Open Form and the Shape of Ideas: Literary Structures As Representations of Philosophical Concepts in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

This study examines some of the ways in which discontinuous literary forms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries serve as representations of philosophical ideas. The author provides a critique of Joseph Frank's "Spatial Form" and Umberto Eco's "Open Work" and then offers his own account of the theory of discontinuous form.