The Politics of Form: An Interview with Caroline Levine

The Politics of Form:An Interview with Caroline Levine Jeffrey J. Williams (bio) Since the 1980s, critics have emphasized how social and cultural conditions bear on literary works. In response, Caroline Levine has called for renewed attention to form. But it is not simply a return to literary formalism; rather, in her book Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015) Levine holds that social arrangements might be considered in formal terms and literary criticism offers tools to decipher them. For her, literature and society always entwine, and a focus on form helps us understand them. Levine began work in Victorian studies, and her first book, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003), shows how the novel, particularly that foregrounds suspense, has a similar structure as experimental method in science, which tests hypotheses. It also parallels the radical thought of the period, imagining political alternatives, as in Morris's socialism. In her next book, Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007), Levine turned directly to politics, arguing that controversial art functions as a kind of stress test for the strength of democracies and the freedom they support. More recently, in essays such as "The Long Lure of Anti-Instrumentality: Politics, Aesthetics, and Sustainability" (MFS, 2021), she traces the bias of modern criticism against instrumental reasoning and calls for our engaging practical, instrumental measures, especially responding to climate change. Levine was born in 1970 in Syracuse, New York, where her father, Joseph M. Levine, was a Distinguished Professor at Syracuse University, specializing in the intellectual history of early modern England. (She writes about him in the introduction to Forms.) She attended Princeton (BA, 1992) and did graduate work in England, earning her PhD at Birkbeck College in the University of London (1996). After jobs at Wake Forest and Rutgers–Camden, she taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 2002 to 2016, serving as chair from 2013 to 2016. She then moved to Cornell University, where she was chair from 2018 to 2021 and is Ryan Professor of the Humanities. [End Page 481] This interview took place on June 29, 2022, in Ithaca, New York. It was conducted and edited by Jeffrey J. Williams. Thanks to Catherine Evans, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, for the transcription. jeffrey j. williams: Your book Forms has gotten a lot of attention and clearly intervenes in recent debates about the role of criticism and theory. What is your basic argument in it? caroline levine: The way I sometimes describe it to people who are not in literary studies is that once upon a time in literary studies we studied the forms and structures of literary texts. Then there was a generation that came along and said, "We have to think about social questions and politics." I'm part of a generation that's trying to put the two together, to think about both the forms and structures of literary texts and of society and politics. I think what's unique about the book, which hasn't been a mainstay of the new formalism, is that I say that we, literary critics, can read forms outside the realms of literary texts too. Politics and social relations are made up of different forms, and we have some of the skills to read those too. jjw: I can see how that resonates with your second book, which is about why politics needs the arts, to paraphrase the subtitle. In a way, your argument in Forms is that politics needs literature. cl: Yes, or literary criticism. I'm more and more drawn to method and away from objects. Literary studies defines itself by a group of objects, and I think that is a problem now, since those objects are no longer at the center of our culture. They were for a while—let's say between the mass literacy projects during the late nineteenth century and the paperback revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. Reading was at the center of culture, even while there was film and radio and television, but now it doesn't look like books are at the center anymore. So, as literary critics, I don't think we can just...