Calling everyone interested in how we approach capitalism and comprehend its changes over time!

American Studies Research Group welcomes you to a hybrid seminar with Leigh Claire La Berge and Thomas Travers.

When: Wednesday, 7^th June – 16.00-18.00 (BST)

Where: Online / Room 1.06, The Oculus, University of Warwick, CV4 7AL

La Berge's talk is titled, “There is ‘No More’ Commodification".

As La Berge describes: “In this talk, I will explore the relationship between perceived increases in the intensity of various capitalist processes and schemes of periodisation that literary and cultural scholars rely on in their critique of capitalism. I will pay particular attention to discussions of abstraction and commodification as they have been employed in critical and literary theory in the past twenty years, and I will question whether such processes really do increase and whether they provide a sure enough conceptual ground to situate the kind of temporal unity that periodisation requires.”

Travers' talk is titled, “Beamed in Ahead of Schedule: The Novel After Value”.

As Travers describes: ”Faced with protracted economic stagnation, expanding surplus populations, and ongoing ecological collapse, Marxist literary scholarship has moved away from theorising the capitalist world-system in terms of its sublime complexity, with critical attention now directed towards the production of non-production. Taking Don DeLillo as a guide through the signal and perhaps terminal crisis of US hegemony, this talk will consider how recent efforts to re-periodise the post-1960s era as being 'after-yet-within' or simply 'after' value might affect uHnderstandings of the novel.”

Leigh Claire La Berge is assistant professor of English at the City University of New York (BMMC). She is the author of Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s (Oxford, 2014), Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art (Duke, 2019), and the forthcoming Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary (Duke, 2023).

Thomas Travers is the author of Peripheralizing DeLillo (Bloomsbury, 2022). His work on the novel, critical theory, and imaginary labour has been published in Textual Practice and A Secret Plot.

To register, please state whether you will attend in-person or online by emailing will.berrington@warwick.ac.uk 

Once registered, a Microsoft Teams invite will be emailed to you closer to the time.

For any questions, please email the same address.

Details here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/events?calendarItem=8a1785d8882e15cc018842d977e12258Link opens in a new window