Hi All! Here’s the Lukács essay I mentioned, “Narrate or Describe?“, a lengthy but provocative argument in favor of the aesthetic superiority of “narration” over “description” (the former he sees as the purview the purview of socially committed realist authors like Balzac or Tolstoy, the latter, as the realm of naturalists like Zola, and by extension, and for the purposes of his schema, with the modernists to follow…) And if you are interested in this line of thinking, I’d strongly recommend checking out Dora Zhang’s wonderful book, Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel, which takes Lukács’s essay as a point of departure. Finally, in a timely coincidence, today is…

From a recent interview with Sally Rooney in The Paris Review I think that’s part of why my books return to the idea of religion, because of my interest in those absences, but also because I want to explore what feels like the transcendent power of beauty to change our lives. That was the motivating question behind Beautiful World, Where Are You—the title sums it up. I have spoken about my ideological commitments—how I look at the contemporary world through a Marxist lens and through the lens of climate change, and how I feel like we’re heading for a catastrophe that is driven by our consumerist lifestyle. It also creates…

Please post your question about one or more of our assigned readings from Marx as a comment below  

The Jameson Reading Group will have its next meeting Sunday February 23rd at 2pm. RSVP and get and PDF of the reading (from Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism) here In other Jameson-related events, Columbia is hosting a screening and memorial reception on Saturday, March 1st, at 5pm; registration and details here A number of upcoming deadlines and opportunities with the Center for the Humanities — including a Summer Public Research Fellowship with a deadline today! Keep an There’s also the Open Knowledge Fellowship competition through the GC Library — details here For anyone with special interests in narrative theory, I wanted to alert you to the Project Narrative…

Please post your questions about our week 3 readings from Hegel’s Lecture on Fine Arts and/or Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads as a comment below  

A few quotations and provocations for further thinking about Kant’s aesthetic theory: In a world in which everything is made to be sold for profit and engineered to appeal to what a consumer is preshaped to desire, how can there not be a philosophically as well as historically meaningful uncertainty at the heart of the aesthetic evaluations through which we process pleasures? — Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick p. 23 Detachment, disinterestedness, indifference—aesthetic theory has so often presented these as the only way to recognize the work of art for what it is, autonomous, that one ends up forgetting that they really mean disinvestment, detachment, indifference, in other words,…

Please post questions about our week 2 reading from Kant’s Critique of Judgment as a “comment” below

Welcome to History of Literary Theory and Criticism II! I look forward to working with you this semester. Please take some time to review this site, and familiarize yourself with the CUNY Academic Commons, if you haven’t used it before. We’ll go over how to use and interact with this WordPress site in class, but if you have questions at any point, reach out by email to let me know.