Literary and Cultural Theory, 2015-16
Assessed Essay Questions (2500 words)
2nd paper
Answer ONE of the following questions. Please note that essays are due on Tuesday of
Week 2, Term 3.
1. What has happened to the idea of the public sphere in societies where identities grow more
diverse? How is Michael Warner’s idea of a Queer Public updating Habermas?
2. Do you understand the body, and hence identity, to be in the first instance a socio-cultural
or a natural category? Answer with reference to Cixous, Soper and Foucault.
3. “Today, what is called postmodernity articulates the symptomatology of yet another stage
of abstraction, qualitatively and structurally distinct from the previous one, which I have
drawn on Arrighi to characterize as our own moment of finance capitalism” (Jameson,
“Culture and Finance Capital, p. 252). Write an essay that explores and critically analyses the
relationship between financialization and cultural form. You may want to draw here on
literary examples from texts you have read for other courses.
4. Write an essay that addresses the situation of mass culture today, with reference to at least
one aspect/artefact of new(er) media, by way of assessing the strengths and limitations of
Adorno and Horkheimer’s essay on the “Culture Industry”.
5. Irigaray’s work sometimes posits ‘woman’ as a constructed category, at other times plays
with essentialism and the writing of woman as directly anatomical and natural. What is at
stake here and where do you think she ultimately stands? You may wish to consider the ways
in which her argument is complicated by the more recent categories of gender and
transgender.
6. What is ‘slow violence’, as Rob Nixon talks about it in his book of that title, and why does
he suggest that we need to develop a theory of this ‘different kind of violence.”
7.‘Extractivism is a nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth, one purely of
taking. It is the opposite of stewardship, which involves taking but also taking care that
regeneration and future life continue. Extractivism is the mentality of the mountaintop
remover and the old-growth clear-cutter… These ideas predate industrial-scale extraction of
fossil fuels. And yet the ability to harness the power of coal to power factories and ships is
what, more than any single other factor, enabled these dangerous ideas to conquer the world.
It’s a history worth exploring in more depth, because it goes a long way toward explaining
how the climate crisis challenges not only capitalism but the underlying civilizational
narratives about endless growth and progress within which we are all, in one way or another,
still trapped’ (This Changes Everything, pp. 169-70).
Critically analyse Klein’s account of the relationship between capitalism and climate in This
Changes Everything, paying particular attention to her concept of ‘extractivism’.
8. ‘For the apocalyptician, the spectre of universal catastrophe may look like a good way of
rallying a middle class who may not directly suffer from the impact of fossil-fuelled
globalisation. But for many listeners, to flatten out existing social conflict in this way feels
disempowering. If the threat of global collapse is supposed to spur us all toward concerted
action, why does it seem instead to paralyse the political imagination, spook ordinary people
into putting their rebellious instincts on ice, and deaden discussion among different social
movements about the lessons of their struggles?’ (Larry Lohmann, ‘Fetishisms of
Apocalypse’, p. 2).
Discuss Lohmann’s critique of apocalypse narratives with reference to the presentation of
climate change in any two or more of the theorists we have read this term.
9. “I am outraged by the promise of governments to create more work—as if there was not
already enough necessary work to be done. The problem is not one of magically coaxing
new work out of a hat, but rather of distributing the work we have in a just manner” (Frigga
Haug, 120).
In an essay where you consider writing to/as work, consider what such a redistribution might
mean for the way we think about literature.
10. Latour, like Habermas, Foucault, and Horkheimer and Adorno looks to the eighteenth
century as the source of current social condition. Where does his account of Enlightenment
differ from those that have come before?
11. In what ways might Latour’s questioning of the way we have understood subject object
relations be compatible with recent calls to rethink our relationship to the environment?
12. In “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” E.P Thompson offers a historical
account of a Puritan and Capitalist “desire to consume time purposively.” He also associates
literature with intercepting this desire. Using one or two examples from literature you have
read in other courses, explain how literature might play into this history time use.
13. “Instead of a contemporary world produced by two discrete, interacting, substances—
Society and Nature—we might instead look at the history of modernity as co-produced, all
the way down and through. One substance, Humanity, does not co-produce historical change
with another substance, Nature. Rather, the species-specificity of humans is already coproduced within the web of life.” (Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, p. 7)
Critically analyse Moore’s presentation of history as co-produced within the web of life.
What implications does his theory have for how we understand capitalist modernity?