Levine, George 1931- (George Lewis Levine)

PERSONAL:

Born August 27, 1931, in New York, NY; son of H.J. (a physician) and Dorothy Levine; married Margaret Bloom, August 19, 1956; children: David Michael, Rachel Susan. Education: New York University, B.A., 1952; University of Minnesota, M.A., 1953, Ph.D., 1959. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Jewish.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Atlantic Highlands, NJ. Office—Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University, 8 Bishop Pl., New Brunswick, NJ 08901. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Indiana University, Bloomington, instructor, 1959-62, assistant professor, 1962-65, associate professor of English, 1965-68; Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, professor of English literature, 1968-86, Kenneth Burke Professor of English, 1985-2006, professor emeritus, 2006—. Visiting professor, Stanford University, 1974-75; Helen Cam visiting fellow, Girton College, Cambridge University, 1983; Avalon professor of literature, Northwestern University, 1998; distinguished visiting scholar, New York University, 2007; director, Center for Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, 1998-2006. Military service: U.S. Army, 1953-55; became sergeant.

MEMBER:

Modern Language Association of America.

AWARDS, HONORS:

American Council of Learned Societies grant, 1964; Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, 1971; National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, 1978; Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, 1983; Bellagio fellowship, 1996; Bogliasco Foundation fellowship, 1999, 2004; Mellon Research Fellowship for Retired Scholars, 2007.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Owen Thomas) The Scientist vs. the Humanist, Norton (New York, NY), 1963.

(Editor) The Emergence of Victorian Consciousness, Free Press (New York, NY), 1967.

(Editor, with William A. Madden) The Art of Victorian Prose, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1967.

The Boundaries of Fiction: Carlyle, Macaulay, Newman, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1968.

(Editor, with David Leverenz) Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1976.

(Author of introduction and notes) Charles Dickens, Hard Times, Pan Books (London, England), 1977.

(Editor, with U.C. Knoepflmacher) The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel, University of California Press (Berkley, CA), 1979.

The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1981.

(Editor, with Alan Rauch) One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature, University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 1987.

Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1988.

An Annotated Critical Bibliography of George Eliot, St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1988.

(Coauthor) Speaking for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies (New York, NY), 1989.

(Editor) Constructions of the Self, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 1992.

(Editor) Aesthetics and Ideology, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 1994.

Lifebirds, illustrated by Marge Levine, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 1995.

(Editor) The Politics of Research, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 1997.

(Editor) The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2002.

Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2006.

How to Read the Victorian Novel, Blackwell (Malden, MA), 2008.

Also editor of Realism and Representation, University of Wisconsin Press. Contributor to Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture, University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 1993. Coeditor, Victorian Studies, 1959-68.

SIDELIGHTS:

In The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley George Levine asserts that the realists were writers who consciously resisted the literary conventions they had inherited as novelists. Not satisfied to present "preestablished realities" in fiction, the realists, according to Levine, used language to explore a nonverbal reality that existed "out there," beyond their verbal descriptions. Levine's definition of realism sets it within a time frame that Denis Donoghue, writing in the New York Review of Books, found too restricted; even so, Donoghue called the study "an exceptionally interesting and far-reaching book." James R. Kincaid, a New York Times Book Review contributor, pointed out that realists have been accused of "operating under the preposterous illusion that words could reproduce or mirror a fixed reality," and that Levine's analyses show that the novelists were not so naive. Therefore, Kincaid concluded: "The Realistic Imagination is a masterly and compelling work that will alter significantly the study of the nineteenth-century novel."

Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture is a collection of essays based on papers originally given at a conference held at Rutgers University in 1989, and offer the collected thoughts of a number of literary scholars, historians, and philosophers. Overall, each essayist appears to stay within the confines of his or her own discipline, making for uneven arguments, according to some critics. Christopher Herbert commented in Victorian Studies that "Levine's lucid introduction presents the volume as a response to a crisis in humanities scholarship." Raymond Woller remarked in the Review of Metaphysics: "Analytically inclined philosophers may well find it eye-opening to discover first hand what Levine details in his excellent essay: that the literary theorists proceed by assuming anti-realism to be the received position."

Aesthetics and Ideology, for which Levine served as editor, takes a look at trends in both academia and literary reading. The essays vary in topic, but most contribu- tors to the book agree that the goal is not to provide an overly analytical, highbrow approach to the topics, but to address them head on as they pertain to cultural value. The book is made up of four sections, including "Contingency and Value," "Rewriting the History of the Aesthetic," "Liberatory Aesthetics," and "Form, Disinterest, and Ideology." Essay topics themselves range from the role of gender in the social intellectual hierarchy of the eighteenth century to ideology in African-American literature and romantic ideology in relation to poetic language. Levine himself provides the opening essay by way of introduction to the book. Karen A. Weisman observed in Criticism that Levine "announces the volume's intention by insisting upon what the aesthetic is not." Writing for Victorian Studies, Jonathan Loesberg noted: "Levine has gathered a wide range of voices to address the problem of whether and how to define a special space for the aesthetic. The odd effect of this openness is that the critics who probably least agree with Levine's own aims have much the best of the argument in this collection."

In Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England Levine combines a series of disciplines, including literature, science, and philosophy, in order to address what he considers the ultimate quest in narrative, which is the search for knowledge at any cost, including the death of the individual on the quest. The result of this is, quite literally, dying to know—the pursuit of knowledge beyond the boundaries of life. In a contribution for the Modern Language Review, Nicola Bradbury acknowledged: "This is a formidable enterprise, in both scope and complexity. Few readers could hope to equal the author in reading over such diverse fields. Yet the subject precisely challenges assumptions about knowledge and authority." Levine uses the final novels of three Victorian authors—Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure—as examples of books that include both the quest for information and ultimately the death of the protagonist searching for knowledge. Bradbury concluded that Levine's analysis and effort resulted in "an important and stimulating if difficult work."

Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World, a deeply philosophical work despite the whimsical title, takes a close reading of Charles Darwin's work and denies Max Weber's claim that true, rational scientific theory puts an end to deeper meaning in the world, since the science is in direct opposition to the romance and emotion associated with meaning or philosophical thought. Levine argues that Darwin himself found deeper meaning and a sort of magic in his theories, and that enchantment is perfectly able to dwell in the same world as scientific theories and facts. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly noted that the book includes "a fair warning to readers to be wary of the political extrapolation, because scientific theories themselves have no political content." However, Norman Levitt remarked in Skeptic that "Levine repeatedly swerves away from the abyss lying at the heart of the picture of reality that Darwin—among many other thinkers—forces us to confront," suggesting that ultimately Darwin and other scientists have presented theories and facts that make it difficult to cling to more abstract beliefs, regardless of what Levine thinks.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Criticism, fall, 1995, Karen A. Weisman, review of Aesthetics and Ideology, p. 650.

Modern Language Review, October, 2004, Nicola Bradbury, review of Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England, p. 1035.

New York Review of Books, November 19, 1981, Denis Donoghue, review of The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley, p. 45.

New York Times Book Review, January 24, 1982, James R. Kincaid, review of The Realistic Imagination, p. 10.

Publishers Weekly, September 25, 2006, review of Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World, p. 56.

Review of Metaphysics, June, 1995, Raymond Woller, review of Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture, p. 909.

Skeptic, fall, 2007, Norman Levitt, "Theodicy for Atheists: The Problem of Evil in a Darwinian World," review of Darwin Loves You.

Victorian Studies, winter, 1995, Christopher Herbert, review of Realism and Representation, p. 321; spring, 1996, Jonathan Loesberg, review of Aesthetics and Ideology, p. 441.