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Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari influentially celebrated constant processes of change over

any graspable structured


order—shifting “aggregates of intensities,” in A Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 15. Literary and cultural studies
scholars have
continued to stress plasticity, multiplicity, heterogeneity, instability, elusiveness, slippages,
and contradictions—all
ways of refusing and unsettling the binary forms of an essentialized contemporary
heteronormativity. See, for
example, Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Post-
Modern (Durham, NC and
London: Duke University Press, 1999), and Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham, NC
and London: Duke
University Press, 2006).
21 Henry S. Turner, “Lessons from Literature for the Historian of Science (and Vice Versa):
Reflections on ‘Form,’” Isis
101 (2010): 582. Turner argues that form “is an attribute of being, of ontology.”
22 Bruno Latour too argues that form is best defined as the material medium that connects
things, people, and ideas to
each other. One example he offers is voting. Nothing if not material, the pieces of paper,
reports, check marks,
accounts, and maps that connect things, people, and ideas at work in an election are what
Latour calls “forms.”
Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 223.
23 Stefanie Markovits, “Form Things: Looking at Genre through Victorian Diamonds,”
Victorian Studies 52, no. 4
(summer 2010): 598.
24 Herbert F. Tucker, “Of Moments and Monuments: Spacetime in Nineteenth-Century
Poetry,” Modern Language
Quarterly 58 (1997): 289.
25 Wolfson is responding to Jerome McGann’s now-classic reading of Romantic writers in
The Romantic Ideology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges, 19, 14, 231.
26 These alternative economic forms did not survive without a struggle: private utilities did
everything they could,
including launching advertising campaigns filled with outright lies, to drive the cooperative
and state-owned
enterprises from the market. Marc Schneiberg looks at the sites where they endured
nonetheless and notes that they
flourished most often in places where there were “legacy effects”—holdovers from previous
times that managed to
last effectively into the present. “What’s on the Path? Path Dependence, Organizational
Diversity and the Problem of
Institutional Change in the US Economy, 1900–1950,” Socio-Economic Review (2007): 66, 72.
27 For an example of the fusing of genre and form, see Jason Mittell, “All in the Game: The
Wire, Serial Storytelling, and
Procedural Logic”: electronic book review (March 18, 2011):
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/serial. See also my response to
Mittell: “From Genre to
Form” (electronic book review, May 1, 2011):
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/serialrip.
28 For a brilliant account of the plasticity and historical situatedness of a genre and its
effects, see Carolyn Williams,
Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
Dimock also argues against
the stability and simple endurance of genre: “bending and pulling and stretching are
unavoidable, for what genre is
dealing with is a volatile body of material, still developing, and still in transit, in some
unknown and unpredictable
direction.” Through Other Continents, 73–74.
29 Ferguson, “Emma and the Impact of Form,” 160.
30 Hayden V. White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1990), x.
31 By 1896, fifty editions of the novel had been published in England alone. Beverly Lyon
Clark, Regendering the School
Story: Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys (New York and London: Garland, 1996), 11.
32 Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1989), 57.
33 Moretti, Distant Reading, 59.
34 “The collection of such past and future orders is not a closed list or a predetermined
sequence, governed by law-like
constraints or tendencies. To understand the internal constitution and the occasional
remaking of these orders
requires a style of social analysis that breaks with the assumptions of deep-structure social
theory and positivist
social science.” Roberto Mangabeira Unger, False Necessity (1987) (London and New York:
Verso, 2001), 54. See also
Democracy Realized (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 20.
35 See Rancière’s account of Rosa Parks in Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran
(London and New York: Verso,
2006), 61.
36 Carolyn Lesjak, “Reading Dialectically,” Criticism 55 (spring 2013): 233–77.
37 Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009), 18.
38 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) (Chicago: Open
Court, 1907), 198, 210. It is
possible to capture cause-and-effect relations in statistical charts and mathematical
equations, but typically these
modes of representation are accompanied by narratives. See, for example, Oxfam’s 2009
report on the impact of the
economic crisis on global poverty rates: http://www.oxfamblogs.or

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