In tracing the relationship between embodiment and form, Formal Matters has established an alternative approach to the body that does not place it beyond representation or expression. I have explored how poetic, rhetorical, and formal figures are grounded in embodied experience, and I have demonstrated the way this embodied experience is an integral part of their figurative processes. My recourse to formalist figures has reinstated their embodied form, either implicit but ignored by formalism or explicit but dispatched by postmodernism. This reading of embodied form has charted a course between these two poles in order to demonstrate both literary form’s inseparable relationship to embodiment and the way embodiment takes shape in form. By explicitly attending to the embodied foundation of literary form and, in turn, using poetic figures to read embodiment, I have provided a methodology for grasping embodiment beyond a text’s representational, thematic, propositional, or discursive content. At the same time, I have argued that there is no essential, natural embodiment that pre-exists our reading for it. The organic, holistic, unified nature of embodied form emerges through interpretation, which brings together seemingly disconnected elements of representation.

Some may remain unconvinced that my focus on form offers an alternative to representation and that the problematics that plague the body’s relationship to representation haunt its connection to form. Does literary form merely stand in for or extend embodiment in a similar manner to representation? Can the body’s corporeality and materiality – its reality as living ‘flesh’ – be rendered in form more fully than in representation? It remains true that the body’s material form and the senses cannot be directly ‘injected’ into literature without some translation, mediation, or transposition that entails a kind of dematerialization of the brute ‘stuff’ of matter. Rather than seeing this process as a failure, however, I have sought to demonstrate that what results in this transposition of embodied experience into literature is a new type of materiality: embodied form. Through formal constellations and poetic figures, embodied form projects the body’s organization of perceptual experience into meaningful patterns. Literary form – as well as other aesthetic objects – both take their shape from and mediate bodily experience, even if this process will never be complete, like the constant vacillation of chiasmus.