Présentation

Certain formally inventive texts and artworks encourage us to attribute meaning to the forms themselves. Others, it seems, resist such attributions and privilege the non-semantic functions of form, be they purely generative (form as a writing machine or "vaccine against the blank page" in the words of Jacques Jouet), psychological (form as a means of eluding self-censorship), or social (form as a support for shared practices). The introduction to What Forms Mean synthesizes reflections by fifteen scholars on the semantics of form and relates those reflections to contemporary trends in literary studies, linguistics and aesthetics. Among those trends are two crucial revivals: of Gestalt theory, by Pierre Cadiot and Yves-Marie Visetti in their theory of semantic forms; and of historical poetics and Russian formalism, by Patrice Maniglier, Simon Jarvis and others. The range of uses to which form may be put is gauged by gathering the conclusions of the case studies conducted by the contributors to the volume. The objects analyzed in those studies include the aphorism, the saga, concrete poetry, anagrammatic poetry, and the use of blanks in prose fiction. It emerges that even when writers seem to be using forms to make and not to mean, the forms used have powerful and complex semantic effects.