Character as Form

(Hardback)

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Description

What if the Renaissance had the right idea about character Most readers today think that characters are individuals. Poets of the Renaissance understood characters as types. They thought the job of a character was to collect every example of a kind, in the same way that an entry in a dictionary collects definitions of a word. Character as Form celebrates the old meaning of character. The advantage of the old meaning is that it allows for generalization. Characters funnel whole societies of beings into shapes that are compact, elegant, and portable. This book tests the old meaning of character against modern examples from poems, novels, comics, and performances in theater and film by Shakespeare, Molire, Austen, the Marx Brothers, Raul Ruiz, Denton Welch, and Lynda Barry. The heart of the book is the character of the misanthrope, who, in Shakespeare's phrase, banishes the world.

Reviews

Idiosyncratic, often brilliant. * New York Review of Books *
The extraordinary value of Kunins book lies in his sensitivity to these aesthetic codes, to the way that artworks selectively augment and mute different aspects of their subjects. This is how content happens, and Kunin has an extremely good ear (and eye) for it. * Los Angeles Review of Books *
Character as Form is a bracingly original study of narrative character. * Modern Philology *
Throughout, [Kunins] analysis is acute and lucid. * Times Literary Supplement *
Combine[s] moments of thoughtful close reading with a vast and eclectic corpus is impressive; perhaps its most useful and intriguing contribution is the notion that ideas of character not only permeate and shape our engagement with fictional people but also underpin their engagements with each other. * Modern Language Review *

Author Bio

Aaron Kunin is Associate Professor of English, Pomona College, USA. He is the author of two books of poetry, Folding Ruler Star: Poems (2005) and The Sore Throat and Other Poems (2010) and a novel, The Mandarin (2008).