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for

Marjorie Levinson

F.L. Huetwell Professor

cecily@umich.edu

Office Information:

3076 Tisch Hall

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century British; Science and Literature; Graduate Faculty; Nineteenth Century British; English; Theory; Romanticism American and British; Poetry and Poetics; British

Education/Degree:

Ph.D., Chicago 1978

About

Primary Interests
Critical theory (materialist and formalist ideas and methods; cognitive studies); poetry and poetics (British, early nineteenth century through modernist and postmodernist movements).

Board Member, School for Criticism and Theory, Cornell University
Editorial Board, ELH
Editorial Board, Literature 19 (NIneteenth-Century Online Review)
Editorial Board, NINES

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Articles
“The Book of Thel” by William Blake: A Critical Reading.” ELH 47 (1980), 287-303.

“Romantic Poetry: The State of the Art.” MLQ, 54 (1993), 183-214.

“News from Nowhere: The Discontents of Aijaz Ahmad.” Public Culture, Fall 1994, 97-133.

“Pre- and Post-Dialectical Materialisms: Modeling Praxis Without Subjects and Objects.” Cultural Critique, Fall 1995, 111-129.

“Revisionist Critique: An Account of the Practice.” The Literary Imagination, special issue, ed. Terence Hoagland, Spring 1998.

“Posthumous Critique.” In Near Ruins: Cultural Theory at the End of the Century. Ed. Nicholas Dirks. U of Minnesota P, 1998. 420-473.

“Picturing Pleasure: Some Poems by Elizabeth Bishop.” What’s Left of Theory: New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory. Essays from the English Institute. Ed. Judith Butler, John Guillory. London: Routledge, 2000. 192-235.

“Object Loss and Object Bondage: Economies of Representation in Hardy’s Poetry.” ELH, Summer 2006, 549-580.

“A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza.” Studies in Romanticism 46 (2007), 366-408. Rpt. Suhrkamp, forthcoming.

“What is New Formalism?” PMLA 122 (2007), 557-569; online full version, 45 pp.: sitemaker.umich.edu/pmla_article.

“Of Being Numerous.” Studies in Romanticism, 49 (2010), 633-657.

“Reflections on the New Historicism.” European Romantic Review 23 (2012) 355-362.

“Notes and Queries on Names and Numbers.” Romantic Circles Praxis, April 2013, http://romantic.arhu.umd.edu/praxis/numbers. 16 pp.

"Critical Response III: Response to Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian, 'Form and Explanation,'” Critical Inquiry 44 (Autumn 2017).

Current Courses

ENGLISH 140-005
First-Year Seminar on English Language and Literature

ENGLISH 451-001
Studies in Literature, 1600-1830

About

Primary Interests
Critical theory (materialist and formalist ideas and methods; cognitive studies); poetry and poetics (British, early nineteenth century through modernist and postmodernist movements).

Board Member, School for Criticism and Theory, Cornell University
Editorial Board, ELH
Editorial Board, Literature 19 (NIneteenth-Century Online Review)
Editorial Board, NINES

________________________________________________

Articles
“The Book of Thel” by William Blake: A Critical Reading.” ELH 47 (1980), 287-303.

“Romantic Poetry: The State of the Art.” MLQ, 54 (1993), 183-214.

“News from Nowhere: The Discontents of Aijaz Ahmad.” Public Culture, Fall 1994, 97-133.

“Pre- and Post-Dialectical Materialisms: Modeling Praxis Without Subjects and Objects.” Cultural Critique, Fall 1995, 111-129.

“Revisionist Critique: An Account of the Practice.” The Literary Imagination, special issue, ed. Terence Hoagland, Spring 1998.

“Posthumous Critique.” In Near Ruins: Cultural Theory at the End of the Century. Ed. Nicholas Dirks. U of Minnesota P, 1998. 420-473.

“Picturing Pleasure: Some Poems by Elizabeth Bishop.” What’s Left of Theory: New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory. Essays from the English Institute. Ed. Judith Butler, John Guillory. London: Routledge, 2000. 192-235.

“Object Loss and Object Bondage: Economies of Representation in Hardy’s Poetry.” ELH, Summer 2006, 549-580.

“A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza.” Studies in Romanticism 46 (2007), 366-408. Rpt. Suhrkamp, forthcoming.

“What is New Formalism?” PMLA 122 (2007), 557-569; online full version, 45 pp.: sitemaker.umich.edu/pmla_article.

“Of Being Numerous.” Studies in Romanticism, 49 (2010), 633-657.

“Reflections on the New Historicism.” European Romantic Review 23 (2012) 355-362.

“Notes and Queries on Names and Numbers.” Romantic Circles Praxis, April 2013, http://romantic.arhu.umd.edu/praxis/numbers. 16 pp.

"Critical Response III: Response to Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian, 'Form and Explanation,'” Critical Inquiry 44 (Autumn 2017).

Books

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The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form

Marjorie Levinson

The fragment poem, long regarded as a peculiarly Romantic phenomenon, has never been examined outside the context of thematic and biographical criticism. By submitting the unfinished poems of the English Romantics to both a genetic investigation and a reception study, Marjorie Levinson defines the fragment's formal character at various moments in its historical career. She ...more

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Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays

Marjorie Levinson

This highly original study presents re-readings of four major poems from Wordsworth's great period of creativity, 1798-1805: 'Tintern Abbey', 'Michael', the Intimations Ode, 'Peele Castle'. The author's concern is to reveal within the profound philosophic and psychic themes of these poems a range of formative contradictions - social, economic and political. Professor Levin ...more

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Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style

Marjorie Levinson

This is an iconoclastic view of Keats. Levinson concentrates on the excesses of Keats poetry, the overwritten and cloying sentiment which the majority of modern critics have chosen to ignore or explain away. She takes as her cue for this the uncompromising criticisms levelled against Keats by his contemporaries, Byron, Wordsworth and Hazlitt, all of whom deprecated his indulgence and immaturity. But it is precisely these qualities that make for his originality and whose characteristics the book explores by taking a Derridean approach to the social and personal ambiguities

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Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History

Marjorie Levinson

In this collection of critical essays, four scholars of Romanticism address the problematic concept of "history" within the specific context of Romantic studies. In so doing, the authors interrogate the methods and assumptions of both "new" and "old" historicism, providing alternative ways of reading the literary past. The four essays in this volume emerged in response to a range of circumstances and as episodes within the independent critical actions. These essays were written by men and women from both the British and the American academy, Romanticists of different...

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Thinking Through Poetry: Field Reports on Romantic Lyric

Marjorie Levinson

Thinking through Poetry: Field Reports on Romantic Lyric pursues two goals. The title signals the contribution to debates about reading. Do we think 'through' - 'by means of', 'with'- poems, sympathetically elaborating their surfaces? Is this compatible with a second meaning: 'thinking through' poems to their end-solving a problem, getting to its root, its deep truth? Thir ...more

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