tendency of judges to uphold contract terms whose validity was previously regarded as questionable (‘no oral modification’ and ‘no reliance’ clauses); the dilution of common law controls on contract terms (in relation to penalties, for example).The first part of the chapter examines recent contract law developments that suggest the re-emergence of formalism in law. The second part explores the common law’s retreat from a role as general regulator of contracting activity in the context of an increasingly contractualised society.

This chapter sets out the main objectives and major themes of the work. The overall aim of the project is to establish the implications of a diminishing contract law (common law in particular).By ‘diminishment’ is meant the return to formal and classical law values in the common law and a reduced field of application for the rules of contract law. A brief outline is given of the topics that are explored during the course of the book: the rise of private ordering through contracts and the legal response to this; the ‘contractualisation’ of society; the formalist turn in modern contract law; the likely future pressures on legal development (such as ‘smart contracts’).The chapter raises some initial arguments concerning the drawbacks of a diminishing contract law (lack of development of public rules of contract law; lack of legal scrutiny of many modern contracts, or aspects of them; lack of opportunity for courts to express and apply the normative values that should underpin contracting). The chapter also anticipates, and responds to, some initial questions or criticisms about the project.

This chapter proposes a theory of legal instrumentalism – contextually, a more explanatory framework than either Marxist or Confucian legal theories – to explain the function and role of law in Chinese society. This kind of instrumentalism, which differs from the debate over this theory in the Anglo-American tradition, is situated in China’s authoritarian regime, where a primary concern is the maintenance of political stability through strengthening authoritarian legality for the ruler. On this premise, economic development, as well as other social goals – such as efficiency of the government – for which the law can undoubtedly be placed in an instrumental position may become a priority in the ruler’s political agenda. When it comes to dispute resolution, the primary matter of concern is not the achievement of the formalist justice of Western tradition via either a formal or informal process but rather the settlement of disputes for which the law primarily plays a facilitative role as a tool, regardless of what strategies it may use. Instrumentalism of this kind, which is suitable for Chinese society both culturally and historically, shows that law is visible and does matter in China, although it cannot be completely understood through the lens of other legal traditions.