The Calamity Form – On Poetry and Social Life

"Reading this always arresting, often startling study feels a little like reading a poem by Donne; unlike things and scales of attention get pressed together to yield a new kind of understanding, at once intellectual and emotional. . . . [The Calamity Form] is a page-turner, the likes of which I can’t remember encountering. Reading Nersessian is like talking to a person of enormous intelligence, originality, creativity, energy, wit, confidence, and style who also works to make herself unknowing enough—vulnerable, susceptible enough—to channel the unheard melodies of the best known of Romantic era poems." -- Marjorie Levinson * Critical Inquiry *
"The Calamity Form injects a Marxist soul into Deconstruction’s veins. . . [The Calamity Form] is thoroughly a book of the present and is poised to become a touchstone of contemporary Romantic studies." -- Bakary Diaby * Los Angeles Review of Books *
"The Calamity Form gives a compelling demonstration of how we might have our formalist cake and eat history too. . . . Formalism doesn’t mean a total sidelining of the historical, but a commitment to studying how literature creates structures that are abstracted from the world. . . . The Calamity Form is a work of Marxist criticism whose key tenet and admirable example is to call for Marxist critics to do their jobs carefully: to use the tools of formal analysis to make precise, ambitious claims about how texts mediate the conditions of their composition." -- Jack Chelgren * Chicago Review *
"Nersessian reads promiscuously, in the best sense, across disciplines, traditions, and languages. It's a densely crafted book fairly brimming with ideas—there is action on every page—and it's written with brio and an almost Pynchonesque vocabulary. . . . Nersessian’s prose takes risks and in a small way is commensurate with the excesses she charts so well
in Keats or with which she rhymes in Adorno. It is likely we will be coming to terms for years to come with this distinctive foray into clouds of unknowing." -- Ian Balfour * Studies in Romanticism *
"Calamity form is simply 'a caution against taking the heroic possibilities of literature too seriously.' That leaves plenty more to take seriously, chiefly the experience of these texts, which Nersessian both plumbs and re-creates with erudition, verve, extraordinary intelligence, and a literary mind par excellence." -- William Galperin * Modern Language Quarterly *
"Nersessian brings a new and deeper understanding to Romantic poetry’s response to capitalism, but she also includes discussions of 20th- and 21st-century visual media. Because of this range and the author's attentive 'thinking about the limits of historical materialism for literary study', this probing, erudite study will appeal to scholars interested in such subjects as formalism, ecocriticism, Marxist theory, and literary theory as well as to those who study literature." * Choice *
“Acute, lyrical, beautifully researched, and crisply argued, The Calamity Form tracks the ‘slender promise’ of momentary solace Romantic poetry made in the face of early nineteenth-century capitalism. Though Nersessian ratchets down the claims that have been made on the poetry’s behalf, she neither imagines it as simply making peace with the world as it was, or as guilty of the failure to change it. Instead, The Calamity Form sees in its archive a myriad of subtle openings onto possible futures, offering not a solution to capitalism but a range of wary, vigilant attitudes toward it, probing something like what Nersessian suggests Keats thought was ‘the upside of degradation.’ It is a powerful book.” -- Christopher Nealon, Johns Hopkins University
“To name the Industrial Revolution as ‘the calamity form’ is to begin at the end, at the birth of a total transformation that will promise planetary death. This book intervenes into an astonishing multiplicity of debates: poetry and its scholarship, ecocriticism, the matter of capital, literary theory, and more. It renovates Romanticism and takes its place in the blossoming field of Marxist poetics. But perhaps most of all it is a demand, careful and clear, that we unmake the world that gave us this calamity and the calamity that gave us this world. At this late date, a romantic communism is no longer possible; a communist romanticism herein makes its return.” -- Joshua Clover, University of California, Davis
"Anahid Nersessian's star has ascended at a pace almost unheard of in our contemporary moment, where ambitious theory is mostly in abeyance, and the sheer glut of publications, to say nothing of our deracinated academic labor market, makes it nigh impossible to gain a hearing beyond one’s narrow disciplinary specialism. Nersessian stands out in part because hers is a critical voice that often enough refuses the scholarly commonplaces of our age, not least an adherence to positivist notions of 'context' and the 'archive.' Of her three monographs to date, The  Calamity  Form is, I think, the best." * Genre *