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A review by meganmilks
Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network by Caroline Levine
4.0
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.