CRITICISM AND MARXISM English 359 Spring 2017 M 2:50-4:10, Downey 100

Transcription

1 CRITICISM AND MARXISM English 359 Spring 2017 M 2:50-4:10, Downey 100 Professor Matthew Garrett 285 Court Street, Office mcgarrett@wesleyan.edu Phone: Office hours: M 4:30-6pm OVERVIEW This course introduces students to the Marxist (or historical-materialist) tradition, with accent on its centrality to interpretative methods in literary studies and related fields in the human sciences. We will study foundations, beginning with Marx and Engels, and our reading will carry us through the range of Marxisms that inform contemporary critical practice. We will focus on historical materialism as a style of dialectical thought, uniquely equipped to grasp both our immediate objects of study (literary texts and other cultural productions) and the social forces through which those objects are determined. In the same dialectical mode, we will reflect often on the relation between our work in the classroom and our contemporary social and historical situation. Students with an interest in literary and social theory will benefit from the course, as will students who know a little bit about Marxism but want to understand the logic of this crucial body of thought. Each year, the course s wide-ranging materials are organized around a different core. The spring 2017 iteration of the course takes Georg Lukács s great essay on reification as its kernel text, seeing in it one dynamic articulation of key Marxist concepts: reification, totality, class, and the dialectic itself. Our readings will be weighed in the field of Lukács s gravity, and we will consider the place of his theory in our historical situation. REQUIREMENTS AND POLICIES Reading. Read and reread. Then read again. Makes notes in the margins, underline and circle words and phrases, bescribble the page: in short, be an active reader. Our texts are challenging, and each week s reading assignments are substantial. Plan your time. Complete the reading before each session, give yourself time to think about the texts before class, and arrive with at least a handful of points and questions for discussion. Bring your reading notes to class. Writing: A) Two essays. If you do not choose the research option, you will write two shorter essays, 5-7pp. and 12-15pp. In the first essay, you will explicate a text by Marx (or Marx and Engels), treating it as a you would a literary text. In your second essay, you will consider aspects of Lukács s theory of reification in relation to the Marxist tradition as we have studied it. B) Weekly short memos (1-2pp.) that respond to some key arguments in the week's reading. These memos give you the opportunity to engage substantially with the reading in advance of our class discussions, and they will help you orient your comments in class. I will collect these at the end of every class session.

2 GARRETT - ENGL 359 SPRING 2017 SYLLABUS 2 texts. C) Four short reading exercises (3pp.) focused on the close reading of one of our Participation. Although at times I will provide lectures, this course is a seminar: we succeed or fail collectively. Arrive at each of our sessions ready to talk and ready to listen with engagement and generosity to your fellow students. If a text excites you, talk about why. If something confuses you (and some things surely will!), ask questions. If you agree with comments someone makes, elaborate on your agreement with the class. If you disagree with someone, explain why. In short, contribute with gusto to our common enterprise in the seminar--which is to engage deeply with a rich and exciting collection of texts and to understand together how they work. Attendance, deadlines. Attendance at every session is required; more than two absences will be grounds for failing the course. Assignment due dates are provided on the syllabus so that you can plan your work for the semester. All due dates are firm: extensions will be granted only in cases of serious illness or personal crisis. Disabilities resources. Wesleyan University is committed to ensuring that all qualified students with disabilities are afforded an equal opportunity to participate in and benefit from its programs and services. To receive accommodations, a student must have a documented disability as defined by Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the ADA Amendments Act of 2008, and provide documentation of the disability. Since accommodations may require early planning and generally are not provided retroactively, please contact Disability Resources as soon as possible. If you believe that you need accommodations for a disability, please contact Dean Patey (lpatey@wesleyan.edu) in Disability Resources located in North College, room 021, or call for an appointment to discuss your needs and the process for requesting accommodations. Honor Code. Please write an abbreviated form of the Honor Code pledge ( No aid, no violation. ) at the top of the first page of all assignments. All work must be done in compliance with the Honor Code. If you need help with proper citations or you have any questions at all on how to avoid plagiarism, please talk with me. Grading: Your final grade breaks down like this: 10%: Participation (including weekly memos) 30%: Reading exercises 60%: Two essays (5-7pp., 20%; 12-15pp., 40%) Text: The Marx-Engels Reader, second edition, edited by Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978). Please purchase through Broad Street Books immediately. All other readings are included in the course reader, which you must order through your electronic portfolio.

3 GARRETT - ENGL 359 SPRING 2017 SYLLABUS 3 SCHEDULE PART ONE: MARX AND MARXISM Week 1 1. JAN. 30 Introduction 2. FEB. 1 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) (Tucker ) Week 2 3. FEB. 6 Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845) (Tucker ) 4. FEB. 8 Karl Marx, The German Ideology, Part I ( ) (Tucker ) Week 3 5. FEB. 13 Karl Marx, from Capital, vol. 1 (1867), prefaces and Part I: Commodities and Money (Tucker ) 6. FEB. 15 Karl Marx, from Capital, vol. 1 (1867), from Part II: The Transformation of Money into Capital and Part III: The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value (Tucker ) **Friday, FEB. 17: First reading exercise due via (mcgarrett@wesleyan.edu) Week 4 7. FEB. 20 Karl Marx, from Capital, vol.1 (1867), from Part IV: Production of Relative Surplus-Value (Tucker ) 8. FEB. 22 Karl Marx, from Capital, vol. 1 (1867), from Part V: The Production of Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value and Part VIII: The So-Called Primitive Accumulation (Tucker ) Karl Marx, from Capital, vol. 3 (Tucker ) Week 5 9. FEB. 27 Karl Marx, from the Grundrisse (Tucker ) 10. MAR. 1 Karl Marx, from the Grundrisse (Tucker ) PART TWO: DIALECTIC AND TOTALITY Week MAR. 6 Georg Lukács, Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, from History and Class Consciousness (1923) (83-110)

4 GARRETT - ENGL 359 SPRING 2017 SYLLABUS MAR. 8 Georg Lukács, Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, from History and Class Consciousness (1923) ( ) **First essay due in class.** MARCH 13 - MARCH 22: SPRING BREAK, NO CLASS. Week MAR. 27 Georg Lukács, Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, from History and Class Consciousness (1923) ( ) 14. MAR. 29 Georg Lukács, from A Defence of History and Class Consciousness ( ) Fredric Jameson, from The Case for Georg Lukács (1970), from Marxism and Form Timothy Bewes, from Reification; or, The Anxiety of Late Capitalism (2002) Recommended: Fredric Jameson, History and Class Consciousness as an Unfinished Project, in Valences of the Dialectic (2009); Erik Olin Wright, The Parable of the Shmoo, in Class Counts (2000) **Friday, MAR. 31: Second reading exercise due via (mcgarrett@wesleyan.edu) INTERLUDE ON THE MODE OF PRODUCTION Week APR. 3 Maurice Dobb, from Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946) Rosa Luxemburg, from The Accumulation of Capital (1913) Kojin Karatani, from The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange (2010) 16. APR. 5 Cedric Robinson, introduction, Racial Capitalism, and Richard Wright and the Critique of Class Theory, from Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983) Silvia Federici, The Reproduction of Labor Power in the Global Economy and the Unfinished Feminist Revolution (2008), in Revolution at Point Zero (2012) Recommended: Kent Puckett, Karl Marx: First as Tragedy, from Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction (2016) PART THREE: DIALECTICS OF CULTURE Week 9 LUKACSIAN CRITICISM: TWO VIBRANT EXAMPLES 17. APR. 10 Kevin Floyd, from The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism (2009) 18. APR. 12 Marcial González, from Chicano Novels and the Politics of Form: Race, Class, and Reification (2008)

5 GARRETT - ENGL 359 SPRING 2017 SYLLABUS 5 Week 10 CULTURES OF TWO CONTENDING CLASSES 19. APR. 17 Roland Barthes, Myth Today, from Mythologies (1957) 20. APR. 19 Leon Trotsky, Proletarian Culture and Proletarian Art, in Literature and Revolution (1923) **Friday, APR. 21: Third reading exercise due via (mcgarrett@wesleyan.edu) Week 11 BOURGEOIS CULTURE AND ITS COLLAPSE 21. APR. 24 Franco Moretti, from The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (2013) 22. APR. 26 T. J. Clark, introduction and Mural, from Picasso and Truth (2013) Week 12 POST-BOURGEOIS CULTURE AND OUR TIME 23. MAY 1 Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick (2017) 24. MAY 3 Guy Debord, The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy (1965) Kathi Weeks, Marxism, Productivism, and the Refusal of Work, from The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries (2011) **Friday, May 5: Fourth reading exercise due via (mcgarrett@wesleyan.edu) Week 13 DIALECTICAL PAUSE 25. MAY 8 Andrew Cole, The Untimely Dialectic and The Eucharist and the Commodity, from The Birth of Theory (2014) 26. MAY 10 Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History (1940) Michael Löwy, from Fire Alarm (2001) **Tuesday, May 16: Second essay due via (mcgarrett@wesleyan.ed) by 5pm.