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.
