What does literature build, and what can critics build with it? This book proposes a new theory of the novel as social model and suggests a more constructive literary criticism that appreciates literature’s resources for producing relations off the page. Taking up the case of realism, the mode that has perennially centered debates about the politics of aesthetics, the book argues for reading realism formalistically, as a model of social space. This notion of modeling is anchored in two sources, one somewhat expected, and the other much less so: the abundant architectural metaphors in theories ... More

What does literature build, and what can critics build with it? This book proposes a new theory of the novel as social model and suggests a more constructive literary criticism that appreciates literature’s resources for producing relations off the page. Taking up the case of realism, the mode that has perennially centered debates about the politics of aesthetics, the book argues for reading realism formalistically, as a model of social space. This notion of modeling is anchored in two sources, one somewhat expected, and the other much less so: the abundant architectural metaphors in theories of realism from Henry James to Georg Lukács and Fredric Jameson; and the nineteenth-century formalist revolution in mathematics. Redefining mathematics as the production of coherent form, independent from existing reality, this revolution predates the elaboration of aesthetic formalism and provides novelists like Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, and Thomas Hardy with mathematical metaphors for novel world-making, including representing political relations. In each chapter, formalist readings underscore how novels think about the foundational structures of social space, articulating a formalism of social and political relations. To explain why math and social building go together necessitates also engaging theorists like Karl Marx, Jacques Lacan, Henri LeFebvre, Caroline Levine, and Jodi Dean, and meditating along the way upon architecture and photography. The end result is a deepened understanding of formalism in its aesthetic, mathematical, and political expressions, and a renewed regard for the joint project of literature, Marxism, and psychoanalysis.