Caroline Levine.
Forms: whole, rhythm, hierarchy, network.
Princeton University Press. 2015
Forms offers a powerful new answer to one of the most pressing problems
facing literary, critical, and cultural studies today—how
to connect form to political, social, and historical context.
Caroline Levine argues that forms organize not only works of art
but also political life, and our attempts to know both art and politics.
Inescapable and frequently troubling, forms shape every aspect of our experience.
Yet, forms don’t impose their order in any simple way.
Multiple shapes, patterns, and arrangements, overlapping and colliding,
generate complex and unpredictable social landscapes that challenge and unsettle
conventional analytic models in literary and cultural studies.
Levine investigates the specific ways that four major forms have structured culture, politics, and scholarly knowledge across periods, and proposes exciting new ways of linking formalism to historicism and literature to politics. She rereads both formalist and antiformalist theorists and offers engaging accounts of a wide range of objects, from medieval convents and modern theme parks to Sophocles’s Antigone and the television series The Wire. The result is a radically mew way of thinking about form for the next generation and essential reading for scholars and students across the humanities who must wrestle with the problem of form and context.