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Richard Burt “It’s a Beautiful Monster”: Robert Zemeckiss?Beowulf, Formal Materiality, Paramediality, and the Hard Drive Rotations of Film and Media History “To parody Kant’s stylistic procedure of dictionary definition: the radical formalism that animates aesthetic judgment in the dynamics of the sublime is what is called materialism. Theoreticians of literature who fear they may have deserted or betrayed the world by being too formalistic are worrying about the wrong thing: in the spirit of Kant’s Critique, they were not nearly formalistic enough.” --Paul de Man, “Kant’s Materialism,” in Aesthetic Ideology (1996), 128 “Late in the writing of this book I became aware of Paul de Man’s use of the term “formal materialism,” notably in Aesthetic Ideology. . . . I do not intend my own use of formal materiality to imply any overlap with the particulars of de Man. ” --Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008),11, footnote 17 “Will we one day be able, in a single gesture, to join the thinking of the event to the thinking of the machine? Will we be able to think, what is called thinking, at one and the same time, both what is happening (what we call an event) and the calculable programming of automatic repetition (we call that a machine)? . . . [The commonly used words organic and inorganic attributed to matter or to the material body] carry an obvious reference, either positive or negative, to the possibility of an internal principle that is proper and totalizing, to a total form of, precisely, organization, whether or not it be a beautiful form, an aesthetic form, this time in the sense of the fine arts. This organicity is thought to be lacking from so-called inorganic matter. If one day . . . the event and the machine . . . were to be thought together, you can bet that not only . . . will one have produced a new logic, an unheard of conceptual form; against the background and at the horizon of present possibilities, this new