01 MW5 CAC 12189 SCANLON MU-212
This course will combine in-depth analysis of three key texts by Marx, The Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology, and Capital, with a survey of Marxism’s major contributions to literary theory from the 1950’s to the present. This survey will take up most of the course and will itself be split in two. The first part will introduce three of the most important figures in Western Marxism in the twentieth century: Georg Lükacs, Antonio Gramsci, and Louis Althusser. The second and longest part of course will concentrate on more recent thinkers prominent in English speaking world. These include Angela Davis, Sylvia Federici, Stuart Hall, Frederic Jameson, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek. We will also look important non-Marxist interlocutors, including Judith Butler, Fred Moten, Cedric Robinson and Sylvia Winter. The course’s central conceptual concerns will include ideology, historical causality, subjectivity, and reading practices. We will also consider Marxism’s contributions to recent debates concerning postmodernism, Cultural Studies, race, post-colonial studies, and gender and sexuality.
Requirements:
1. Regular attendance (please arrive on time).
2. Four short (1-2pp.) explications.
3. Final longer project in two drafts (6-8pp.).