2011-2012 syllabus
Literary and Cultural Theory, 2011-2012
Note: The readings are included in two reading packs, one for each term. Please remember to purchase two volumes in addition to the reading packs: Discipline and Punish and Civilization and its Discontents.
Term I
Week 1:
Introduction
Week 2:
Immanuel Kant, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ Online: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/kant-whatis.html
Michel Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Catherine Porter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984): 32-50.
Week 3:
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993): 1-56.
Week 4:
Karl Marx, ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret’. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990): 163-77.
Georg Lukács, ‘The Phenomenon of Reification’, Part I of ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin, 1968): 83-110.
Naomi Klein, No Logo (London: Flamingo, 2000): 1-26.
Week 5:
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘Bourgeois and Proletarians’. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Online: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm.
David Harvey, Chs. 15-17 of ‘The Experience of Space and Time’, Pt. III of The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989): 240-307.
Week 6:
Reading Week – NO CLASS
Week 7:
Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’. Selected Writings on Art and Literature, translated with an introduction by P. E. Charvet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992): 390-435, 458-460.
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Man of the Crowd’. Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984): 388-396. Online: http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/p/poe/edgar_allan/p74c/cons5.html
Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’. Selected Writings Vol. 4: 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003): 313-355.
Marshall Berman, ‘Baudelaire: Modernism in the Streets’. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982): 131-71.
Perry Anderson, ‘Modernity and Revolution’. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and London: University of Illinois Press, 1988): 317-38.
Week 8:
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility (Second Version)’. Selected Writings Vol. 3: 1935-1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002): 101-133.
Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’. Selected Writings Vol. 4: 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003): 389-400.
Week 9:
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979): 3-31; 135-69; 170-94; 195-228.
PLEASE NOTE: Due to an unexpected fault the following lecture has recorded without sound. We hope the slides are useful and apologise for the problem.
Week 10:
Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’. New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92.
PLEASE NOTE: Due to ongoing technical difficulties the lecture for this week was not recorded. We apologise for any inconvenience.
Term II
Week 1:
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin, 2002).
PLEASE NOTE: This week's lecture is available as an audio file and is linked below:
Week 2:
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, Part I (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974): 11-105.
Week 3:
Luce Irigaray, ‘The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine’ and ‘Questions’, from This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985): 68-85; 119-69.
Week 4:
Kate Soper, ‘Nature and Sexual Politics’. What is Nature? (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995): 119-48.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’. Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197-222.
Mike Davis, ‘Who Will Build the Ark?’ New Left Review 61 (January-February 2010): 29-46.
Week 5:
Immanuel Wallerstein, 'The Modern World-System in Crisis: Bifurcation, Chaos, and Choices’. World Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004): 76-90.
Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010): 353-83.
Tim Jackson, selections from Prosperity without Growth? The Transition to a Sustainable Economy (Sustainable Development Commission, 2009): 16-36.
Week 6:
Reading Week – NO CLASS
Week 7:
Theodor W. Adorno, selections from Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978).
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.’ Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002): 94-136.
Week 8:
Raymond Williams, ‘Culture is Ordinary’. Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism (London and New York: Verso, 1989): 3-18.
Raymond Williams, ‘The Analysis of Culture’. The Long Revolution (London: The Hogarth Press, 1992): 41-71.
Week 9:
Pierre Bourdieu, selections from Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).
Week 10:
Pascale Casanova, “Principles of a History of World Literature,” from The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. Devoise (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004): 1-44.
Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’. New Left Review 1 (2000): 54-68.