Background
Levine, George Lewis was born on August 27, 1931 in New York City. Son of Harris Julius and Dorothy Sara (Podolsky) Levine.
(George Levine is one of the world's leading scholars of V...)
George Levine is one of the world's leading scholars of Victorian literature and culture. This collection of his essays develops the key themes of his work: the intersection of nineteenth-century British literature, culture and science and the relation of knowledge and truth to ethics. The essays offer perspectives on George Eliot, Thackeray, the Positivists, and the Scientific Naturalists, and reassess the complex relationship between Ruskin and Darwin. In readings of Lawrence and Coetzee, Levine addresses Victorian and modern efforts to push beyond the limits of realist art by testing its aesthetic and epistemological limits in engagement with the self and the other. Some of Levine's most important contributions to the field are reprinted, in revised and updated form, alongside previously unpublished material. Together, these essays cohere into an exploration both of Victorian literature and culture and of ethical, epistemological, and aesthetic problems fundamental to our own times.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521349494/?tag=2022091-20
(How to Read the Victorian Novel provides a unique introdu...)
How to Read the Victorian Novel provides a unique introduction to the genre. Using examples from the classics, like The Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, The Woman in White, and Middlemarch, it demonstrates just how unfamiliar their familiarity is. The book attempts to break free of the sense that the Victorian novel is somehow old fashioned, moralizing, and formally careless by emphasizing the complexity, difficulty, and rare pleasures of the Victorian writers' strenuous efforts both to entertain and to teach; to create serious "art" and to appeal to wide audiences; to respond both to the demands of publishing and also to their own rich imaginative engagement with a world heading into modernity at full speed. Broad in its scope, the text surveys a wide variety of literary types and explores the cultural and historical developments of the novel form itself. The book also poses a series of "big questions" pertaining to money, capitalism, industry, race, gender, and, at the same time, to formal issues, such as plotting, perspective, and realist representation. In addition, it locates the qualities that give to the great variety of Victorian novels a "family resemblance," the material conditions of their production, their tendency to multiply plots, their obsession with class and money, their problematic handling of gender questions, and their commitment to realist representation. How to Read the Victorian Novel challenges our comfortable expectations of the genre in order to explore intensively a burgeoning and changing literary form which mirrors a burgeoning and changing society.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1405130563/?tag=2022091-20
( How does Carlyle, Macaulay, Newman sustain the values o...)
How does Carlyle, Macaulay, Newman sustain the values of old traditions and at the same time meet the challenge of contemporary Victorian experience is the subject of Professor Levine's book. Like the novelists of the period upon whom they had great influence, these three writers were seeking stability and permanence in an age of tremendous change. They were trying to sustain the values and order of old traditions and at the same time meet the challenge of contemporary Victorian experience. How each one met this challenge is essentially the subject of Professor Levine’s book. The author begins with a close analysis of the style and structure of the writers’ key works, essentially dissimilar in nature, then moves on to an exploration of what they had in common. Originally published in 1968. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0006BU2G0/?tag=2022091-20
( Levine shows how Darwin's ideas affected nineteenth-cen...)
Levine shows how Darwin's ideas affected nineteenth-century novelists—from Dickens and Trollope to Conrad. "Levine stands in our day as the premier critic and commentator on Victorian prose."—Frank M. Turner, Nineteenth-Century Literature. "Magnificently written, with a care and delicacy worthy of its subject."—Nina Auerbach, University of Pennsylvania
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226475743/?tag=2022091-20
( Jesus and Darwin do battle on car bumpers across Americ...)
Jesus and Darwin do battle on car bumpers across America. Medallions of fish symbolizing Jesus are answered by ones of amphibians stamped "Darwin," and stickers proclaiming "Jesus Loves You" are countered by "Darwin Loves You." The bumper sticker debate might be trivial and the pronouncement that "Darwin Loves You" may seem merely ironic, but George Levine insists that the message contains an unintended truth. In fact, he argues, we can read it straight. Darwin, Levine shows, saw a world from which his theory had banished transcendence as still lovable and enchanted, and we can see it like that too--if we look at his writings and life in a new way. Although Darwin could find sublimity even in ants or worms, the word "Darwinian" has largely been taken to signify a disenchanted world driven by chance and heartless competition. Countering the pervasive view that the facts of Darwin's world must lead to a disenchanting vision of it, Levine shows that Darwin's ideas and the language of his books offer an alternative form of enchantment, a world rich with meaning and value, and more wonderful and beautiful than ever before. Without minimizing or sentimentalizing the harsh qualities of life governed by natural selection, and without deifying Darwin, Levine makes a moving case for an enchanted secularism--a commitment to the value of the natural world and the human striving to understand it.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691136394/?tag=2022091-20
( In The Realistic Imagination, George Levine argues that...)
In The Realistic Imagination, George Levine argues that the Victorian realists and the later modernists were in fact doing similar things in their fiction: they were trying to use language to get beyond language. Levine sees the history of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel as a continuing process in which each generation of writers struggled to escape the grip of convention and attempted to create new language to express their particular sense of reality. As these attempts hardened into new conventions, they generated new attempts to break free.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226475514/?tag=2022091-20
( In the tradition of Annie Dillard, this book is a set o...)
In the tradition of Annie Dillard, this book is a set of meditations on nature, in this case specifically on the way birds and birding are entangled with life, with work, family, and friends. While it delicately narrates loving engagement with birds, it is not a field guide. Its author is a birder, not a professional ornithologist. Although the book does in fact offer a surprising amount of detail about birds, it is primarily a consideration of the experience and human significance of seeing birds, rather than of the birds in themselves as objects of systematic study. It attempts to convey something of the extraordinary variety and excitement of birding, the complications and subtleties of bird identification, the implication of birding in the imagination and the world against which it is usually defined. While one doesn’t have to be interested in birds to read it with pleasure, it attempts to seduce the reader into the birding experience through a series of autobiographical memoirs with birds at their center. It is not meant for experts, except as experts might be interested in how a journeyman experiences their more significantly constructed world. In the end the book is about a lot more than birds. It is about “lifebirds,” with all the many meanings that word might seem to imply.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0813524954/?tag=2022091-20
( "Dying to Know is the work of a distinguished scholar, ...)
"Dying to Know is the work of a distinguished scholar, at the peak of his powers, who is intimately familiar with his materials, and whose knowledge of Victorian fiction and scientific thought is remarkable. This elegant and evocative look at the move toward objectivity first pioneered by Descartes sheds new light on some old and still perplexing problems in modern science." Bernard Lightman, York University, Canada In Dying to Know, eminent critic George Levine makes a landmark contribution to the history and theory of scientific knowledge. This long-awaited book explores the paradoxes of our modern ideal of objectivity, in particular its emphasis on the impersonality and disinterestedness of truth. How, asks Levine, did this idea of selfless knowledge come to be established and moralized in the nineteenth century? Levine shows that for nineteenth-century scientists, novelists, poets, and philosophers, access to the truth depended on conditions of such profound self-abnegation that pursuit of it might be taken as tantamount to the pursuit of death. The Victorians, he argues, were dying to know in the sense that they could imagine achieving pure knowledge only in a condition where the body ceases to make its claims: to achieve enlightenment, virtue, and salvation, one must die. Dying to Know is ultimately a study of this moral ideal of epistemology. But it is also something much more: a spirited defense of the difficult pursuit of objectivity, the ethical significance of sacrifice, and the importance of finding a shareable form of knowledge.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226475360/?tag=2022091-20
literature critic English language educator
Levine, George Lewis was born on August 27, 1931 in New York City. Son of Harris Julius and Dorothy Sara (Podolsky) Levine.
Bachelor, New York University, 1952; Master of Arts, University of Minnesota, 1953; Doctor of Philosophy, University of Minnesota, 1958.
Instructor Indiana University, Bloomington, 1959-1962, assistant professor, 1962-1965, associate professor, 1965-1968. Professor English Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1968—2006, chairman department, 1979-1983, Kenneth Burke professor, 1985—2006, professor emeritus, since 2006. Distinguished scholar in residence New York University, since 2007, New York University Gallatin School, since 2010.
Visiting professor University California-Berkeley, 1968, Stanford University, California, 1974-1975. Visiting research fellow Girton College, Cambridge University, England, 1983. Avalon professor literature Northwestern University, 1998.
Director Center Critical Analysis of Contemp. Culture, 1998-2006. With United States Army, 1953-1955.
( In The Realistic Imagination, George Levine argues that...)
( In The Realistic Imagination, George Levine argues that...)
( "Dying to Know is the work of a distinguished scholar, ...)
( How does Carlyle, Macaulay, Newman sustain the values o...)
( In the tradition of Annie Dillard, this book is a set o...)
( Levine shows how Darwin's ideas affected nineteenth-cen...)
(George Levine is one of the world's leading scholars of V...)
(How to Read the Victorian Novel provides a unique introdu...)
( Jesus and Darwin do battle on car bumpers across Americ...)
( . )
Served with United States Army, 1953-1955. Member Modern Language Association, American Association of University Professors.
Married Margaret Bloom, August 19, 1956. Children: David Michael, Rachel Susan.