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Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network
A radically new way of thinking about form and context in literature, politics, and beyondForms 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 Ranci�re, 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.
192 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews
February 7, 2017
ok i have a more nuanced critique of this book but overall: i liked it. i'm excited to use levine's guiding framework in my own work, especially the concept of "affordances" and the attention she pays to overlapping/conflicting/colliding forms as a place for some potentially politically disruptive interventions. i'm invested in the concept that new formalism isn't necessarily apolitical, and in navigating and balancing the tensions of responsible historicist practice and politically-engaged critical theory.
all that being said, this book felt a little overdone to me, and knowing the background of V21 / victorian studies in general makes her carefully inoffensive navigation of formalist critics feel a little disingenuous. and, as is usual for critical theory texts that claim political efficacy, i wish that she would follow through more on the potential she outlines for actual concrete political action.
all that being said, this book felt a little overdone to me, and knowing the background of V21 / victorian studies in general makes her carefully inoffensive navigation of formalist critics feel a little disingenuous. and, as is usual for critical theory texts that claim political efficacy, i wish that she would follow through more on the potential she outlines for actual concrete political action.
May 10, 2022
Actually quite riveting theory or was I hyper fixating today? Both?
October 6, 2021
This rich and thought-provoking study offers the contours of a method to read how subtle and complex patterns in space, time, relationships and distributions of wealth crosscut each other in all kinds of asymmetric and haphazard ways, giving way to a conception of socio-political change that is porous and resists the ideological deadweight of more monolithic and mechanistic theories. Levine’s project is therefore Foucauldian in spirit. But in the complexity of colliding forms she sees an important potential for empowerment. "Forms will often fail to impose their order when they run up against other forms that disrupt their logic and frustrate their organizing ends, producing aleatory and sometimes contradictory effects.” Therefore deliberate intentions and dominant ideologies, however heavy-handed their claims to power, are bound to undercut their own designs.
For instance, bounded wholes (or containers) offer some of the most obviously totalizing and confining settings. But they can also have other, oblique effects that mitigate the confinement or modulate it into another socio-cultural register. One example discussed by Levine is the following: at the end of the 13th century, Pope Boniface VIII decreed that religious women should be strictly cloistered. Clearly, the clausura restricted women’s movements and disempowered them. But another hierarchy of spaces within the church already existed, lending a special status to sites that were most enclosed and protected. Eventually cloistered women were able to cast themselves as especially holy - indeed as more capable than their male counterparts of gaining access to miraculous experience. So the boundaries of the convent turned out to afford both imprisonment and centrality. The effects didn’t directly cancel each other out, but overlapped obliquely, yielding “an unsettling political effect”.
Levine’s survey of the organizing/disorganizing workings of containers, temporal rhythms, hierarchies and networks relies on a variety of literary and socio-historical cases. In contrast with a dominant mode of literary criticism, texts do not appear here as expressions of given social forms, but as sites where multiple forms cross and collide, inviting the reader to think in a more nuanced way about power. As a result a teeming, rhizomatic world comes into view in which masterplans, bureaucracies, established norms and entrenched patterns prove to be remarkably vulnerable.
This book has given me much pause for thought. My sense is that the reasoning and conceptual framework it offers could be streamlined into a practical, systemic approach to diagnose processes of social and organizational change and to ground a wider behavioral repertoire to deal with their friction points and unwanted consequences.
For instance, bounded wholes (or containers) offer some of the most obviously totalizing and confining settings. But they can also have other, oblique effects that mitigate the confinement or modulate it into another socio-cultural register. One example discussed by Levine is the following: at the end of the 13th century, Pope Boniface VIII decreed that religious women should be strictly cloistered. Clearly, the clausura restricted women’s movements and disempowered them. But another hierarchy of spaces within the church already existed, lending a special status to sites that were most enclosed and protected. Eventually cloistered women were able to cast themselves as especially holy - indeed as more capable than their male counterparts of gaining access to miraculous experience. So the boundaries of the convent turned out to afford both imprisonment and centrality. The effects didn’t directly cancel each other out, but overlapped obliquely, yielding “an unsettling political effect”.
Levine’s survey of the organizing/disorganizing workings of containers, temporal rhythms, hierarchies and networks relies on a variety of literary and socio-historical cases. In contrast with a dominant mode of literary criticism, texts do not appear here as expressions of given social forms, but as sites where multiple forms cross and collide, inviting the reader to think in a more nuanced way about power. As a result a teeming, rhizomatic world comes into view in which masterplans, bureaucracies, established norms and entrenched patterns prove to be remarkably vulnerable.
This book has given me much pause for thought. My sense is that the reasoning and conceptual framework it offers could be streamlined into a practical, systemic approach to diagnose processes of social and organizational change and to ground a wider behavioral repertoire to deal with their friction points and unwanted consequences.
April 17, 2016
This book thinks about the social/political dimensions of forms in clear, accessible prose. I found Levine's analysis of the history of critical theory theorizing form to be particularly useful, and I'm indebted to Levine for giving me some new vocabulary for thinking about my own experiments in formalism as a writer: i.e., I am frequently exploring the "affordances" of a given form in much the way Levine articulates here--for example, my "Traumarama" piece asks what else this form can do, what are its limits, etc; and so on with new explorations in therapeutic scripts.
Maybe it's that I read her essay on the network narrative several years ago, but at the same time that these ideas seem big and important, they also seem already absorbed. I was sort of resistant to the larger claims about the newness of this new formalism; then again, this is not the conversation I'm participating in as someone doing formalist experimentation as opposed to formalist criticism.
Maybe it's that I read her essay on the network narrative several years ago, but at the same time that these ideas seem big and important, they also seem already absorbed. I was sort of resistant to the larger claims about the newness of this new formalism; then again, this is not the conversation I'm participating in as someone doing formalist experimentation as opposed to formalist criticism.
January 9, 2016
The most accessible and understandable graduate school assigned reading material I have encountered yet. Even the chapter focusing on the HBO series "The Wire" was presented in a manner that continued her overall argument succinctly--despite my never having watched the show.
November 18, 2025
some of the best-written contemporary formal analysis i’ve read, but really truly problematic (and wrong) through its essentialism in a number of sections.
January 17, 2018
This is certainly an intriguing book, and I know that I'm late to the party since I'm reading it now. The way that Levine talks about social forms is very compelling and will be very useful for me and for many other critics; it's good that formalism is getting greater recognition. Sometimes, though, her assessments of other critical approaches (such as New Historicism) seemed a bit simplistic. I've considered myself a New Historicist for about 12? years now, and I hadn't bought into the totalizing notion of culture that Levine critiques here. I think the sections on "Wholes" and "Networks" were perhaps the most illuminating here, and I admire the book's concision and clarity. I recommend it to other literary critics who are concerned with theory, literature and politics, or the current state of criticism. I will certainly be thinking of Levine's points and illustrations for the next few months. Also, I've started reading the 2017 issue of _PMLA_ that responds to her work, and this has helped me get a clearer sense of some of the main points of the book as well as some of its limitations.
September 14, 2024
I read this for class. Very hard to grasp at first, but WOW. It changed the way I look at things. Whenever I get drunk I go on tangents about form and affordances and just confuse myself all over again.
Read
March 28, 2022“yeah things can be bad but they can also be good” (x5) once again i did not read the sixth chapter but 5/6 is still good enough for me to give myself credit for it.
February 2, 2019
By far one of the most readable things I've read for grad school, this book takes the idea of forms or categories for organizing thought and demonstrates how they overlap with other forms to create scenarios we couldn't predict. One of the most important thoughts from this book is that no single form dominates all the others--each form has the power to influence and disrupt other forms. Fascinating examples from literature, pop culture, and history illustrate concepts in an engaging way that lends credence to her argument. While I was unfamiliar with some of the pop culture references, I was still able to follow along. Definitely worth a read.
January 24, 2019
A very important exploration into the way forms signify in relation to social and cultural life. It broadens New Formalism (if you want to call it that) in all the right ways and draws attention to the complex ways in which we are organized by larger (or smaller) structures. This book has huge implications all over literary studies and cultural studies.
June 1, 2019
I skipped the last chapter about The Wire bc I figured it would contain spoilers & would like to, someday, watch that show. Other than that, I read the whole book & was extremely interested in what the author had to say about forms.
May 17, 2021
Con todos los peligros del liberalismo formalista; con todas las virtudes de la ANALÍTICA elegantona.
May 5, 2023
Hey. It's been a while. Going to catch up on my books from first semester, then get to spring semester.
One of the highlights of the fall semester was this book, Forms; not to be confused with the literary criticism notion of "formalism" (focusing on ordering principals, such as rhyming, line length, etc., all the close reading stuff you did in school), Levine does something super cool, basically expanding the notion of "forms" to include all repeating/categorization of all shapes and sizes, no matter which domain they're found in. Levine outlines four main subcategories of forms, specifically "Whole," "Rhythm," "Hierarchy," and "Network." Perhaps the most important thing about these "forms" and Levine's overall approach is that she forcefully pushes back against the half-baked and lazy idea that all categorization, all generalizations, all distinctions are unjust. Not only are all three unavoidable, but they're what make up our entire social and political lives. We all interact with each of these forms on a daily basis: we belong to groups ("whole"), we go to work ("rhythm"), we have bosses and obey traffic laws ("hierarchy") and we interact with different social groups ("network").
What these forms highlight more than anything is twofold: they provide "affordances" and they complicate conspiratorial thinking/provide hope. Let's take the latter first. Many postmodern theorists and all political partisans today operate on a strange conspiracy-theory mindset whereby "the baddies" are in charge and it's up to YOU, LOWLY VOTER to dislodge them by... voting? or rioting? But if we look at varying forms in the world, we see them work powerfully at cross purposes; in other words, their goals do not line up, and despite some overlap, there is no grand conspiracy in control. Rather, it's much safer to say there's a ton of companies and groups trying to not go bankrupt and trying not to piss off each other too much. Levine has this to say: "Foucault was right to focus on teh shapes and arrangements that structure everyday experience. But I have come to believe that he was wrong to imagine that these forms converge in massive regimes of coordinated power. The world is much more chaotic and contingent, formally speaking, than Foucault imagined, and therefor much more interesting-- and just a little bit more hopeful as well." The reason why it's hopeful, is that even if you view the world through the depressing lens of "racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.", you quickly see that things are much more complicated than this. Groups may be strongly advocating for one group but leaving out others, and vise versa. Thus, instead of the cliche and lazy threat to "burn it all down" (with nothing but utopian pipe dreams to replace it), this book makes a more conservative argument that we can (and must) use pre-existing forms to achieve our political goals, rather than lying to ourselves that we can somehow escape them.
To return to the term "affordances," which I mentioned a while back, that is a term borrowed from fashion, which means the "potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs;" for example, "Glass affords transparency and brittleness. Steel affords strength, smoothness, hardness, and durability" (6). This is an extremely helpful way to look at ideas, organizations, and more, where you can see more clearly the limitations and opportunities inherent in the form, rather than being hung up on the surface level of "I agree!" or "I disagree!" Additionally, though any given form may have few or even contradictory affordances, all share the affordance of "portability," i.e. they can be moved into new contexts. We all know the example of the factory schedule replete with buzzing bells which was ported into schools.
One of the few dilemmas I've found with the notion of forms is that our knowledge of these forms is limited by the Rumsfeldian Quadlemma of "known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns;" in other words, if we have cliched or limited views of certain forms (such as leftists who are scared of dichotomies or hierarchies), then our ability to work with those forms will be hampered. I guess the only solution is intellectual humility and antipartisanship, but who would want to do that to themselves? lol.
The book's introduction mostly introduces the idea of forms and affordances, and parries attacks from her fellow leftists who are stuck in the rut of "hierarchy = bad >:(," so I'll move to the first chapter, Wholes. This form is almost so basic and wide that it need not be stated, but we've gotten to such a ridiculous place in linguistics and politics where the obvious must be stated. In other words, YOU CAN'T TALK WITHOUT "WHOLES," containers with concrete boundaries. Every word I've typed so far has a meaning (or several) which necessarily excludes all other definitions. If that wasn't the case, you wouldn't comprehend anything I'm typing. Maybe you still don't. But that's on me. Wholeness, drawing distinct boundaries, it's necessary for conceptualizing any idea, concept, word, etc.! (28)
Secondly, we have rhythms, which includes/implies chronology, as well as repetition, iteration, and even time periods, which are also in some important senses also "wholes" insofar as they have discrete boundaries, but I'm much more in favor of them being checkboxes which can be marked off at any time period so long as the quota is met. What this latter point means is that my notion of premodern/modern/postmodern can be found at any time and place; these labels merely denote when that worldview was ascendant. Another cool point Levine makes about Rhythms is that we all inhabit various institutions, and each of those institutions has their own "tempo" (61). Additionally, because we all live in multiple institutions, we are forced to live in multiple time periods at once (60): premod church [spirituality], modern factory [work], postmodern media [fragmentary, remixed]. Levine also relates Rhythm to both poetry (which literally has it) and art (which, with memesis and art history, is also repetitious).
Thirdly we have Hierarchies, and Levine includes the badass etymology of the word: Greek hieros, meaning "sacred," and arche, meaning "rule" (82). The biggest hierarchy that leftists complain about is ironically the smallest hierarchy, the binary. Though there is nothing necessarily valuative about binaries, it's leftist dogma to assume so, so she spends much of the chapter trying to argue for such exceptions, especially using the classic play Antigone. I'm feeling lazy, so here's three cool quotes from the chapter to round it out: (1) "Hierarchies break down not because they are internally contradictory but because their encounters with other hierarchies unsettle them" (2) "it is not clear at any moment which form organizes all the others" (3) "to isolate a single form and to assume its dominance is almost always an act of oversimplification". So basically, conspiracy theorists can eat a boot.
Fourth and finally, we have Networks, which, aside from the obvious (social networks, social media), includes Churches, mail systems, and other complex systems like that. Levine argues that these were comparatively rare in the premodern era because of how complex they tend to be and how much they rely on fast communication (120-1). This chapter is lightest on content, especially because Levine (and others) are uncertain about the extent of Network's impact on things (i.e., is it not just a confluence of the other forms?). The following quote explains what I mean: "Some critics consider wholeness to be a myth that networks helpfully shatter. Others adopt wholeness as a troubling reality that can and should be violated by networked extension" (117).
The final chapter was about some TV called "The Wire" (which I'm informed is not Shen Bapiro's show). I have not viewed the television program, so I did not read the chapter. Good day.
One of the highlights of the fall semester was this book, Forms; not to be confused with the literary criticism notion of "formalism" (focusing on ordering principals, such as rhyming, line length, etc., all the close reading stuff you did in school), Levine does something super cool, basically expanding the notion of "forms" to include all repeating/categorization of all shapes and sizes, no matter which domain they're found in. Levine outlines four main subcategories of forms, specifically "Whole," "Rhythm," "Hierarchy," and "Network." Perhaps the most important thing about these "forms" and Levine's overall approach is that she forcefully pushes back against the half-baked and lazy idea that all categorization, all generalizations, all distinctions are unjust. Not only are all three unavoidable, but they're what make up our entire social and political lives. We all interact with each of these forms on a daily basis: we belong to groups ("whole"), we go to work ("rhythm"), we have bosses and obey traffic laws ("hierarchy") and we interact with different social groups ("network").
What these forms highlight more than anything is twofold: they provide "affordances" and they complicate conspiratorial thinking/provide hope. Let's take the latter first. Many postmodern theorists and all political partisans today operate on a strange conspiracy-theory mindset whereby "the baddies" are in charge and it's up to YOU, LOWLY VOTER to dislodge them by... voting? or rioting? But if we look at varying forms in the world, we see them work powerfully at cross purposes; in other words, their goals do not line up, and despite some overlap, there is no grand conspiracy in control. Rather, it's much safer to say there's a ton of companies and groups trying to not go bankrupt and trying not to piss off each other too much. Levine has this to say: "Foucault was right to focus on teh shapes and arrangements that structure everyday experience. But I have come to believe that he was wrong to imagine that these forms converge in massive regimes of coordinated power. The world is much more chaotic and contingent, formally speaking, than Foucault imagined, and therefor much more interesting-- and just a little bit more hopeful as well." The reason why it's hopeful, is that even if you view the world through the depressing lens of "racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.", you quickly see that things are much more complicated than this. Groups may be strongly advocating for one group but leaving out others, and vise versa. Thus, instead of the cliche and lazy threat to "burn it all down" (with nothing but utopian pipe dreams to replace it), this book makes a more conservative argument that we can (and must) use pre-existing forms to achieve our political goals, rather than lying to ourselves that we can somehow escape them.
To return to the term "affordances," which I mentioned a while back, that is a term borrowed from fashion, which means the "potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs;" for example, "Glass affords transparency and brittleness. Steel affords strength, smoothness, hardness, and durability" (6). This is an extremely helpful way to look at ideas, organizations, and more, where you can see more clearly the limitations and opportunities inherent in the form, rather than being hung up on the surface level of "I agree!" or "I disagree!" Additionally, though any given form may have few or even contradictory affordances, all share the affordance of "portability," i.e. they can be moved into new contexts. We all know the example of the factory schedule replete with buzzing bells which was ported into schools.
One of the few dilemmas I've found with the notion of forms is that our knowledge of these forms is limited by the Rumsfeldian Quadlemma of "known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns;" in other words, if we have cliched or limited views of certain forms (such as leftists who are scared of dichotomies or hierarchies), then our ability to work with those forms will be hampered. I guess the only solution is intellectual humility and antipartisanship, but who would want to do that to themselves? lol.
The book's introduction mostly introduces the idea of forms and affordances, and parries attacks from her fellow leftists who are stuck in the rut of "hierarchy = bad >:(," so I'll move to the first chapter, Wholes. This form is almost so basic and wide that it need not be stated, but we've gotten to such a ridiculous place in linguistics and politics where the obvious must be stated. In other words, YOU CAN'T TALK WITHOUT "WHOLES," containers with concrete boundaries. Every word I've typed so far has a meaning (or several) which necessarily excludes all other definitions. If that wasn't the case, you wouldn't comprehend anything I'm typing. Maybe you still don't. But that's on me. Wholeness, drawing distinct boundaries, it's necessary for conceptualizing any idea, concept, word, etc.! (28)
Secondly, we have rhythms, which includes/implies chronology, as well as repetition, iteration, and even time periods, which are also in some important senses also "wholes" insofar as they have discrete boundaries, but I'm much more in favor of them being checkboxes which can be marked off at any time period so long as the quota is met. What this latter point means is that my notion of premodern/modern/postmodern can be found at any time and place; these labels merely denote when that worldview was ascendant. Another cool point Levine makes about Rhythms is that we all inhabit various institutions, and each of those institutions has their own "tempo" (61). Additionally, because we all live in multiple institutions, we are forced to live in multiple time periods at once (60): premod church [spirituality], modern factory [work], postmodern media [fragmentary, remixed]. Levine also relates Rhythm to both poetry (which literally has it) and art (which, with memesis and art history, is also repetitious).
Thirdly we have Hierarchies, and Levine includes the badass etymology of the word: Greek hieros, meaning "sacred," and arche, meaning "rule" (82). The biggest hierarchy that leftists complain about is ironically the smallest hierarchy, the binary. Though there is nothing necessarily valuative about binaries, it's leftist dogma to assume so, so she spends much of the chapter trying to argue for such exceptions, especially using the classic play Antigone. I'm feeling lazy, so here's three cool quotes from the chapter to round it out: (1) "Hierarchies break down not because they are internally contradictory but because their encounters with other hierarchies unsettle them" (2) "it is not clear at any moment which form organizes all the others" (3) "to isolate a single form and to assume its dominance is almost always an act of oversimplification". So basically, conspiracy theorists can eat a boot.
Fourth and finally, we have Networks, which, aside from the obvious (social networks, social media), includes Churches, mail systems, and other complex systems like that. Levine argues that these were comparatively rare in the premodern era because of how complex they tend to be and how much they rely on fast communication (120-1). This chapter is lightest on content, especially because Levine (and others) are uncertain about the extent of Network's impact on things (i.e., is it not just a confluence of the other forms?). The following quote explains what I mean: "Some critics consider wholeness to be a myth that networks helpfully shatter. Others adopt wholeness as a troubling reality that can and should be violated by networked extension" (117).
The final chapter was about some TV called "The Wire" (which I'm informed is not Shen Bapiro's show). I have not viewed the television program, so I did not read the chapter. Good day.
October 30, 2015
I'm still processing this one. The idea seems too simple to not already be accepted: forms and their various interractions structure social existence. Texts offer the opportunity to disentangle and understand the political power wrapped on in particular forms.
More than anything else, Levine offers an incredibly useful vocabulary to begin these (new?) new formalist projects.
And, it's worth saying, one of the most clearly and delightfully written pieces of academic argumentation I've read in a long time. No posturing via maddeningly complex prose here, just lucid and well-illustrated ideas, which earns Levine a special place in academic heaven (in my humble opinion).
More than anything else, Levine offers an incredibly useful vocabulary to begin these (new?) new formalist projects.
And, it's worth saying, one of the most clearly and delightfully written pieces of academic argumentation I've read in a long time. No posturing via maddeningly complex prose here, just lucid and well-illustrated ideas, which earns Levine a special place in academic heaven (in my humble opinion).
April 7, 2016
This is a really ambitious and interesting book, an unabashedly theoretical work that tries to rethink the relationship between literary form and social context. It does this in an unexpected way, by showing how social contexts are governed by forms, and examining how they can be "read".
Some people will hate this book, probably because they will take it as a programmatic statement or normative argument about what we should all be doing. I don't think it's either. I think it's a collection of almost devastatingly simple observations, carefully thought through (and well researched!), that takes you to some unexpected and fascinating places. I really enjoyed it.
Some people will hate this book, probably because they will take it as a programmatic statement or normative argument about what we should all be doing. I don't think it's either. I think it's a collection of almost devastatingly simple observations, carefully thought through (and well researched!), that takes you to some unexpected and fascinating places. I really enjoyed it.
July 10, 2020
The great strength of this book is its political impetus, but not necessarily its literary analyses. There are certainly several issues with the methodology that Levine proposes and with the conclusions she draws (or does not draw), but altogether, I really enjoyed reading this book and it made me think about the way I think and argue. The style of writing is quite easy for theory and one does not need to be an expert in the field to follow her arguments.
March 20, 2025
Citation:
Levine, Caroline, 1970. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton University Press, Princeton , New Jersey, 2015.
context: a way around the whole formalism/historicism debate
Thesis:
"This book makes a case for expanding our usual definition of form in literary studies to include patterns of sociopolitical experience like those of Lowood School. Broadening our definition of form to include social arrangements has, as we will see, immediate methodological consequences. The traditionally troubling gap between the form of the literary text and its content and context dissolves. Formalist analysis turns out to be as valuable to understanding sociopolitical institutions as it is to reading literature. Forms are at work everywhere"
Notes:
"Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière, I define politics as a matter of distributions and arrangements.4 Political struggles include ongoing contests over the proper places for bodies, goods, and capacities. Do working-class crowds belong in the public square? Do women belong in voting booths? Does earned income belong to individuals? What land belongs to Native Americans? Sorting out what goes where, the work of political power often involves enforcing restrictive containers and boundaries— such as nation-states, bounded subjects, and domestic walls. "
Forms constrain. According to a long tradition of thinkers, form is disturbing because it imposes powerful controls and containments. For some, this means that literary form itself exercises a kind of political power. In 1674, John Milton justified his use of blank verse as a reclaiming of “ancient liberty” against the “troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.”5 Avant-garde poet Richard Aldington made a similar claim in 1915: “We do not insist upon ‘freeverse’ as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as for a principle of liberty.”6 In our own time, critics—especially those in the Marxist tradition—have often read literary forms as attempts to contain social clashes and contradictions.
Forms differ. One of the great achievements of literary formalism has been the development of rich vocabularies and highly refined skills for differentiating among forms. Starting with ancient studies of prosody, theorists of poetic form around the world have debated the most precise terms for distinct patterns of rhyme and meter, and over the past hundred years theorists of narrative have developed a careful language for describing formal differences among stories, including frequency, duration, focalization, description, and suspense.
Various forms overlap and intersect. Surprisingly, perhaps, schools of thought as profoundly different from one another as the New Criticism and intersectional analysis have developed methods for analyzing the operation of several distinct forms operating at once. The New Critics, who introduced the close reading method that dominated English departments in the middle decades of the twentieth century, deliberately traced the intricacies of overlapping literary patterns operating on different scales, as large as genre and as small as syntax. Intersectional analysis, which emerged in the social sciences and cultural studies in the late 1980s, focused our attention on how different social hierarchies overlap, sometimes powerfully reinforcing one another—how for example race and class and gender work together to keep many African-American women in a discouraging cycle of poverty
Forms travel. certain literary forms—epic, free indirect discourse, rhythm, plot—can survive across cultures and time periods, sometimes enduring through vast distances of time and space.10 Something similar is true, though less often acknowledged, for social forms. Michel Foucault draws our attention to the daily timetable, for example, which begins by organizing life in the medieval monastery, but then gets picked up by the modern prison, factory, and school.
secondly, The most important of these were binary oppositions— masculine and feminine, light and dark—which imposed a recognizable order across social and aesthetic experiences, from domestic spaces to tragic dramas. Structuralism later came under fire for assuming that these patterns were natural and therefore inexorable, but one does not have to be a structuralist to agree that binary oppositions are a pervasive and portable form, capable of imposing their arrangements on both social life and literary texts. Some critics have also worried that aesthetic forms can exert political power by imposing their artificial order on political life.
Forms do political work in particular historical contexts. In recent years, scholars interested in reviving an interest in form (sometimes called the “new formalists”) have sought to join formalism to historical approaches by showing how literary forms emerge out of political situations dominated by specific contests or debates. Since the late 1990s, literary critics like Susan Wolfson and Heather Dubrow have argued that literary forms reflect or respond to contemporary political conditions.14 Forms matter, in these accounts, because they shape what it is possible to think, say, and do in a given context.
if you read Jane Eyre as Levine suggests you should, then you might see “narrative and gender as two distinct forms, each striving to impose its own order, both travelling from other places to the text in question, and neither automatically prior or dominant.” The novel, by this interpretive light, mediates a tense competition among forms, which pits their affordances against one another and thereby affords us a way of seeing how they shape human destinies.
It is precisely because The Wire is, as she puts it, “constructed and stylized” that it provides such a powerful “theorization of the social.” To understand the show as a kind of sociology is not to deny its fictionality and artifice, but to see its formal devices as part of what gives it such a compelling vantage on collective experience. Instead of assuming that The Wire is a symptom of the society that produced it, in other words, Levine defines the show as a formed object that affords thinking about social form.
There are forms in politics and in our ways of understanding society, just as there are in literature. Structuralism was able to connect dots to context, interweaving patterns of the aethetic and the social, while new critics could see complex overlap of different ordering principles within single text.
Strategic Formalism - complex, composite vocabulary for thinking of the array of forms that overlap, compete, and interconnect. Not just forms of class, gender, race but also forms of knowledge
The Wire:
All of these forms overlap to show that social reality is best represented not by the focused gaze of sociology, but by the expansive causal network which is shown in the Wire.
Bounded Wholes - Sobotka fights over installing stained glass, tries to get police involved, but that expands to larger national investigation beyond his control.
Rhythm - school year, daily newspaper deadlines, and crime reports all have different time imperatives, which each have their own social tempo effects. major institutions endure over time.
Hierarchy - vertical structures crop up everywhere, but are complex and uneven overlappings of norms and practices with unpredictable consequences.
Network - "The Wire imagines that the process of capturing social experience will not lie in stories that follow a sequence of seperate institutional forms — one narrative about a hospital, another about lawyers, a third about a school— but through attention to the many points where forms collide.
Levine, Caroline, 1970. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton University Press, Princeton , New Jersey, 2015.
context: a way around the whole formalism/historicism debate
Thesis:
"This book makes a case for expanding our usual definition of form in literary studies to include patterns of sociopolitical experience like those of Lowood School. Broadening our definition of form to include social arrangements has, as we will see, immediate methodological consequences. The traditionally troubling gap between the form of the literary text and its content and context dissolves. Formalist analysis turns out to be as valuable to understanding sociopolitical institutions as it is to reading literature. Forms are at work everywhere"
Notes:
"Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière, I define politics as a matter of distributions and arrangements.4 Political struggles include ongoing contests over the proper places for bodies, goods, and capacities. Do working-class crowds belong in the public square? Do women belong in voting booths? Does earned income belong to individuals? What land belongs to Native Americans? Sorting out what goes where, the work of political power often involves enforcing restrictive containers and boundaries— such as nation-states, bounded subjects, and domestic walls. "
Forms constrain. According to a long tradition of thinkers, form is disturbing because it imposes powerful controls and containments. For some, this means that literary form itself exercises a kind of political power. In 1674, John Milton justified his use of blank verse as a reclaiming of “ancient liberty” against the “troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.”5 Avant-garde poet Richard Aldington made a similar claim in 1915: “We do not insist upon ‘freeverse’ as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as for a principle of liberty.”6 In our own time, critics—especially those in the Marxist tradition—have often read literary forms as attempts to contain social clashes and contradictions.
Forms differ. One of the great achievements of literary formalism has been the development of rich vocabularies and highly refined skills for differentiating among forms. Starting with ancient studies of prosody, theorists of poetic form around the world have debated the most precise terms for distinct patterns of rhyme and meter, and over the past hundred years theorists of narrative have developed a careful language for describing formal differences among stories, including frequency, duration, focalization, description, and suspense.
Various forms overlap and intersect. Surprisingly, perhaps, schools of thought as profoundly different from one another as the New Criticism and intersectional analysis have developed methods for analyzing the operation of several distinct forms operating at once. The New Critics, who introduced the close reading method that dominated English departments in the middle decades of the twentieth century, deliberately traced the intricacies of overlapping literary patterns operating on different scales, as large as genre and as small as syntax. Intersectional analysis, which emerged in the social sciences and cultural studies in the late 1980s, focused our attention on how different social hierarchies overlap, sometimes powerfully reinforcing one another—how for example race and class and gender work together to keep many African-American women in a discouraging cycle of poverty
Forms travel. certain literary forms—epic, free indirect discourse, rhythm, plot—can survive across cultures and time periods, sometimes enduring through vast distances of time and space.10 Something similar is true, though less often acknowledged, for social forms. Michel Foucault draws our attention to the daily timetable, for example, which begins by organizing life in the medieval monastery, but then gets picked up by the modern prison, factory, and school.
secondly, The most important of these were binary oppositions— masculine and feminine, light and dark—which imposed a recognizable order across social and aesthetic experiences, from domestic spaces to tragic dramas. Structuralism later came under fire for assuming that these patterns were natural and therefore inexorable, but one does not have to be a structuralist to agree that binary oppositions are a pervasive and portable form, capable of imposing their arrangements on both social life and literary texts. Some critics have also worried that aesthetic forms can exert political power by imposing their artificial order on political life.
Forms do political work in particular historical contexts. In recent years, scholars interested in reviving an interest in form (sometimes called the “new formalists”) have sought to join formalism to historical approaches by showing how literary forms emerge out of political situations dominated by specific contests or debates. Since the late 1990s, literary critics like Susan Wolfson and Heather Dubrow have argued that literary forms reflect or respond to contemporary political conditions.14 Forms matter, in these accounts, because they shape what it is possible to think, say, and do in a given context.
if you read Jane Eyre as Levine suggests you should, then you might see “narrative and gender as two distinct forms, each striving to impose its own order, both travelling from other places to the text in question, and neither automatically prior or dominant.” The novel, by this interpretive light, mediates a tense competition among forms, which pits their affordances against one another and thereby affords us a way of seeing how they shape human destinies.
It is precisely because The Wire is, as she puts it, “constructed and stylized” that it provides such a powerful “theorization of the social.” To understand the show as a kind of sociology is not to deny its fictionality and artifice, but to see its formal devices as part of what gives it such a compelling vantage on collective experience. Instead of assuming that The Wire is a symptom of the society that produced it, in other words, Levine defines the show as a formed object that affords thinking about social form.
There are forms in politics and in our ways of understanding society, just as there are in literature. Structuralism was able to connect dots to context, interweaving patterns of the aethetic and the social, while new critics could see complex overlap of different ordering principles within single text.
Strategic Formalism - complex, composite vocabulary for thinking of the array of forms that overlap, compete, and interconnect. Not just forms of class, gender, race but also forms of knowledge
The Wire:
All of these forms overlap to show that social reality is best represented not by the focused gaze of sociology, but by the expansive causal network which is shown in the Wire.
Bounded Wholes - Sobotka fights over installing stained glass, tries to get police involved, but that expands to larger national investigation beyond his control.
Rhythm - school year, daily newspaper deadlines, and crime reports all have different time imperatives, which each have their own social tempo effects. major institutions endure over time.
Hierarchy - vertical structures crop up everywhere, but are complex and uneven overlappings of norms and practices with unpredictable consequences.
Network - "The Wire imagines that the process of capturing social experience will not lie in stories that follow a sequence of seperate institutional forms — one narrative about a hospital, another about lawyers, a third about a school— but through attention to the many points where forms collide.
December 25, 2018
Modus ponens: as formas que tendemos a analisar em ciências sociais são instáveis, estão em ritmo, o ritmo dessas formas, consoante a sua movimentação, gera a ideia de hierarquia de poder na análise da justaposição notória num determinado sintagma, para além disso, nenhuma forma (ritmo, hierarquia) está fora de uma rede. O livro de Levine não é teoria literária, política, cultural, sociológica ou sistémica, mas tudo isso em simultâneo por reconhecer a instabilidade das formas que levam a essas nomenclaturas disciplinares — e sua interdependência. Há aqui algo da ideia de "modernidade líquida" de Zygmunt Bauman, mas em termos de ataques directos, só são feitos à ideia estática de "capital social" de Pierre Bourdieu.
Para melhor se entender a instabilidade denunciada das formas, pense-se no conceito clássico de sala de seminário: são eleitos os melhores alunos a que um professor passa as suas melhores estratégias críticas para conhecer e lidar com o mundo e a vida. A este grupo exclusivo de pessoas que reiteradamente se encontram para aprender dos seus mestres não é pedido que produzam relatos de conhecimento fechado e hermético unicamente compreensíveis entre pares: o que se produz num seminário tem o intuito de afectar toda uma sociedade. A forma exclusiva do grupo de seminaristas tem um objectivo inclusivo a nível social.
O conceito de historiografia literária é atacado em nome do facto de num período histórico se encontrarem resíduos de épocas anteriores, estabelecerem-se ideias dominantes e gerarem-se ideias emergentes. Passado e futuro tornam a ideia de presente instável e líquida. Ver obras literárias pelo prisma do que é dominante numa sociedade é redutor e cria pontos de cegueira para com os objectos em estudo que podem não se encontrar num horizonte de expectativas óbvio.
O problema na transmissão deste livro é a literatura secundária a que obriga — e que não é má. As noções de 'whole' de Cleanth Brooks e de 'new historicism' de Mary Poovey, a noção de poder do «Surveiller et Punir» de Foucault, a noção de género para Judith Butler, ou uns quantos ensaios de Jacques Derrida podem dificultar uma leitura seguida da obra de Levine (obrigando, para além da consulta das notas do fim do livro, a consulta dos textos referidos), mas o confronto com as obras com que dialoga evidencia a pertinência da presente. O grande problema que Levine diagnostica é o facto de tantos tipos de estudo "trans", "inter" e "pós" dependerem precisamente do modelo binário de que se tentam afastar: uma quantidade exorbitante de estudos declaradamente anti- ou ultra- determinado binómio que não argumentam para além de estabelecer a sua posição declaradamente opositória.
«Forms» de Caroline Levine é o tipo de crítica que faltava (e continua a faltar) à crítica.
Para melhor se entender a instabilidade denunciada das formas, pense-se no conceito clássico de sala de seminário: são eleitos os melhores alunos a que um professor passa as suas melhores estratégias críticas para conhecer e lidar com o mundo e a vida. A este grupo exclusivo de pessoas que reiteradamente se encontram para aprender dos seus mestres não é pedido que produzam relatos de conhecimento fechado e hermético unicamente compreensíveis entre pares: o que se produz num seminário tem o intuito de afectar toda uma sociedade. A forma exclusiva do grupo de seminaristas tem um objectivo inclusivo a nível social.
O conceito de historiografia literária é atacado em nome do facto de num período histórico se encontrarem resíduos de épocas anteriores, estabelecerem-se ideias dominantes e gerarem-se ideias emergentes. Passado e futuro tornam a ideia de presente instável e líquida. Ver obras literárias pelo prisma do que é dominante numa sociedade é redutor e cria pontos de cegueira para com os objectos em estudo que podem não se encontrar num horizonte de expectativas óbvio.
O problema na transmissão deste livro é a literatura secundária a que obriga — e que não é má. As noções de 'whole' de Cleanth Brooks e de 'new historicism' de Mary Poovey, a noção de poder do «Surveiller et Punir» de Foucault, a noção de género para Judith Butler, ou uns quantos ensaios de Jacques Derrida podem dificultar uma leitura seguida da obra de Levine (obrigando, para além da consulta das notas do fim do livro, a consulta dos textos referidos), mas o confronto com as obras com que dialoga evidencia a pertinência da presente. O grande problema que Levine diagnostica é o facto de tantos tipos de estudo "trans", "inter" e "pós" dependerem precisamente do modelo binário de que se tentam afastar: uma quantidade exorbitante de estudos declaradamente anti- ou ultra- determinado binómio que não argumentam para além de estabelecer a sua posição declaradamente opositória.
«Forms» de Caroline Levine é o tipo de crítica que faltava (e continua a faltar) à crítica.
January 7, 2021
The author of this work gives us an idea of what to expect on page 21 of my edition. "Organizing this book are four major forms." Let us ponder that statement. Books are compositions, highly organized collections of statements, remarks, quotes, data, and so forth. The organizing principle here is that there are four basic forms that shape "our" experience. By "our" the author means modern, liberal humanist thinking about human experience in general and literary experience in particular.
The author helps us understand what she is writing about by stating that a form can be thought of as a "bounded whole." This means walls, partitions, separations. A bounded whole excludes while simultaneously including. Take the nuclear family. The exterior world is "outside" such a family. The internal relationships can be defined as "parent and child." Another form of form is rhythm. Here we are dealing with organized "repetitions." The sun comes up and the sun goes down. That most of us are slaves to diurnal/nocturnal rhythms can't be debated. It's a given, a form that is not negotiable. Perhaps some day in the distant future, the social justice warriors will eliminate that form of tyranny.
Hierarchies are the third form. The most basic hierarchy is father and son, mother and daughter. The priority of parents to children is established by stating that had the child never been born, no hierarchy would be needed. The last form entertained herein is the network, a "linkage of people and objects involving trade, terror, and transportation." Terror networks are obvious as is incompetence. Trade is obvious as is graft. Transportation networks are the most obvious because in the New York subway system they have those pretty diagrams of different routes to Coney Island.
The author helps us understand what she is writing about by stating that a form can be thought of as a "bounded whole." This means walls, partitions, separations. A bounded whole excludes while simultaneously including. Take the nuclear family. The exterior world is "outside" such a family. The internal relationships can be defined as "parent and child." Another form of form is rhythm. Here we are dealing with organized "repetitions." The sun comes up and the sun goes down. That most of us are slaves to diurnal/nocturnal rhythms can't be debated. It's a given, a form that is not negotiable. Perhaps some day in the distant future, the social justice warriors will eliminate that form of tyranny.
Hierarchies are the third form. The most basic hierarchy is father and son, mother and daughter. The priority of parents to children is established by stating that had the child never been born, no hierarchy would be needed. The last form entertained herein is the network, a "linkage of people and objects involving trade, terror, and transportation." Terror networks are obvious as is incompetence. Trade is obvious as is graft. Transportation networks are the most obvious because in the New York subway system they have those pretty diagrams of different routes to Coney Island.
November 20, 2022
For me, this was a good survey of current thinking on Formalism. I liked the author's open-ended approach and non-zero sum approach to different schools of criticism. The book has a method that combines different aspects of formalism discussed through the book: affordance of form, wholeness (unity of form), rhythm, hierarchy, and networks, and then an analysis of The Wire using the method. "Affordance" is one of those terms that seems self-evident and yet opens up a way of thinking about formal objects and the context of user/audience that I think is helpful. I read the book in relation to my learning about form after trying to adapt A Pattern Language to a content management system. While this method is for lit criticism or cultural studies, the insight also applies to the formalism necessary to create an information system. I found the book a good source of recommended reading, and also recasts New Criticism and close reading as useful tools that were never really able to escape the reality of context. In the same vein, later schools are unable to escape the text. Levine's continual application of multiple methods as part of her system to be something to aspire to. The downside for a critic or analyst is the overhead of becoming fluent in different systems.
June 12, 2017
This is a very fine piece of literary theory. Levine is very much in the tradition of Mikhail Bakhtin, who bizarrely she doesn't quote. 'Forms' govern all aspects of our life, from politics to literature to shopping or using appliances. But there is no single 'form' which governs the whole. Instead, different patterns and systems overlap everywhere, sometime reinforcing one another and sometimes perplexing one anothers' operation. The book culminates with a chapter on The Wire, a messy text if ever there was one, and Levine demonstrates with some panache how the four 'forms' she considers in the text—whole, rhythm, hierarchy and network—overlap in the vast vibrating world of the show's fictionalised Baltimore. Like many literary theory texts, this one quotes rather too many fancy theorists, and makes develops too few arguments of its own in detail. But Levine's overarching argument is compelling, her examples are striking, and her polemic about the direction of academic literary criticism today could not be more spot-on. An important work for English academics, if not necessarily for anyone else. The typography is stunning too—one of the best contents pages I've ever seen.
Read
November 12, 2020Whole: p. 25 Scapegoat
Rhythm: Bronte Williams residuals (62)
Hierarchy: Antigone
"Women--traditionally bearers of the internal (emotion, the home, the private)--had to suppress inner feelings to become insiders in the public world outside of the home, while masculine insiders traditional bearers of the external (reason, the workplace, the public), could afford to express their inner feelings because they were so firmly on the inside of the outside." (105)
Network: matrix - Dickens
Canny Formalism:
"The few characters who recognize the power an significance of multiple forms--Lester Freamon, Bunny Colvin, and Omar Little--all make strategic decisions which, temporarily at least, permit outcomes that frustrate or elude the conventional distribution of power. Freamon briefly exposes a corrupt elite. Colvin reshapes the city until he is brought down by the mayor. Omar remains comparatively free, but he works the network all the same. They are the show's epistemological and ethical exemplars, and they perform a reading of the social that is nothing other than a canny formalism." (Abbrev. 149-50)
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 6, 2021
Tem seus bons momentos, como o capítulo sobre o The Wire, que faz uma boa análise da série, apesar de premissas sociológicas que não me convencem muito. No geral, esperava um livro com mais análises de obras de arte, especialmente de música. Quase todos os exemplos vêm de instituições ou de organizações políticas/sociais, o que faz com que muitas passagens do livro fiquem em torno do óbvio ou não ofereçam nada que uma boa leitura de Foucault já poderia entregar. Fora as leituras de Antígona, de um poema de Elizabeth Barrett Browning e de The Wire não achei muita coisa de interessante. O prefácio acaba sendo uma promessa que não se consolida no livro e a discussão sobre a colisão de hierarquias, ritmos e networks que formam um todo não-harmonioso e integrado até parece legal, mas poderia ser resumida em um artigo sociológico, ou encontrada com mais precisão e detalhamento em outro lugar.
November 30, 2019
Ratlos. Sehr gut lesbar für ein akademisches Buch. Aber was nützt die literarsoziologische Formanalyse? Um Vergleichbarkeit zwischen literarischen und sozialen Formen herzustellen wird in einem so hohen Maße abstrahiert, dass am Ende nur unspezifische Nullausagen herauskommen. Formen sind z.B. Ganzheiten, Dichotomien, Netzwerke, Rhythmen; Ganzheiten, die als verknüpfte Formen erscheinen, sind das zb. Klöster und eine textuelle Einheit. Wie das zudem politisch aktivistisch gegenüber etwa Rassismusanalysen im Vorteil sein soll, wie die Autorin wiederholt behauptet, ist mir vollkommen schleierhaft. Schade, denn die Idee, durch ein Drittes aus dem Text-Kontext-Problem herauszukommen, ist gut.
November 14, 2018
This book contains fascinating ideas about how forms present information and interact with each other, opening up the field of literary criticism. The way Levine writes is smooth and accessible, she details and contextualizes her ideas and references completely that there is no need to research outside sources because of confusion (only if she's sparked your curiosity!)
February 3, 2020
Not only is this book insightful for understanding multiples types of forms within literature, but one can also apply Levine’s rules of forms to other types of mediums like film, poetry, novels, and even aspects of daily life. Levine’s use of examples at every point helps to clearly grasp her ideas.
It is a brilliant read and very accessible to graduate students.
It is a brilliant read and very accessible to graduate students.
Read
September 20, 2023This was very well written (of course) and an interesting exploration on the topic. It did feel at times a bit more literature review than argument, though. I was hoping for more in that final chapter and was left disappointed. In her arguments, there were some substantial nuggets of gold that I’ll come back to.
October 15, 2018
This is an incredible work of formalist theory, presenting a coherent, dynamic, and fascinating argument for a return to structural analysis. It's worth reading the whole book just to understand the vocabulary Levine will use in her final, brilliant reading of the show The Wire.
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