The sonnet is a form. The prison is also a form. A city’s transit system is another form, and so too is an organized boycott.
Caroline Levine’s new book invites us to consider such propositions. It elaborates an argument she advanced in her Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2017), in which she outlined a formalist approach not only to literature and other arts but also to political and social life. Driven by a set of questions about the role of our discipline—and of individual scholars and students—in environmental activism, The Activist Humanist presses that earlier argument farther to consider how we might mobilize literary formalism to specific political ends.
Levine’s book begins by asking readers to question a number of fundamental tenets that have typically guided what we do as humanities scholars. Our critical affinity for “ever more complexity and possibility” rather than straightforward resolutions—think of our disdain for the...
