The Sociology of Forms

Caroline Levine's Forms is a study of form as much as a sociology of forms—a tracking of the many ways that they relate to one another or are conjoined in creative works. While offering an extended meditation on the formal categories of whole, rhythm, hierarchy, and network as they are manifest in such works, the book organizes this meditation under the separate category of collision. Other terms are substituted for it—overlap, encounter, interaction—but the metaphoric intent remains the same. If the book seeks to sharpen our understanding of four major forms as universal elements of texts and social experience, its other interest is in honing our awareness of the complex ways these forms collide within and through narrative. his interest spurs Levine to look to sociological theory for examples of how to think about this complexity, a tradition that dates back at least to the time when György Lukács was writing under the influence of Georg Simmel, around 1910. Here I will show how her conversation with sociology follows yet another familiar path: the literary critic's borrowing of conclusions or concepts from sociologists while eschewing the methods and theoretical models through which these conclusions or concepts are arrived at and understood. In particular, I consider the consequences of drawing on sociological thinking to make general claims about complex relations while excluding some of the methods by which generalizability is established and problematized in the social sciences. This exclusion marks a fundamental disciplinary divide that sociologically inclined literary critics continue, sometimes out of habit, sometimes out of perceived necessity, to preserve.