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CLT4250/5250

Marxist critical theory

Proposed to be offered next in 1998

Andrew Milner

8 or 12 points
* 2 hours per week
* Clayton

Objectives Upon completion of this subject students should be able to: demonstrate substantial familiarity with recent debates in cultural theory; articulate the analytical skills, theoretical vocabularies and conceptual apparatuses studied in the subject; demonstrate a sense of their own personal and cultural reflexivity; write clear, grammatically and syntactically appropriate, independent essays on the topics chosen for assessment.

Synopsis `Western Marxism' is the term coined by Merleau-Ponty to describe that tradition of `critical' Marxism which developed in Western Europe and later in the United States by way of a more or less deliberate reaction against official communist Marxism. Literary and cultural theory represents one of the more significant dimensions of Western Marxist thought in the period since the First World War. As Perry Anderson observes: `Western Marxism...came to concentrate overwhelmingly on study of superstructures...It was culture that held the central focus of its attention'. The subject will examine the two main waves of Western Marxist theorising: that which developed in the aftermath of the First World War and under the impress of the social crises of the interwar period; and that which developed as a critique of advanced capitalism from the 1960s onwards. They will each be examined for their respective accounts of the relationships between art, culture and society.

Assessment (8 points) Two seminar papers
* Long essay (4000 words)

Assessment (12 points) Two seminar papers
* Long essay (6000 words)

Preliminary reading

Anderson P Considerations on Western Marxism New Left Books, 1976

Bennett T Formalism and Marxism Methuen, 1979

Eagleton T Marxism and literary criticism Methuen, 1976

Nelson C and Grossberg L (eds) Marxism and the interpretation of culture Macmillan, 1988

Recommended texts

Adorno T and Horkheimer M Dialectic of enlightenment New Left Books, 1979

Althusser L Lenin and philosophy and other essays New Left Books, 1971

Bakhtin M The dialogical imagination U Texas P, 1981

Benjamin W Illuminations Fontana, 1973

Berman M All that is solid melts into air: The experience of modernity New Left Books, 1982

Bloch E and others Aesthetics and politics New Left Books, 1977

de Beauvoir S The second sex Jonathan Cape, 1968

Eagleton T Walter Benjamin New Left Books, 1981

Goldmann L Towards a sociology of the novel Tavistock, 1975

Gramsci A Selections from the prison notebooks Lawrence and Wishart, 1971

Habermas J The philosophical discourse of modernity Polity Press, 1988

Jameson F The political unconscious Methuen, 1981

Lukács G History and class consciousness Merlin Press, 1971

Marx K and Engels F The German ideology Part I, Lawrence and Wishart, 1970

Sartre J-P Critique of dialectical reason vol. I, New Left Books, 1976

Williams R Marxism and literature OUP, 1977


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