Marjorie Levinson – Lyric: the Idea of This Invention, 2015. And as a chapter in Thinking Through Poetry: Field Notes on the Romantic Lyric (Oxford University Press, 2018). 330 pp. (Hdbk., $82; ISBN 9780198810315). A review.
About her project, Professor Levinson writes:
Event announcement at Stanford.
“Borrowing frameworks from one discipline for use in another” is how Jonathan Culler describes one of theory’s traditional agendas and it gives a good general account of my procedures in this essay. Although the frameworks I borrow come from several disciplines (e.g., neurophysiology, post-classical physics, evolutionary biology, 19th-c morphology, developmental systems theory), they share a common paradigm (self-organization) and a common process (recursion). That paradigm and that process are the connect with lyric form, one of my core topics. The other topic is method, and there too I take a leaf from the sciences, arguing for an epistemic pluralism and, more radically, an ontic pluralism as well, such that we can allow not just different kinds of explanations for different levels of study, but different kinds of objects emerging at different scales and through different techniques of inquiry and display. The validity of my contribution is therefore tied to its level of analysis, which I characterize, via Culler once again, as “theory of the middle range, or what used to be called poetics” (as distinct from “high theory” on the one hand, and “literary criticism” on the other). By adapting some modeling moves from scientific discourses that target this middle range, I hope to circumvent the tired historicist/formalist standoff, and more important, to generate language for describing deep structure effects in the absence of deep structure causes and origins.