ENGLISH 569 / WINTER 2015
LITERARY THEORY: MARXIST LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY
Thursdays, 10:00 am to 1:00 pm / HC 3-86
Imre Szeman
imre@ualberta.ca
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Some of the most significant contributions to study of literature and culture in the
twentieth- and twenty-first centuries have been made by theorists who, in one way or
another, have seen their work as part of the political project of Marxism. Though Marx
himself had surprisingly little to say about literature and the other arts and their place in
dialectical materialism, his characterization of the relation of a particular society's
superstructure to its economic, material base (to take just one example) offered a
beginning point for an account of cultural production and a mode of cultural
interpretation that has consistently emphasized the fact that cultural objects and practices
are ("in the last instance") social and historical through and through. If one strand of a
Marxist approach to culture resulted in the aesthetic dead-end of the official doctrines of
socialist realism, another strand (most commonly identified as "Western Marxism") has
produced increasingly sophisticated theoretical accounts of the relationship of literature
and the arts to the social and political that have had an incalculable impact on the
formation and development of almost all other critico-theoretical discourses. Indeed,
Marxist and Marxist-influence forms of literary and cultural theory have proved to be as
relevant as ever in helping us to make sense of the forces and dynamics shaping cultural
production and reception in the era of neoliberal globalization.
This class will be organized into three sections. The first will offer students an
introduction to key terms and debates animating Marxist literary and cultural theory,
through encounters with Marx’s writing, thinkers working in the interwar period (Brecht,
Gramsci, Lukács) and with the work of members of the Frankfurt School (Adorno,
Benjamin, Marcuse). The central section of the course will trace the career of the thinker
who has come to be most closely affiliated with Marxist literary and cultural theory:
Fredric Jameson. In the brief time available to us, the course will give students a sense of
the themes and issues on which Jameson has focused during distinct phases of his career.
In the third and final part of the course, we will examine some recent examples of
Marxist literary and cultural theory (with specific attention to Marxist feminisms) and
will also consider a number of discourses that have posed explicit or implitic challenges
to the project of Marxism, including Michel Foucault’s work on power, Jacques
Rancière’s work on aesthetics, Alain Badiou’s re-configuration of ‘communism’, the
claims of (so-called) new materialisms, and more.
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REQUIRED TEXTS
Assigned readings will be made available to students via PDFs in a Dropbox folder.
Students may choose to purchase books relevant to this class via amazon.ca or other
booksellers.
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COURSE SCHEDULE
1. January 8
Introduction to Course: From Western Marxism to Post-Marxism
• Perry Anderson, “The Advent of Western Marxism” (24-49)
• Andrew Pendakis and Imre Szeman, “Marxisms Lost and Found”
• Optional: Perry Anderson, “Contrasts and Conclusions” (95-108);
“Afterword” (109-126) in Considerations on Western Marxism
2. January 15
Marx: Key Essays and Ideas
• Karl Marx, “The German Ideology”
• Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” (66-93)
• Karl Marx, Capital (Vol. 1) (294-343, 417-434)
• Karx Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party”
3. January 22
Lukács, Brecht, Adorno, Benjamin: Debates in Aesthetics and Politics
• Georg Lukács, “Realism in the Balance”
• Bertolt Brecht, “Against Georg Lukács”
• Theodor Adorno, “Letters to Walter Benjamin”
• Walter Benjamin, “Reply”
• Theodor Adorno, “Commitment”
• Optional: Fredric Jameson, “Reflections in Conclusion”
• Optional: Imre Szeman, “Marxist Literary Theory, Then and Now”
4. January 29
Frankfurt School and Post-War European Marxism
• Herbert Marcuse, “The Affirmative Character of Culture”
• Max Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment
as Mass Deception”
• Adorno, excerpts from Minima Moralia
• Antonio Gramsci, “Hegemony”
• Optional: Jacques Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator”
5. February 5
Walter Benjamin
• Benjamin, “The Destructive Character”
• Benjamin, “The Author as Producer”
• Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological
Reproducibility”
• Optional: Fredric Jameson, “Version of a Marxist Hermeneutic: I.
Walter Benjamin; or, Nostalgia”
6. February 12
Althusser and French Marxism
• Louis Althusser, “On Ideology” and “Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses” from On the Reproduction of Capitalism
• Étienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, “On Literature as an Ideological
Form”
• Michel Foucault, “Method” and “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx”
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7. February 19
Reading Week
8. February 26
The Political Unconscious
• Fredric Jameson, “On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially
Symbolic Act” and “Conclusion: The Dialectic of Utopia and
Ideology” from The Political Unconscious
9. March 5
Jameson on Criticism
• Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture”
• Jameson, “Progress versus Utopia”
• Jameson, “Of Islands and Trenches”
• Jameson, “Metacommentary”
10. March 12
Postmodernism and After
• Jameson, “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”
• Jameson, “The Antinomies of Postmodernity”
• Jameson, “Culture and Finance Capital”
11. March 19
Contemporary Marxism/Communism
• Slavoj Žižek, excerpts from Welcome to the Desert of the Real
• Slavoj Žižek , “The Spectre of Ideology”
• Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Biopolitical Production”
• Alain Badiou, “The Communist Hypothesis”
• Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, “The New Way of the World, Part
I and II”
12. March 26
Marxism and Feminism
Due: Conference abstracts
• Marxist-Feminist Collective, “Women’s Writing”
• Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political
Economy’ of Sex”
• Maya Gonzalez and Jeanne Neton, “The Logic of Gender: On the
Separation of Spheres and the Process of Abjection”
• Roswitha Scholz, “Patriarchy and Commodity Society: Gender
without the Body”
• Silvia Federici, “Women, Land Struggles, and Globalization”
• Optional: Silvia Federici, The Accumulation of Labor and the
Degradation of Women: Constructing "Difference" in the
"Transition to Capitalism" (from Caliban and the Witch)
13. April 2
Conference presentations
14. April 9
Wrap-up discussion – Whither Marxism?
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EVALUATION
• Seminars
• Conference Abstract and Title
• Conference Presentations
• Final Paper
30%
10%
20%
40%
TOTAL
100%
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COURSE REQUIREMENTS
a. Presentations and Summaries (3 x 10%)
One of the functions of this class will be to give us an overview of the ideas, theories and
concepts in Marxist literary and cultural theory. So that we might each come away with
more than just discussions and exchanges in the classroom, each student will produce a
short summary of individual readings; taken together, these summaries will provide us
with a great resource on which we can draw in the future.
The written summaries will include:
(a)
a quotation from the reading that ably summarizes/ identifies the dominant
issues/questions/themes of the week’s lecture;
(b)
a 500 word (maximum) summary of the reading; and
(c)
a brief set of questions (2-3) that arise out of the readings and which are
important to discuss in the class.
These written summaries must be circulated to me and your colleagues via email no later
than the day before our meeting (i.e., Wednesday morning).
In addition to these summaries, students will be expected to present 15 to 20 minute
seminar presentations on their readings. Your task will not only be to offer a reading/
interpretation/overview of the essay(s), but to
(a) offer context, framing the piece within the work of the writer, the themes of the
course, and the broader intellectual movements within which it operates;
(b) explain especially difficult concepts in the written material;
(c) describe the core problem or issue that the piece seeks to address (e.g., the
conceptual blockages it hopes to move past, the new paradigm it seeks to create,
etc.); and
(d) explore what avenues of interpretation/investigation the piece opens up (e.g.,
how does it change our approach to the study of a cultural object or practice?)
The aim of summaries and presentations is for us to learn more together than we could
learn alone by sharing our labour. The individual summaries will be collected into a
single document that will be made available to each and every student at the end of the
course.
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• Responds to other students' ideas by asking questions or building on their points.
b. Conference Paper Presentation (30%)
• Conference Abstract and Title
• Conference Presentation (paper and presentation)
10%
20%
Students will be expected to develop an original, conference-length paper (10 pages max;
12-15 min presentation). This paper will be presented during an in-class conference that
will take place on April 2nd. Each student will get no more than 15 minutes to make their
presentation (they will be timed). As the grade for this element will be based primarily on
their presentation, students should consider the manner in which they plan to present their
work (e.g., will you simply read the paper? work off point form notes? etc.)
In advance of the presentation, students will be asked to submit a title and a 250 word
abstract of their paper. This will be due on March 26th.
The purpose of this exercise is to help build skills and competencies required for
successful academic conference presentations, and to give students feedback on their
work in advance of submission of their final papers.
c. Final Paper (20-25 pages; 40%)
Your final paper may be on any subject as long as it is related to the course material in
some way. You may want to focus directly on a particular concept or theory, exploring
the ways in which it has developed and what its productivity is today. Or you could make
use of the ideas and criticisms that we have engaged in to guide a critical analysis of an
image, an object, a form of technology, a social movement, an institution, an historical
development, a text, a political situation, etc. All references should be cited in proper
MLA style. Remember to keep copies of all your work in case anything goes astray.
Essays are due no later than April 16, 2014 by 4:30 pm and should be submitted in .doc
or .docx format to imre@ualberta.ca. You should feel free to bounce ideas off of me at
any point during the term.
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Policy about course outlines can be found in Section 23.4(2) of the University Calendar.
The University of Alberta is committed to the highest standards of academic integrity and
honesty. Students are expected to be familiar with these standards regarding academic
honesty and to uphold the policies of the University in this respect. Students are
particularly urged to familiarize themselves with the provisions of the Code of Student
Behaviour (online at www.uofaweb.ualberta.ca/secretariat/ studentappeals.cfm) and
avoid any behaviour which could potentially result in suspicions of cheating, plagiarism,
misrepresentation of facts and/or participation in an offence. Academic dishonesty is a
serious offence and can result in suspension or expulsion from the University.
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