We don’t realize it, but forms are all around us—ordering our lives—says , the David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities in the Department of English, whose work is profiled in this .
“My shift in literary studies was to think of literary and artistic forms as having certain affordances,” she says in the story. “A poetic rhythm can think certain thoughts that a framed picture cannot. The same is true of the terms we use for analyzing our world. If we think of a text as having boundaries—a beginning, a middle, and an end—then we’re thinking of it in a certain way as a whole. But if we think of it as part of a culture, the idea of it being whole doesn’t work anymore. Different conceptual designs produce different kinds of thinking. In my book, I was trying to use these basic formal structures, like the whole, to think about what these forms afford across art objects and social worlds.”
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