Simple Forms

A fundamental contribution to the endless, contentious, productive dialogue between morphology and history. André Jolles, the interlocutor of Aby Warburg and Johan Huizinga, is still provoking us with his work. The long overdue translation of a classic. -- Carlo Ginzburg
Simple Forms can be counted among the standard works of scholarship. -- Hans-Georg Gadamer
Jolles's versatility was an inevitable result of his extraordinary receptivity and omnivorous interest in all aspects of the study of art and culture and of his talent for absorbing and processing things, and for combining disparate material. -- Johan Huizinga
It is a cause for celebration to have Jolles's classic Simple Forms in English . a great book, always stimulating, and exhilarating in its speculative leaps, its shrewd insights, its wilder guesses. -- Fredric Jameson, from the Foreword
Jolles extended a formal curiosity and intellectual generosity that critics otherwise would only accord to works by established geniuses of the Western canon ... A humbling account of human thought as an attempt to reach beyond our cognitive and agential limitations ... Simple Forms speaks to us with surprising directness and insight. -- Marta Figlerowicz * LA Review of Books *
The book is a wonderful example of the very possibility of doing theory-just theory, only theory-in the field of narrative, regardless of the current temptation to rethink theory in terms of easily marketable toolkits. Highly thought-provoking. -- Jan Baetens * Critical Inquiry *
One central endeavor of the current interest in form is to theorize it in such a way that a concern with form need not exclude a concern with history, society, and politics. Jolles's concept of 'simple forms,' which are ab ovo as social, historical, and material as they are formal, would seem to hold considerable potential for just this endeavor. -- David Martyn * Arcadia 2018; 53 (2) *
This English translation of Simple Forms is a welcome addition to folk-narrative scholarship-not only because it makes Jolles's work available in English, but also because it is an outstanding work of scholarship in its own right. -- Andrew Teverson * Marvels & Tales, Volume 33, Number 1, 2019, pp. 207-209 *