Levine, xi: "As I read further about politics and form, I started to notice that literary and cultural studies scholars often assumed that aesthetic forms were tremendously complex, while political forms were comparatively simple. Powerful, even all-encompassing, but simple in themselves. And this, I came to believe, was not altogether wrong. Racism, for example, operates most often as a stark binary, a blunt political instrument rather than a complex formation in itself. But what literary formalists know well is that any simple order gets complicated fast once we start attending to the dense intertwining and overlapping of multiple forms. The best close readers are always attentive to many different forms at different scales operating at once. I began to track the ways that political forms try to contain and control us, while often in fact overlapping and colliding with other forms, and sometimes getting in one another’s way