C Levine
Biographic Data
| ID | 7803 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Levine |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Levine |
| SIGNATURE | LEVINE C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| ORCID | 0009-0000-2457-5026 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 30 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Politics of Disruption
Utopian Thinking and Political Action Now
Marxists disagree about the relations between utopian thinking and political action. One tradition, represented best by Theodor Adorno, warns of the dangers of trying to fight for the realization of utopian imaginings; the other tradition demands strategic, practical, collective mobilizing for change. In literary and cultural studies today, Adorno’s case against political action is the one that prevails. In our own historical moment, however, the…
The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis
Nuts and Bolts: Collective Action, the Divestment Movement, and Jane Addams
This essay describes the author's quest for effective, large-scale political actions to stop the burning of fossil fuels. What are the nuts and bolts of collective organizing at scales large enough to effect substantial change? Frustrated both by widespread public pessimism and by the politics most often articulated in literary studies, Levine finds a working political model in the divestment movement; a methodological model in formalist analysis…
In Praise of Happy Endings: Precarity, Sustainability, and the Novel
Open-endedness is one of the most pervasive and enduring values in literary studies. Critics of all stripes have condemned teleology on both aesthetic and political grounds. This essay makes the paradoxical case that in an era of mass precarity, this insistence on openness has reached its limit. It is now blocking the kinds of political action that will be necessary to slowing the pace of climate change and building material conditions for collec…
Literary Studies and Collective Life
Literary studies has repeatedly justified a diciplinary focus on the small scale. Both our most conventional objects—the novel and the lyric poem—and our most conventional methods—close reading, historical analysis, and an attention to surprises and exceptions—lead us away from a focus on large scales of collective life. This essay argues for a different starting point, making a case for a metadisciplinary formalism that can join literary studies…
Supplemental Material for Historical Change in Midlife Health, Well-Being, and Despair: Cross-Cultural and Socioeconomic Comparisons
In the current study, we included Mexico, which is considered an upper-middle-income and developing nation and the United States, Australia, Germany, and South Korea, which are considered high-income nations. The distinction follows the United Nations (Millennium Development Indicators: World and Regional Groupings, 2003; UN, 2020) that uses the per capita gross national income (GNI) established by the World Bank to classify countries by their le…
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977)
This article focuses on two of the most enduring terms in Raymond Williams's Marxism and Literature: "dominant, residual, emergent" and "structures of feeling." Williams's theory of history as mixtures and layers of different temporal moments is not only alive and well in the field today; it also offers a way to theorize what it means to be "Undead," that is, to produce thoughts that live after or out of one's time. And yet, Williams's stress on …
Art et/ou Politique
Dans cet entretien, Prof. Caroline Levine (University Wisconsin , Madison) répond à nos questions sur les rapports entre art et politique. Partant des idées les plus intuitives sur la collusion entre ces deux champs, des questions plus précises sont abordées sur la subversion, la propagande, la censure, les limites de l’action politique, ou encore la technique. De multiples collusions et contaminations entre art et politique apparaissent alors, f…
Three Unresolved Debates
It is such an honor to have Forms chosen for a special feature in PMLA , and I am grateful for the time and energy these scholars put into their thoughtful responses. Taken together, these contributions point to three core questions that divide us in the field today: What is politics? How should we understand agency? And what is the value and purpose of literature and literary studies?
Critical Response I Still Polemicizing After All These Years
Model Thinking: Generalization, Political Form, and the Common Good
For decades, many scholars in the humanities have set themselves against generalizations, valuing instead what is local, resistant, exceptional, nuanced, situated, concrete, embodied, and specific. Both close reading and historicizing, two of the major methods in literary studies, emphasize singularity, strangeness, and heterogeneity. This essay argues that the antigeneralizing imperative has also brought with it a moralizing of the large scale, …
Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network
This book 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. The book 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…
Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network
Thing, Feeling, Form
Reading at the Time
Research Article| March 01 2008 Reading at the Time Caroline Levine Caroline Levine University of Wisconsin–Madison [email protected] Caroline Levine is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is author of Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (Blackwell 2007) and The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (Virginia 2003), winner of the Perkins Prize for the best book in narrative studies.…
Teaching & Learning Guide for: Formal Pasts and Formal Possibilities in Victorian Studies
Author's Introduction Formalism, famously, went out of fashion in the 1970s. Three decades before, the New Critics had inspired an extraordinarily wide audience for formalist reading practices in university classrooms across the US and Britain, where ‘close reading’ became the basic staple of English literature courses. But by 1980 these same practices had become the target of powerful critiques by feminists, Marxists, post‐structuralists, and hi…
Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts
Formal Pasts and Formal Possibilities in Victorian Studies
This essay tells a story about the complex and sometimes fraught relationship between Victorian studies and literary formalism. After the New Critics had thrown Victorian literature into disrepute for its formalist failures, socio‐political approaches to literature reclaimed the Victorians – but often by discarding form. This essay shows how recent criticism has begun to bring formalist approaches to historical and political concerns in exciting …
Scaled Up, Writ Small: A Response to Carolyn Dever and Herbert F. Tucker
Scaled Up, Writ Small:A Response to Carolyn Dever and Herbert F. Tucker Caroline Levine (bio) There is no pleasure like having one's work read by people one has long admired. I am keenly grateful to Carolyn Dever and Herbert F. Tucker for their searching and elegant responses, and to Victorian Studies for arranging this forum. The pieces by Dever and Tucker afford another pleasure, too: the exciting feeling that formalism is really coming back, a…
Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies
Strategic Formalism:Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies Caroline Levine (bio) Since the demise of the New Criticism, literary critics have struggled to articulate links between literary forms and social formations. From Georg Lukács to Pierre Macherey and Fredric Jameson, Marxists have been inclined to understand literary forms as expressions of social and economic realities. To be sure, literary forms do not reflect economic arrangements in …
Propaganda for Democracy: The Curious Case of Love on the Dole
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Gursky's Sublime
The paradox of public art: "Democratic space, the avant-garde, and Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc
This essay interprets the controversy over Richard Serra's monumental sculpture, Tilted Arc , which was designed for a public plaza in downtown Manhattan in 1979 and then torn down five years later after intense public outcry. Levine reads this controversy as characteristic of contemporary debates over the arts, which continue the tradition of the nineteenth century avant-garde, pitting art against a wider public, and insisting that art must deli…
Introduction Reading for Pleasure: Gender and Popular Genres
Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network
Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies
Strategic Formalism:Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies Caroline Levine (bio) Since the demise of the New Criticism, literary critics have struggled to articulate links between literary forms and social formations. From Georg Lukács to Pierre Macherey and Fredric Jameson, Marxists have been inclined to understand literary forms as expressions of social and economic realities. To be sure, literary forms do not reflect economic arrangements in …
The paradox of public art: "Democratic space, the avant-garde, and Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc
This essay interprets the controversy over Richard Serra's monumental sculpture, Tilted Arc , which was designed for a public plaza in downtown Manhattan in 1979 and then torn down five years later after intense public outcry. Levine reads this controversy as characteristic of contemporary debates over the arts, which continue the tradition of the nineteenth century avant-garde, pitting art against a wider public, and insisting that art must deli…
The ethics of screening for early intervention in HIV disease
The potential for early medical intervention to slow or prevent the\ndevelopment of AIDS in HIV-positive individuals has led to calls for\nwidespread testing of asymptomatic at-risk persons. Levine and Bayer discuss\nthe ethical aspects of these proposals, distinguishing among the\njustifications for screening and evaluating each independently. They present\ncurrent clinical evidence for early intervention and explore its potential\nrisks and ben…
Propaganda for Democracy: The Curious Case of Love on the Dole
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Critical Response I Still Polemicizing After All These Years
Formal Pasts and Formal Possibilities in Victorian Studies
This essay tells a story about the complex and sometimes fraught relationship between Victorian studies and literary formalism. After the New Critics had thrown Victorian literature into disrepute for its formalist failures, socio‐political approaches to literature reclaimed the Victorians – but often by discarding form. This essay shows how recent criticism has begun to bring formalist approaches to historical and political concerns in exciting …
Scaled Up, Writ Small: A Response to Carolyn Dever and Herbert F. Tucker
Scaled Up, Writ Small:A Response to Carolyn Dever and Herbert F. Tucker Caroline Levine (bio) There is no pleasure like having one's work read by people one has long admired. I am keenly grateful to Carolyn Dever and Herbert F. Tucker for their searching and elegant responses, and to Victorian Studies for arranging this forum. The pieces by Dever and Tucker afford another pleasure, too: the exciting feeling that formalism is really coming back, a…
Visual Labor: Ruskin’s Radical Realism
C RITICS HAVE BEEN COMPLAINING about Ruskin’s inconsistencies since the 1840s. In 1856, Elizabeth Rigby wrote contemptuously of Ruskin’s “crochety contradictions and peevish paradoxes” (187). Marshall Mather lamented in 1897 that the critic’s “so-called inconsistencies roused the laughter and sneer of superficial readers” (xi). By 1933, R. H. Wilenski simply affirmed that “Ruskin’s art criticism . . . is an appalling muddle” (192). And in our own…
The ethics of screening for early intervention in HIV disease
The potential for early medical intervention to slow or prevent the\ndevelopment of AIDS in HIV-positive individuals has led to calls for\nwidespread testing of asymptomatic at-risk persons. Levine and Bayer discuss\nthe ethical aspects of these proposals, distinguishing among the\njustifications for screening and evaluating each independently. They present\ncurrent clinical evidence for early intervention and explore its potential\nrisks and ben…
Orphans of the HIV epidemic: Unmet needs in six US cities
In the United States, an estimated 72,000-125,000 children and adolescents will lose their mothers to AIDS by the year 2000. Six cities have been particularly hard hit: New York City, Newark, Miami, San Juan, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. The most urgent unmet needs for children, their families and new guardians are for mental health services, including bereavement counselling; transitional services to help overcome the loss of AIDS-related be…
Visual Labor: Ruskin’s Radical Realism
C RITICS HAVE BEEN COMPLAINING about Ruskin’s inconsistencies since the 1840s. In 1856, Elizabeth Rigby wrote contemptuously of Ruskin’s “crochety contradictions and peevish paradoxes” (187). Marshall Mather lamented in 1897 that the critic’s “so-called inconsistencies roused the laughter and sneer of superficial readers” (xi). By 1933, R. H. Wilenski simply affirmed that “Ruskin’s art criticism . . . is an appalling muddle” (192). And in our own…
Harmless Pleasure”: Gender, Suspense, and Jane Eyre
“[I] T IS TIME THE OBSCURITY . . . WAS done away,” writes Charlotte Brontë in 1850. “The little mystery, which formerly yielded some harmless pleasure, has lost its interest. Circumstances have changed” (“Biographical Notice” 134). The “little mystery” she coyly invokes here was not so trivial in the eyes of the literary world. From the moment that Jane Eyre appeared, reviewers speculated wildly about the identity of the authors of Jane Eyre , Wu…
Introduction Reading for Pleasure: Gender and Popular Genres
Gursky's Sublime
The paradox of public art: "Democratic space, the avant-garde, and Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc
This essay interprets the controversy over Richard Serra's monumental sculpture, Tilted Arc , which was designed for a public plaza in downtown Manhattan in 1979 and then torn down five years later after intense public outcry. Levine reads this controversy as characteristic of contemporary debates over the arts, which continue the tradition of the nineteenth century avant-garde, pitting art against a wider public, and insisting that art must deli…
Scaled Up, Writ Small: A Response to Carolyn Dever and Herbert F. Tucker
Scaled Up, Writ Small:A Response to Carolyn Dever and Herbert F. Tucker Caroline Levine (bio) There is no pleasure like having one's work read by people one has long admired. I am keenly grateful to Carolyn Dever and Herbert F. Tucker for their searching and elegant responses, and to Victorian Studies for arranging this forum. The pieces by Dever and Tucker afford another pleasure, too: the exciting feeling that formalism is really coming back, a…
Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies
Strategic Formalism:Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies Caroline Levine (bio) Since the demise of the New Criticism, literary critics have struggled to articulate links between literary forms and social formations. From Georg Lukács to Pierre Macherey and Fredric Jameson, Marxists have been inclined to understand literary forms as expressions of social and economic realities. To be sure, literary forms do not reflect economic arrangements in …
Propaganda for Democracy: The Curious Case of Love on the Dole
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts
Formal Pasts and Formal Possibilities in Victorian Studies
This essay tells a story about the complex and sometimes fraught relationship between Victorian studies and literary formalism. After the New Critics had thrown Victorian literature into disrepute for its formalist failures, socio‐political approaches to literature reclaimed the Victorians – but often by discarding form. This essay shows how recent criticism has begun to bring formalist approaches to historical and political concerns in exciting …
Reading at the Time
Research Article| March 01 2008 Reading at the Time Caroline Levine Caroline Levine University of Wisconsin–Madison [email protected] Caroline Levine is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is author of Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (Blackwell 2007) and The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (Virginia 2003), winner of the Perkins Prize for the best book in narrative studies.…
Teaching & Learning Guide for: Formal Pasts and Formal Possibilities in Victorian Studies
Author's Introduction Formalism, famously, went out of fashion in the 1970s. Three decades before, the New Critics had inspired an extraordinarily wide audience for formalist reading practices in university classrooms across the US and Britain, where ‘close reading’ became the basic staple of English literature courses. But by 1980 these same practices had become the target of powerful critiques by feminists, Marxists, post‐structuralists, and hi…
Thing, Feeling, Form
Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network
This book 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. The book 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…
Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network
Three Unresolved Debates
It is such an honor to have Forms chosen for a special feature in PMLA , and I am grateful for the time and energy these scholars put into their thoughtful responses. Taken together, these contributions point to three core questions that divide us in the field today: What is politics? How should we understand agency? And what is the value and purpose of literature and literary studies?
Critical Response I Still Polemicizing After All These Years
Model Thinking: Generalization, Political Form, and the Common Good
For decades, many scholars in the humanities have set themselves against generalizations, valuing instead what is local, resistant, exceptional, nuanced, situated, concrete, embodied, and specific. Both close reading and historicizing, two of the major methods in literary studies, emphasize singularity, strangeness, and heterogeneity. This essay argues that the antigeneralizing imperative has also brought with it a moralizing of the large scale, …
Art et/ou Politique
Dans cet entretien, Prof. Caroline Levine (University Wisconsin , Madison) répond à nos questions sur les rapports entre art et politique. Partant des idées les plus intuitives sur la collusion entre ces deux champs, des questions plus précises sont abordées sur la subversion, la propagande, la censure, les limites de l’action politique, ou encore la technique. De multiples collusions et contaminations entre art et politique apparaissent alors, f…
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977)
This article focuses on two of the most enduring terms in Raymond Williams's Marxism and Literature: "dominant, residual, emergent" and "structures of feeling." Williams's theory of history as mixtures and layers of different temporal moments is not only alive and well in the field today; it also offers a way to theorize what it means to be "Undead," that is, to produce thoughts that live after or out of one's time. And yet, Williams's stress on …
Supplemental Material for Historical Change in Midlife Health, Well-Being, and Despair: Cross-Cultural and Socioeconomic Comparisons
In the current study, we included Mexico, which is considered an upper-middle-income and developing nation and the United States, Australia, Germany, and South Korea, which are considered high-income nations. The distinction follows the United Nations (Millennium Development Indicators: World and Regional Groupings, 2003; UN, 2020) that uses the per capita gross national income (GNI) established by the World Bank to classify countries by their le…
In Praise of Happy Endings: Precarity, Sustainability, and the Novel
Open-endedness is one of the most pervasive and enduring values in literary studies. Critics of all stripes have condemned teleology on both aesthetic and political grounds. This essay makes the paradoxical case that in an era of mass precarity, this insistence on openness has reached its limit. It is now blocking the kinds of political action that will be necessary to slowing the pace of climate change and building material conditions for collec…
Literary Studies and Collective Life
Literary studies has repeatedly justified a diciplinary focus on the small scale. Both our most conventional objects—the novel and the lyric poem—and our most conventional methods—close reading, historical analysis, and an attention to surprises and exceptions—lead us away from a focus on large scales of collective life. This essay argues for a different starting point, making a case for a metadisciplinary formalism that can join literary studies…
Philosophy (19 works) · Law (17 works) · Art (16 works) · Political science (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Politics (15 works) · Aesthetics (12 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Law (10 works)