ENGL 236: |
Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory
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Materiality, Materialism, and Culture |
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| Fall 2006 |
| Instructor: Maurizia Boscagli |
| Meets on: T 11:00 AM - 1:30 PM SH 2617 |
| Prerequisites: Graduate standing |
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Content of the course will vary from quarter to quarter and these courses may be repeated for credit with consent of the chair of the departmental graduate committee.
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| This seminar studies how modern and contemporary discourses or materiality have shaped cultural studies and cultural materialism. In Western rationalism and in the philosophy of idealism, materiality (and what occupies its place: the object and objects, the body, nature, technology), stands as the terrain upon whose domination and exclusion the self, the spirit, and reason are founded. As such, materiality has been confined to the passivity of an instrumental role, without agency. Starting with Marx's concept of praxis, we will examine materialist theories that reject and revise this particular understanding of materiality, and the relationship of subject and object - including Husserl, Heidegger, Lukacs, Benjamin, Adorno, and Gramsci. With the last three thinkers we will move into the discourse of cultural studies, to show how the theories of materiality we encountered in the first part of the course crucially intervene in the analysis of culture from the 1950s to today. We will concentrate on issues of reiification, commodity fetishism, hegemony, alterity, identity, and pleasure by reading the work of Lefebvre, Debord, and Baudrilllard in France, and Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Homi Bhabha in Britain. We will conclude with readings from Antonio Negri, Slavoj Zizek, Donna Haraway, and Judith Butler. |
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