This course begins with a world changing text by Marx and his collaborator, Engels, and then proceeds to examine the debates that have emerged among theorists and philosophers who have taken up Marxist ideas and run with them. These thinkers have expanded on Marx’s insights about class conflict and history, and have sought to understand how capitalism, racism, and sexism intersect and thus work together to create dominant systems of power, or what Marxists often call hegemony. At the center of the course is the question of how 19th century Marxist ideas about political economy (aka economics), history, and philosophy have been taken up by 20th and 21st century scholars, and how a distinct tradition of interpreting literature, culture, and society from a Marxist perspective, using Marxist tools, has developed over time.
By contrast to other models of literary and cultural criticism which often seek to find transcendent messages and universal meanings in literature, art and other cultural productions, Marxists situate all texts within their historical contexts of production and reception. In so doing, Marxists seek to understand how power dynamics (including those informed by class, race, gender, and sexuality) create meaning, and how the conflicts that result from the imposition of power impact the meaning, message, genre, style, and form of all cultural productions.
Our study of Marxist theory will necessarily involve close, intensive reading of dense and often highly philosophical or abstract texts. Through engagement with these texts, we will seek to understand how a materialist method indebted to Marx and Engels shapes contemporary literary and cultural studies scholarship, and how diverse critical practices (sometimes given labels such as “critical theory,” “feminist theory,” “critical race theory,” "postcolonial studies," or “cultural studies”) sit within an expansive Marxist intellectual tradition. Over the course of the quarter, we will treat several literary fictions and films. We will consider how our understanding of each is shaped by the Marxist frameworks the course introduces, and how each cultural text can be used, in turn, to reveal the possibilities and pitfalls of the Marxist theories and methodologies we have examined.