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Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and The Arts Events, 2019/2020

Unless otherwise stated, CRPLA seminars take place on Tuesdays, 5:30-7:00pm in Room S0.11 (ground floor of Social Studies). All welcome. For further information, please contact Diarmiud Costello: Diarmuid.Costello@warwick.ac.uk

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CRPLA Seminar: Amy De'Ath (KCL), 'Hidden Abodes and Inner Bonds: Literary Study and Marxist-Feminism'

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This talk presents an argument that Marxism can provide much more capacious and flexible tools for feminist analysis than has previously been allowed for, and that the concepts and methods developed in value-theoretical readings of Marx that first emerged in Germany in the 1960s are particularly well suited to reading gendered literary texts. My approach draws in particular on the idea of “real abstraction,” a Marxian concept germane to thinking from the perspective of the whole. Far from helping us to diagnose a case of interpellation by capital’s narratives, value theory and Marxist-feminism can work in the service of a feminist literary criticism attuned to the highly ambivalent and dialectical ways in which capitalist subjects might “identify.” I offer a brief reading of a poem by Kay Gabriel to suggest that feminist poetry gives us ways to think capitalist abstraction not as sublime other, but as the social synthesis of an exchange in toto that gathers, institutes, and deploys difference wherever it goes.

Link to "You Say Wife" by Kay Gabriel:

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