Fall 2010 Course Offerings

(also ENGL 4076)
Fall.  4 credits.  
Limited to 15 students.  
J. Clover 
T 12:20 - 2:15

POETICS OF CAPITAL: MARXISM AND FORM, AGAIN
Money is a kind of poetry — Wallace Stevens. 
Everything can be summed up in aesthetics and political economy — Stephane Mallarme

This course focuses both on the apparatus of Marxian literary theory as it develops across the 20th century, and on the archive of 20th century American poetry. To a lesser degree it extends these studies both into other literatures and into the 21st century. Major poetic figures range from canonical modernists such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Willams through mid-century figures including John Ashbery and Amiri Baraka to contemporary authors such as Juliana Spahr and Kevin Davies. The major literary theorists run from Volosinov through the Frankfurt School to Jameson and after.

The fortunes of both Marxian literary theory/analysis and of poetry in the west confronted roughly congruent stories of decline in the 20th century. Paradoxically, this does not indicate that they were indexed to each other; indeed, the object of the former has mostly been the novel, while poetry has served as lead object of study for other discourses, most notably deconstruction.

However, this course pursues the critically articulated and possible relationship between the two. In a sense, it starts at the end, with the suggestion that poetry may indeed be better suited to grasp the contours of an increasingly non-representational and non-narrative economic world, a world of hyperabstraction and dematerialization. In turn, it suggests that such a grasp of political-economic development in the west may go a long in coordinating the changes through which poetry has gone. In short and with variations, the course looks at 20th century American poetry and critiques of political economy dialectically, each offering an aperture into a more nuanced understanding of the other.

Required poetry texts: Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations; William Carlos Williams, Paterson; John Ashbery, The Double Dream of Spring; Juliana Spahr, This Connection of Everyone With Lungs; Kevin Davies, The Golden Age of Paraphernalia; Lisa Robertson, R’s Boat. There will also be a digital reader of poems. 

Required critical texts: Marx, Capital Vol. 1; David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital; Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious & Marxism and Form; Kristen Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. There will also be some articles available via online resources, etc. 

Recommended texts: Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle. Fine and Saad-Filho, Marx’s Capital; Volosinov, Marxism and Philosophy of Language; Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. 

Joshua Clover is an Associate Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California Davis; publications include two books of poetry, as well as a book each on film and music from the perspective of cultural history. Current work focuses on the poetry and poetics of late capitalism, including the essays “Point de capital,” “Stock Footage,” and “Autumn of the System: Poetry and Finance Capital.”

(also COML 6341, ENGL 6341, FREN 6341, VISST 6341)
Fall.  4 credits.  
Limited to 15 students.  
T. Murray
T 2:30 - 4:25

The rise of cinema and mechanized representational technologies has provided an informative backdrop for a century long reflection on aesthetics and the excesses of affect, sentiment, and corporeality in relation to modern/postmodern formulations of subjectivity, community, politics, race, and sexuality. Emphasizing French Psycho-Philosophical approaches to cinematic technologies, the course will rehearse the intellectual backdrop for understanding this Aesthetics of Excess with readings in Freud, Bergson, Artaud, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty in order to frame discussion of later twentieth and twenty-first century reflections on the balance between aesthetics and cinematic and new media technologies. In dialogue with a range of films and digital artworks, we will analyze texts to be chosen from Fanon, Barthes, Simondon, Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrrida, Kristeva, Laplanche, Stiegler, Duguet, Bellour, Nancy, and Rancière.

Timothy Murray is Director of The Society for the Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature and English. His areas of research include new media, film and video, and visual studies, as well as seventeenth-century studies and literary theory, with strong interests in philosophy and psychoanalysis. He is the founding Curator of The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art in the Cornell Library, the Co-Curator of CTHEORY Multimedia, and curated the traveling exhibition, “Contact Zones: The Art of CD-Rom.” He is the author of Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (2008); Zonas de Contacto: el arte en CD-Rom (1999); Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, Art (1997); Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas (1993); Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius In XVIIth-Century England and France (1987). He is editor of Mimesis, Masochism & Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (1997) and, with Alan Smith, Repossessions: Psychoanalysis and the Phantasms of Early-Modern Culture (1997).