Kornbluh 2015
From Commonplace Book
Kornbluh, Anna. "The Realist Blueprint". The Henry James Review 36:3 (Fall 2015): 199-211. Print.
Notes from UW talk 5.12.17
- 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
