Difference between revisions of "Kornbluh 2015"

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(Notes from UW talk 5.12.17)
(Notes from UW talk 5.12.17)
 
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===Kornbluh, Anna. ''The Realist Blueprint''. ''The Henry James Review'' 36:3 (Fall 2015): 199-211. Print.===
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===Kornbluh, Anna. "The Realist Blueprint". ''The Henry James Review'' 36:3 (Fall 2015): 199-211. Print.===
 +
 
 
===Notes from UW talk 5.12.17===
 
===Notes from UW talk 5.12.17===
 +
"We Have Never Been Critical: Toward the Novel as Critique"
 
*Jesse: literature constituting a form in the world, doing things (like architecture or math)
 
*Jesse: literature constituting a form in the world, doing things (like architecture or math)
 
*novel agency: not Latourian but Marxian
 
*novel agency: not Latourian but Marxian
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*reading of Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad
 
*reading of Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad
 
*false dichotomy between critiquing literature and loving literature
 
*false dichotomy between critiquing literature and loving literature
*Marshall's question: what do you mean by utopia?
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*Marshall's question: what do you mean by utopia? (I'm with him. It's this part that doesn't land.)
 
**mediating critique -> utopia?  
 
**mediating critique -> utopia?  
 
**utopian alternatives vs. other pragmatic alternatives?
 
**utopian alternatives vs. other pragmatic alternatives?

Latest revision as of 13:52, 15 May 2017

Kornbluh, Anna. "The Realist Blueprint". The Henry James Review 36:3 (Fall 2015): 199-211. Print.

Notes from UW talk 5.12.17

"We Have Never Been Critical: Toward the Novel as Critique"

  • Jesse: literature constituting a form in the world, doing things (like architecture or math)
  • novel agency: not Latourian but Marxian
  • longue duree humanities crisis: "permanent crisis of legitimacy"
  • Felski - how can humanists be more affirmative
    • AK's critique: it's not just that humanists practice negative critique, it's a crisis of the precarity of our labor
  • literature as critique: a more robust ontology
    • striving for what does not exist
    • Said's sense of secularity
  • Marxist aesthetics for understanding the novel
    • a more crisis-proof system
  • Novel as a mode of knowing: sociality, language
    • literature as more than evidence or data (though I'd argue it is this too)
    • not subtracting the imaginative: immanent critique: thought on the move, dialecticity itself
    • inseparableness of strata in novel representation: not just the univocal "child labor problem," inseparable from first person narration
      • rootedness of thought in material production (but how does this fit? Materialist in the broadest Marxist sense?)
  • Marxism as the sister of the novel
    • they share a utopian impulse in Ernst Bloch's sense - utopia as a space adequate for humans
  • Marxism and form
    • Marx's innovation was in thinking of forms, not just labor and critique of capital
  • a work of art as helping decipher, not just representing
  • "totality is not available as a referent in experience" - Lukacs
    • therefore the novel is a form of abstraction
  • Jameson, Political Unconscious: more important for framework than his readings
    • "formal spatiality" of the novel (ties to "Blueprint")
    • interplay/laminating of formal features to work out problems: Jameson's method of seeing a novel thinking
  • evaluative judgment, not the "gotcha" of ideological complicity
  • reading of Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad
  • false dichotomy between critiquing literature and loving literature
  • Marshall's question: what do you mean by utopia? (I'm with him. It's this part that doesn't land.)
    • mediating critique -> utopia?
    • utopian alternatives vs. other pragmatic alternatives?
    • utopianism the elementary practice of generativity, not focusing on the normativeness of the utopian genre (utopian literature that can't handle real problems)
    • "Felski's book never got past critique"
    • "what is affirmative is making new things out of the shit we're in"
      • the problem isn't Marxism and psychoanalysis to her, but rather Foucauldian historicism