The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life
August 2020
"Acute, lyrical, beautifully researched, and crisply argued."
-Christopher Nealon, Johns Hopkins University
"This book...is a demand, careful and clear, that we unmake the world that gave us this calamity and the calamity that gave us this world."
-Joshua Clover, University of California, Davis
The Calamity Form is a book about the formal and rhetorical strategies poetry uses to confront historical crisis. Drawing on the work of Romantic poets like William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Friedrich Hölderlin, Anahid Nersessian pushes back against recent attempts to see literature as a source of information on par with historical or scientific data, arguing instead for the irreducibility of poetic knowledge.
Reading this always arresting, often startling study feels a little like reading a poem by Donne. . . . [The Calamity Form] is a page-turner, the likes of which I can’t remember encountering. Reading Nersessian is like talking to a person of enormous intelligence, originality, creativity, energy, wit, confidence, and style who also works to make herself unknowing enough—vulnerable, susceptible enough—to channel the unheard melodies of the best known of Romantic era poems.
- Marjorie Levinson, Critical Inquiry
Poised to become a touchstone of contemporary Romantic studies.
- Bakary Diaby, Los Angeles Review of Books
Nersessian brings a new and deeper understanding to Romantic poetry's response to capitalism....T]his probing, erudite study will appeal to scholars interested in such subjects as formalism, ecocriticism, Marxist theory, and literary theory as well as to those who study literature.
- Choice
Available at the University of Chicago Press and Bookshop.
This is a book that I hope will have a shaping effect on literary study. It offers a model for how we might continue to address issues of ongoing social concern without exaggerating or minimizing the importance of poetry to criticism and, perhaps more importantly, to life.
- Brian McGrath, The Wordsworth Circle
Nersessian reads promiscuously, in the best sense, across disciplines, traditions, and languages. It's a densely crafted book fairly brimming with ideas—there is action on every page—and it's written with brio and an almost Pynchonesque vocabulary.
- Ian Balfour, Studies in Romanticism
The Calamity Form gives a compelling demonstration of how we might have our formalist cake and eat history too.
- Jack Chelgren, Chicago Review