Caroline Levine – författare

An argument that humanists have the tools—and the responsibility—to mobilize political power to tackle climate changeAs climate catastrophes intensify, why do literary and cultural studies scholars so often remain committed to the separation of aesthetic study from the nitty-gritty of political change? In this thought-provoking book, Caroline Levine makes the case for an alternative view, arguing that humanists have the tools to mobilize political power—and the responsibility to use those tools to avert the worst impacts of global warming. Building on the theory developed in her award-winning book, Forms, Levine shows how formalist methods can be used in the fight for climate justice.Countering scholars in the environmental humanities who embrace only “modest gestures of care”—and who seem to have moved directly to “mourning” our inevitable environmental losses—Levine argues that large-scale, practical environmental activism should be integral to humanists’ work. She identifies three major infrastructural forms crucial to sustaining collective life: routines, pathways, and enclosures. Crisscrossing between art works and public works—from urban transportation to television series and from food security programs to rhyming couplets—she considers which forms might support stability and predictability in the face of growing precarity. Finally, bridging the gap between academic and practical work, Levine offers a series of questions and exercises intended to guide readers into political action. The Activist Humanist provides an essential handbook for prospective activist-scholars.

Part of the Norton Library seriesThe Norton Library edition of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde features the text of the first (1886) British edition. A thorough introduction by Caroline Levine discusses the contexts and structure of Stevenson’s thrilling horror, highlighting the literary achievements of “a fable that lies nearer to poetry than to ordinary prose fiction” (Vladimir Nabokov). Other selections include “Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh,” “The Body-Snatcher,” “Markheim,” and “The Bottle Imp.”The Norton Library is a growing collection of high-quality texts and translations—influential works of literature and philosophy—introduced and edited by leading scholars. Norton Library editions prepare readers for their first encounter with the works that they’ll re-read over a lifetime.Inviting introductions highlight the work’s significance and influence, providing the historical and literary context students need to dive in with confidence.Endnotes and an easy-to-read design deliver an uninterrupted reading experience, encouraging students to read the text first and refer to endnotes for more information as needed.An affordable price (most $10 or less) encourages students to buy the book and to come to class with the assigned edition.About the Editor: Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at Cornell University. She has written three books: The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003), Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007), and Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015). She is the nineteenth-century editor for the Norton Anthology of World Literature.

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. Borrowing the concept of "affordances" from design theory, this book investigates the specific ways that four major forms--wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks--have structured culture, politics, and scholarly knowledge across periods, and it proposes exciting new ways of linking formalism to historicism and literature to politics.Levine rereads both formalist and antiformalist theorists, including Cleanth Brooks, Michel Foucault, Jacques Ranciere, Mary Poovey, and Judith Butler, and she 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 new 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.

An argument that humanists have the tools—and the responsibility—to mobilize political power to tackle climate changeAs climate catastrophes intensify, why do literary and cultural studies scholars so often remain committed to the separation of aesthetic study from the nitty-gritty of political change? In this thought-provoking book, Caroline Levine makes the case for an alternative view, arguing that humanists have the tools to mobilize political power—and the responsibility to use those tools to avert the worst impacts of global warming. Building on the theory developed in her award-winning book, Forms, Levine shows how formalist methods can be used in the fight for climate justice.Countering scholars in the environmental humanities who embrace only “modest gestures of care”—and who seem to have moved directly to “mourning” our inevitable environmental losses—Levine argues that large-scale, practical environmental activism should be integral to humanists’ work. She identifies three major infrastructural forms crucial to sustaining collective life: routines, pathways, and enclosures. Crisscrossing between art works and public works—from urban transportation to television series and from food security programs to rhyming couplets—she considers which forms might support stability and predictability in the face of growing precarity. Finally, bridging the gap between academic and practical work, Levine offers a series of questions and exercises intended to guide readers into political action. The Activist Humanist provides an essential handbook for prospective activist-scholars.

Scholars have long recognized that narrative suspense dominates the formal dynamics of 19th-century British fiction, both high and low. But few have asked why suspense played such a crucial role in the Victorian novel and in Victorian culture more broadly. This study argues that a startling array of 19th-century thinkers - from John Ruskin to Michael Faraday to Charlotte Bronte and Wilkie Collins - saw suspense as the perfect vehicle for a radically new approach to knowledge that they called ""realism"". Although by convention suspense has belonged to the realm of sensational mysteries and gothic horrors, and realism to the world of sober, reformist, middle-class domesticity, the two were in fact inextricably intertwined. The real was defined precisely as that which did not belong to the mind, that which stood separate from patterns of thought and belief. In order to get at the truth of the real, readers would have to learn to suspend their judgement. Suspenseful plots were the ideal vehicles for disseminating this experience of doubt, training readers to pause before leaping to conclusions. Far from being merely low or sensational, the mysteries of many plotted texts were intended to introduce readers to a rigorous epistemological training borrowed from science. And far from being complacently conservative, suspense was deliberately employed to encourage a commitment to scepticism and uncertainty. Carole Levine argues convincingly that the 19th-century critics were not wrong about suspense: the classic readerly text was indeed far more writerly - dynamic, critical, questioning and indeterminate - than modern critics have been inclined to imagine. Offering official readings of canonical texts, including ""Jane Eyre"", ""Great Expectations"", ""The Moonstone"" and ""The Picture of Dorian Gray"", and drawing on a range of historical sources, from popular fiction and art criticism to the philosophy of science and scientific biography, Levine combines narrative theory and the history of ideas to offer a rereading of 19th-century realism.

First published in 1998, this volume proposes to shift the critical emphasis from a canonical author to her uncanonical text – from George Eliot to her novel Romola – and contends that this choice both broadens the range of interpretive possibilities and brings them into sharper focus.The editors invited a variety of critics to put their different critical models to work on Romola and the results are fertile and suggestive: among the issues explored here are the domestic politics of marriage, the relationship between narrative and epistemology, the materiality of the text, the novel’s relation to nineteenth-century narratives of martyrdom, and the gendering of space. Such theoretical eclecticism, when focused on a common reference point, necessarily opens out into a dialogue among critical and interpretive models. Theory throws light onto Romola, just as Romola throws light onto theory.

First published in 1998, this volume proposes to shift the critical emphasis from a canonical author to her uncanonical text – from George Eliot to her novel Romola – and contends that this choice both broadens the range of interpretive possibilities and brings them into sharper focus.The editors invited a variety of critics to put their different critical models to work on Romola and the results are fertile and suggestive: among the issues explored here are the domestic politics of marriage, the relationship between narrative and epistemology, the materiality of the text, the novel’s relation to nineteenth-century narratives of martyrdom, and the gendering of space. Such theoretical eclecticism, when focused on a common reference point, necessarily opens out into a dialogue among critical and interpretive models. Theory throws light onto Romola, just as Romola throws light onto theory.

A provocative and compelling book that explores the complex relationship between democracy and avant-garde art, offering a surprising new perspective on the critical role that the arts play in democratic governance at home and abroad. Covers a broad range of topics, from disputes over public art, copyright, and obscenity, to the operations of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Cold WarHighlights detailed and at times shocking debates over the role of the rebellious artist within society