Module description
Since the 2008 financial crash, Marxist cultural criticism has experienced a flourishing, and critics working in literary studies and art history have begun to re-examine the relationship between cultural production and capitalist value production, adopting fresh approaches to longstanding questions. Has art become a commodity like any other, or does it retain a degree of autonomy from the market? What can literary works tell us about the logic of capitalism? In order to investigate these questions, this module will introduce students to a broader return to Marx—often termed the ‘new reading of Marx’ or ‘value-form theory’—which is changing the way critics think about art and literature. This turn initially emerged in the 1960s at a time of social upheaval and countercultural resistance, and sought to break with the Stalinist dogmatism of actually existing socialism in order to recover an ‘esoteric Marx’ using texts which had historically been neglected, including the Grundrisse and A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Reinterpreting Marx’s critique of political economy as a social theory, Marxian theorists such as Michael Heinrich, Moishe Postone, Christopher Arthur and Diane Elson present ‘a Marxism stripped of dogmatic certainties and naturalistic conceptions of society’, in Werner Bonefeld’s words.
We will investigate the capitalist form of value as an abstract yet form-determining force, and consider capitalism as a historically contingent set of social relations rather than a natural state of society. We will seek to understand how capital accumulation depends on human labours differentiated along lines of race and gender. Using these foundations, we will explore the relationship between the capitalist value-form and aesthetic form. By evaluating a range of material from various schools of value critique, and their applications by art historians and literary critics such as Dave Beech, Marina Vishmidt, Christopher Nealon and Sianne Ngai, we’ll ask: to what extent can the conditions under which art and literature are produced be properly capitalist? Can aesthetic works give representation to the social forms shaped by value production, or do they merely trace its effects? If the logic of capitalism obscures its immanent structural relationships, this module seeks to unpack those inner connections, in part by asking where and how they ‘appear’ in contemporary art and culture.
No prior knowledge of Marxian theory is required: this module provides an introduction to Marx’s work via the new readings mentioned above, and may be of particular interest to those who wish to study how capitalism mediates race and gender.
Assessment details
Coursework
1 x 4000 word essay
Educational aims & objectives
This module will introduce students to the recent turn in literary studies and art history to the Marxian critique of value, offering a survey of key texts in the field of value-theory in the process. Students will gain familiarity with a range of literary criticism and aesthetic theory, and develop their skills in transporting concepts from ‘scientific’ modes of economic analysis into innovative practices of literary criticism. The module also aims to foster skills in identifying and assessing the possibilities and limits of such methodologies.
Learning outcomes
- Knowledge of the major critical approaches studied in the module (value-form theory; theories of abstraction; aesthetic theory; literary theory)
- A critical understanding of how the critique of value has been formulated and deployed in literary, aesthetic and Marxian theory in recent decades, and in specific political contexts
- Skilful engagement of theoretical and economic terms within literary and aesthetic contexts
- The ability to evaluate, compare and select different theoretical methods
- Production of a 4000-word essay using an appropriate range of materials on a topic of the student's own devising
Teaching pattern
One two hour seminar weekly