Critical Theory

Critical Theory 200/History 280B

The Idea of Reason

Martin Jay

Seminar: Friday 10 am – 12 pm, 3205 Dwinelle

This course will follow the fortunes of the idea of “reason” in the work of Kant, Hegel and Marx. We will also examine several 20th-century assessments of their legacy, including work by Frankfurt School theorists.

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Critical Theory 205/Comp Lit 225

Modern Poetry and Frankfurt School Aesthetics

Robert Kaufman

Seminar: Tuesday 2-5 pm, 225 Dwinelle

Readings in modern, and above all modern lyric, poetry (much of it from the U.S., but also from Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Near East) in relation to major Frankfurt-School texts on aesthetics, criticism, and social theory that emphasize the significance of literature (as well as the other arts) and especially poetry. Focused concentration on the writings of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, and on their development of Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxian traditions of aesthetics and critical theory. Sustained attention to how and why poetry turns out to be so crucial to the Frankfurters' (and, in particular, to Benjamin's and Adorno's) overall analyses of modernity, mechanical/technical/technological reproduction and reproducibility, and critical agency. Consideration of how Frankfurt-School concerns and legacies might engage the changed sociopolitical circumstances and artistic-aesthetic tendencies—-and the changed poetry—-of the last three decades; analysis in turn of how later-modernist and contemporary poets' work may challenge Frankfurt analyses of and assumptions about poetry, aesthetic experience, and critical agency themselves. Readings of poetry throughout the course will tend to emphasize formal, stylistic, and philosophical-theoretical matters in order to highlight the question of how--and to what degree--artistic technique, in relation to aesthetic form and aesthetic experience, may offer stimulus toward and insight into historical, sociopolitical, and ethical understanding and engagement. Some treatment of Romantic and nineteenth-century poetry, and of 21st-century poetry, but the seminar will focus primarily on twentieth-century, modernist poetry (including modernist poetry written and published during the apparently postmodern period).

A fuller description of Professor Kaufman's Critical Theory 205/Comparative Literature 225 seminar is available at:

http://complit.berkeley.edu/?page_id=8701

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Critical Theory 240/English 250, Sec. 1

Critical and Peripheral Realisms

Colleen Lye

Seminar: 3:30 – 6:30 pm, 180 Barrows

Book List: Bloch, Ernst, ed., Aesthetics and Politics; Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious; Lukacs, Georg, The Historical Novel; Schwarz, Roberto, A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism; Morrison, Toni, Home; Adiga, Aravind, White Tiger; Park, Ed, Personal Days

We will also read essays and book chapter selections from Eric Auerbach, Theodor Adorno, Raymond Williams, Roland Barthes, Edward Said, Franco Moretti, T.J. Clark, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gayatri Spivak, Hal Foster, David Palumbo-Liu, Bruce Robbins, Alex Woloch, Madhu Dubey, Ulka Anjaria, Sanjay Krishnan, Stephen Best, Yoon Sun Lee, Marcial Gonzalez, and others.

To what extent has our tendency to measure aesthetic achievement within the terms set by the historical modernisms of 1890-1920 blocked our perception of twentieth century peripheral literatures? This course will entertain historical diagnoses of this tendency and an accounting of some of its costs. As a result of the institutionalization of postcolonial and ethnic studies in the 1980s under a regime of reading for modernism, the magical realism of Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García-Márquez has been celebrated for its subversive antimimeticism; likewise, ethnic studies have tended to value minority literatures by vesting in a melancholic critique of History’s myths, as exemplified by dominant approaches to Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston. More recently, however, a realist turn in both literature and criticism suggests that we may now be inhabiting a different moment, one that approaches the capitalist world system as partially, potentially describable in its concrete reality rather than one that stylizes, or even heroicizes, the impossibility of mapping it.

We will look at some recent literary trends exemplified by: Morrison’s departure from her signature style; the forgetting of Salman Rushdie in the era of Aravind Adiga’s adaptation of Native Son to contemporary India; and Ed Park’s experimentation with an Asian American novel without Asian American characters. The class will then move to familiarize students with foundational theoretical works in a Marxist tradition of critical realism, including: the aesthetics and politics debates within the Frankfurt School; the British cultural studies tradition represented by Raymond Williams; and the submerged presence of critical realism even within French (semiotic) theory. What are the portable legacies of European Marxism for postcolonial and ethnic projects, given that both attempt to grapple with the literary representation of non-bourgeois European subjects (whether mass proletarian, subaltern, racialized or minoritized)? The last third of the course will examine literary criticism and theory relating to race, historical transition in the postcolony, and combined and uneven development in the world system. For their final papers, students will be asked to select a novel of their choice to research and analyze, using the tools gained from the course. This course should be useful for students wishing to gain a background in Marxist criticism and world-systems theory; in postcolonial and ethnic studies; and in novel theory as it bears upon the political questions central to the former.

Note: Those interested in attending this class should email the instructor a week in advance of the start of the semester for the reading assignment required of the first meeting.