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“The point is not that societies are just like poems, but that literary critics, long practiced at articulating the subtle shaping patterns that both reinforce and destabilize one another in a given textual object, are ideally suited to extend those reading practices to the analysis of cultural life more broadly, understanding cultural entities as sites where many conflicting ways of imposing order jostle one another, overlap, and collide.”
— Caroline Levine - “Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies” (from Victorian Studies)
