Literary Studies and Collective Life

Literary studies has repeatedly justified a diciplinary focus on the small scale. Both our most conventional objects—the novel and the lyric poem—and our most conventional methods—close reading, historical analysis, and an attention to surprises and exceptions—lead us away from a focus on large scales of collective life. This essay argues for a different starting point, making a case for a metadisciplinary formalism that can join literary studies and many other fields in the work of responding to global poverty and climate change. Reading Henry Mayhew and Rodrigo Nunes, Levine makes a case for the hinge as a crucial aesthetic and political form.