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Caroline Levine

Professor
Office: 6137
Phone: 262-7835
Email

Degrees and Institutions

 

• PhD, University of London, 1996
• AB, Princeton University, 1992

Interests

 

My research and teaching interests include Victorian literature and culture, formalism, narrative theory, world literature, aesthetics and politics, and public humanities. I am currently working on a book called Strategic Formalism: Shape, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, and I have recently become an editor for The Norton Anthology of World Literature. I write about Victorian novels and poetry, and also about television (The Wire and Mad Men, in particular) and contemporary art. Both my published work and my teaching aim to bridge the gap between historical-political approaches to culture and the more traditional techniques of literary formalism. I am a co-organizer of the Andrew Mellon World Literature/s Research Workshop, founder of the Creative Arts and Design Residential Learning Community, and co-organizer of the North American Victorian Studies Association conference in Madison in 2012.

Selected Courses

 

• Detective Fiction
• Work and Art in the Nineteenth Century
• Victorian Liberalism After 9/11
• Art on Trial: Rebellious Artists, Free Speech, and Democratic Society
• Nineteenth-Century Literature as World Literature
• British and Anglophone Literature, 1750-present
• What Are We Doing Here? Education in Literature and Theory
• Victorian Poetry
• The Brontës
• The Brownings
• Representing Culture in an Age of Networks: The Wire and Others (faculty development seminar co-taught with Lewis Friedland)

Books

 

• Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts. Blackwell, 2007. “Manifestos” series.
• The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt. University of Virginia Press, 2003. Winner of the 2004 Perkins Prize from the Narrative Society.
• Norton Anthology of World Literature. I am the editor responsible for the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the 3rd edition (forthcoming).
• Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. A collection of essays edited with Mario-Ortiz-Robles (forthcoming from Ohio State University Press).
• From Author to Text: Re-reading George Eliot’s Romola. A collection of essays edited with Mark W. Turner (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 1998).
• Translation from the French: Nicole Loraux, The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division between the Sexes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Some Recent Articles and Book Chapters

 

• “Victorian Realism,” for the Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
• “The Shock of the Banal: Mad Men’s Progressive Realism,” in Mad World (Duke University Press: forthcoming).
• “Rhythms, Poetic and Political,” Victorian Poetry (forthcoming, 2011)
• “Thing, Feeling, Form,” review essay for Novel (forthcoming, 2011)
• “Infrastructuralism, or the Tempo of Institutions,” in On Periodization: Selected Essays from the English Institute, ed. Virginia Jackson (ACLS Humanities E-Book, 2010)
• “Narrative Networks: Bleak House and the Affordances of Form,” Novel 42:3 (fall 2009): 517-23.
• “Reading at the Time,” ELN 46 (spring/summer 2008): 135-46.
• “Formal Pasts and Formal Possibilities in Victorian Studies,” Literature Compass (May 2007).
• “Strategic Formalism: Towards a New Method in Cultural Studies,” Victorian Studies 48 (summer 2006): 625-57. Honorable mention for the Donald Gray Prize. 

Works online

 

• “Chinese Wall,” invited blog entry on Mad Men for the University of Illinois’ blog, Kritik (2010)
• “Both Sides Now,” Inside Higher Ed (December 7, 2007)
• “The Art of the Impenetrable,” Times Higher Education Supplement (Nov. 16, 2007): 16.
• “The Criticism of Purpose: review of Amanda Claybaugh’s Novel of Purpose,” on The Valve (2007)
• “Gursky’s Sublime,” Journal of Postmodern Culture 12 (2002)