Marjorie Levinson

Reflections on the New Historicism

In this essay, I describe my practice of historicism circa 1986 by setting it into a field of distinctions and affinities gathered from the annals of intellectual history, literary history, critical theory, and critical practice. Under “critical practice,” I set my own developing thought over the past two decades, the new resources on which it draws, and its overall shape as an immanent critique of commitments informing the ideas and methods of my earliest work. I offer this vantage on what was lacking in my historicism in order to bring out a double irony: one, that my critique of my work goes deeper than the many attacks on it, and, two, that in surpassing that practice of historicism, I see it realized and validated.

Critical Response III Response to Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian, “Form and Explanation”

Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian, the authors of “Form and Explanation” (Critical Inquiry 43 [Spring 2017]: 650–69) suggested I might wish to respond to their article because a portion of it takes issue with a statement I made—more precisely, a rhetorical question I asked—in my 2007 PMLA review essay, “What Is New Formalism?” My essay treated items published between 2000 and 2006; “Form and Explanation” focuses on work appearing between 2007 and 2015. The discrepancy in our databases may be instructive in and of itself (see below, number 11). That said, the authors’ arguments are serious and specific, and as such, deserve the respect of a comparable response. I thank Critical Inquiry and the authors of “Form and Explanation” for giving me a chance to reply. Before zeroing in on those specifics, I wish to state unequivocally how much I learned from this essay and how deeply I value its provocation to finer and more self-accounting thought about form (and about form-talk) in literary study. By recruiting analogies from evolutionary biology and arguments from analytic philosophy, the authors effectively show how to use other disciplines to help clarify and advance our own thinking without forfeiting or disparaging our own disciplinary routines. The contrast is with the slavish or simply default recourse that too many of us make to the more