Klarman Hall

Caroline Levine

Caroline Levine has spent her career asking how and why the humanities and the arts matter, especially in democratic societies. She argues for an understanding of forms and structures as essential both to understanding links between art and society and to the challenge of taking meaningful political action. She is the author of four books. The most recent,The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis(Princeton University Press 2023), grows out of the theoretical work ofForms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network(2015, winner of the James Russell Lowell Prize from the MLA, and named one ofFlavorwire’s“10 Must-Read Academic Books of 2015”). Levine has also publishedThe Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt(2003, winner of the Perkins Prize for the best book in narrative studies) andProvoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts(2007). She is currently the nineteenth-century editor for theNorton Anthology of World Literatureand spends much of her free time engaged in climate activism, including the drive to divest the Cornell endowment (successful in 2020). Lately Levine has been writing about literature and precarity, infrastructural justice, the trouble with anti-instrumentality, and the need to focus on institutions as sites of social change. Recent articles appear inThe LA Times,MLQ,NOVEL,Modern Fiction Studies,New Literary History,symploke,InsideHigherEd,andPMLA.

/caroline-levine
Klarman Hall

J. Robert Lennon

J. Robert Lennonis the author of three story collections, Pieces For The Left Hand, See You in Paradise, and Let Me Think, and ten novels, including Hard Girls, Broken River, and Subdivision. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Playboy, Granta, The Paris Review, and elsewhere, and his criticism in The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, The Nation, and The London Review of Books. He is the co-editor of Critical Hits, an anthology of nonfiction writing about video games.

/j-robert-lennon

Welcome to Literatures in English

Embracing new approaches to literary study, traditional strength.
/welcome-literatures-english
Top