Literature and Society: Literary Form, Social Process: Marxist Theory and Criticism

Literary form, social process--how, exactly, do we read and move from one to the other? What forms of knowledge and scales of textual analysis does a reflexive reading of the literary and the social enable? Through a focused survey of Marxist critical theory, this course engages students in the problem of "mediation"--understood expansively as the dialectic between literature and reality, form and history, and aesthetics and politics. We read canonical as well as recent historical materialist approaches to race, genre, empire, and other world systems to develop interdisciplinary tools for writing about economic mediations of culture.