Caroline Levine, "The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis" (Princeton UP, 2023)

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Nov 9, 2023

Caroline Levine, an activist humanist, discusses the form and method in the climate crisis. Topics include the potential impact of attention to social forms within aesthetic criticism, the inclusion of a workbook in the book on political action, the impact of climate change on water systems, designing social worlds for collective continuance, building political will and the role of routines, the depiction of healthcare infrastructure in 'The Midwife' TV series, movies as a model for political action, and the effects of divestment and the disconnect between economists and climate scientists.

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INSIGHT

Adorno's Legacy Can Disempower Activism

Anti-instrumentality (Adornian skepticism) dominates criticism, favoring negativity over concrete alternatives.
Levine suggests this can disempower the humanities and prevent engagement with other campus disciplines like engineers and policymakers.

ANECDOTE

Quick Cornell Divestment Win From Coordinated Forms

Levine recounts Cornell divestment work where coordinated efforts across students, faculty, trustees, and administrators led to victory in under a year.
Scientist Robert Warren Howard built inside governance connections that helped shift trustees and win rapid institutional change.

ADVICE

Design Activism As A Coordinated Institutional Project

Treat activist campaigns like coordinated creative projects involving many institutional instruments.
Study institutional forms, accept defeats as information, and combine protests, governance engagement, and committee work to build success.

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W. H. Auden once said, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Auden’s quote has been used for so many purposes, it might be worth remembering what he meant. Auden’s line is importantly from a poem memorializing W.B. Yeats, a politician and a poet. Auden meant that despite Yeats’s poetry, “Ireland [still] has her madness and her weather still.” Yeats’s poetry didn’t stop suffering. But Auden acknowledges that poetry is a “way of happening” that survives and persists. Today’s guest, Caroline Levine, has written a brilliant new book The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton UP, 2023). As I read the book, I began asking myself in the manner of Auden: “Does literary criticism make nothing happen? What kind of something might attention to social forms within aesthetic criticism make happen?”

I am excited to talk to Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities at Cornell University. Previously, she was Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), which won the winner of the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association, as well as The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003) and Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007).

John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies.

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