Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism

Kornbluh should revolutionize our understanding of literary realism and its relationship to representation.

Rarely does a work of criticism come along that has the potential to transform existing fields or to establish novel modes of inquiry within the literary humanities, but I believe that The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space by Anna Kornbluh has the capacity to do so. It strikes me as the kind of book that could have an effect somewhat like that of Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations, Eve Kofovsky Sedgwick’s Between Men, or Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, texts that helped to inaugurate new approaches to literature.

Kornbluh works across several disciplinary registers. Hers is a daring and ambitious program of research, and on all terrains the discussion is enviably sophisticated, rigorous, and fluent.

As proficient in contemporary critical theory, historical materialism, and formalist geometry as in theories of the novel ... The Order of Forms makes a case for the 'world-building' nature of novels, which do not just unfold in particulars but also play in abstractions, performing and forming as well as reflecting their world.

Kornbluh anchors her brilliant and challenging book in the 19th-century realist novel but goes well beyond those confines to argue forcefully for the political dynamism and durability of forms and formalisms in our timeForms are not merely immovable perimeters or momentary playthings. They are, for Kornbluh, the tools sustaining art and literature that we can use to build a better world.

In Kornbluh’s dazzling book, formalist mathematics crystallises what forms can do, introducing new ways of organising thought and relationships. ... Thinking about the co-emergence of aesthetic and mathematical formalisms in the 19th century alongside 21st-century psychoanalysis and Marxism, Kornbluh boldly gives shape to a new set of strategies for thinking politically in the humanities.

The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Science is an ambitious and timely work.

Everyone seriously interested in Victorian fiction should read The Order of Forms... It mounts sharp, polemical, hugely stimulating arguments about the basic categories, form and realism, that structures its topic.

Praise for Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club

Kornbluh has devised a remarkable two-fisted engine that examines simultaneously and in turns Marxist film theory and Fight Club. She offers a rigorous and highly original analysis of the film, in which cinematic form and economic circumstances vie with and outstrip each other, and a superb demonstration of the dialectic at work.

The first rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club. So, what's the first rule of Marxist film theory? If you or Anna Kornbluh can't talk about that either, her short sharp introduction nonetheless offers an expert account of what Marxism is and why-maybe more than ever-it matters. Moving elegantly between different theories of film and a film that does the work of theory, she both explains how several modes of Marxist analysis work and makes a powerful case for Marxism's status not as one method among many but rather as our best and maybe last chance to engage and to engage critically with the forms of a world we must find wanting.

Kornbluh’s book convincingly shows the advantage of Marxist film theory, which is that it focuses on film form allowing one to reflect on the film in practically all its aspects including its conditions of production.

Kornbluh’s books put forward versions of Marxism that are as vigorous, erudite, and committed as one would wish any kind of Marxist theorising to be.

Praise for Realizing Capital

Realizing Capital is not just about the psychic life of financial capital, about how the mad dance of the capital affects human psyche, and about how Victorian literature from Dickens onwards registered the psychic distortions imposed by the mad circulation of the capital. The underlying premise is a much more radical one: the psychic life of capital, the way individuals experience and fictionalize financial circulation, is a key ingredient of economic reality itself, since the reality of financial capital is itself structured like a fiction. Although Kornbluh’s book deals with Victorian England, it holds a mirror to our era - if you want to understand what goes on today, how a madness like the 2008 meltdown was possible, read Realizing Capital!

This highly original and far-reaching book puts Marx and Freud into an exciting new dialogue with the Victorian novel. Kornbluh reads these imposing thinkers as engaged in the same project as the realist novelists, all of them struggling to defamiliarize the frighteningly fictitious character of capital. Offering thrilling new insights into Great Expectations, Middlemarch, and The Way We Live Now, this book culminates in a tour de force reading of Marx’s Capital as a Bildungsroman and a radical rethinking of Freud’s 'psychic economy.'

For Kornbluh, realism written in the 19th-century blossoming of finance capitalism performs much of the same work as political theory. She works with a specifically Marxist framework, but instead of subjugating literature to a Marxist program, her version of 'aesthetic mediation' finds similar historical, aesthetic, scientific, and political thought in Marx's metaphors and in the critiques embodied in novels.

Realizing Capital should be essential reading for anyone wishing to follow cutting edge work on the form of the Victorian novel.

By tracing the cultural circulation of two specific tropes ? “fictitious capital” and “psychic economy” ? Kornbluh makes a compelling argument about the complex figurative ties that bind the realist novel to our understanding of both capitalism and the psyche. This exciting and original book will make us reconsider the novel’s cultural work as well as that of its criticism.

Impressively researched, highly inventive, and powerfully driven by original close readings of nineteenth-century fiction and non-fiction.

An exceptionally insightful and important book, one that will fascinate and enable readers interested in capitalism and culture in the modern era.

Kornbluh’s book, beautifully argued, makes the case for a return to material and psychoanalytic critique through formalist methods allied with the 'best historicist impulses'... Realizing Capital is invaluable for its reminder that 'the financial metaphors' of the Victorian period not only structured realism itself but continue to fundamentally 'corrugate our world'.