The Column as Form: Toward a Discourse Theory of the Modern Age

This dissertation develops the argument that the editorial column is a distinct genre affording its own constraints and resources for figuring the deep social forms that structure capitalist modernity as a contradictory, alienated totality. To elucidate this core argument it moves through a series of case studies drawn from the past, each of which develops a distinct aspect of the relationship between form and function that defines the column as a communicative genre. The relation between form and function is eminently historical, and a definite form of this relation is at the core not just of the column, but any significant genre of literary or rhetorical thought. As both sedimented products of evolving social forms as well as vehicles for their creative interpretation, genres reflectively materialize the modes of economic life that make up historically specific organizations of social reproduction. The column is a prominent type of this mediation whose main inventional resources gravitate around the agency of the image and culminate in an elaborately composed assertion.