Reading Groups
To access all of the readings at once click here.
Social Reproduction Then and Now (Friday at 1:30 pm)
Led by Jaime Acosta Gonzalez, Brendan Higgins, and Shannan Lee Hayes
Required Texts:
Melinda Cooper, “The Moral Crisis of Inflation: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and the Demise of theFamily Wage,” from Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism
Nancy Fraser, “Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism”
Michel Feher, “Self-Appreciation; or, The Aspirations of Human Capital”
Karl Marx, “The Buying and Selling of Labour Power,” from Capital Vol. 1.
Optional Texts:
Kathi Weeks, “Working Demands: From Wages for Housework to Basic Income” from The Problem with Work
Marx, Hegel, Lenin (Friday at 7 pm)
Led by: Bret Benjamin, Steven Delmagori, Pooya Jamaly, Ashley Manning, Jessica Manry, Samantha Rider, Paul Stasi, and Sepideh Yasrebi
Required Texts:
Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism selections 19-39, 98-107, 122-131,138-143,153-169
Marx, Critique of Hegel's Dialectic from the 1844 manuscripts
Lenin, Notebooks on Hegel
Recommended Text:
Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism selection 250-268
The Dialectic of Literary Form and Social Process: Roberto Schwarz (Sunday at 1:45 pm)
Led by Emilio Sauri, Ericka Beckman, and Oded Nir
Required Texts:
Roberto Schwarz, “Brecht’s Relevance—Highs and Lows”
Roberto Schwarz, “Misplaced Ideas: Literature and Society in Late-Nineteenth-Century Brazil”
Roberto Schwarz, “Objective Form: Reflections on the Dialectic of Roguery”
Recommended Texts:
Antonio Candido, “Dialectic of Malandroism”
Maria Elisa Cevasco, “Two Girls and a Master: The Potency of Cultural Criticism”
Neil Larsen, “Roberto Schwarz: A Quiet (Brazilian) Revolution in Critical Theory”
New Old Materialisms and Literary Criticism (Monday at 10:45 am)
Led by: Meghan Gorman-DaRif and Anne Stewart
Required Texts:
David Alworth, “The Site of the Social” from Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form
Terry Eagleton, “Materialisms” from Materialism
Harry Garuba, "Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society”
Alexander R. Galloway, “History Is What Hurts: On Old Materialism”
Kim TallBear, “Beyond the Life/Not-Life Binary: A Feminist-Indigenous Reading of Cryopreservation, Interspecies Thinking, and the New Materialism”
Myka Tucker-Abramson, “Make Literary Criticism Great Again (Review of David Alworth’s Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form)”
Theories of the Social (Tuesday at 1:45 pm)
Led by: Sarah Brouillette, Annie McClanahan, Myka Tucker-Abramson
Required Texts:
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed”
Emile Durkheim, selection from The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Bruno Latour, selection from Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory
James Scott, selection from Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance
What Is To Be Done With Non-Identity? (Wednesday at 10:45 am)
Led by: Tavid Mulder and Matt Gannon
Required Texts:
T. W. Adorno, “The Experiential Content of Hegel's Philosophy"
Bruno Bosteel, "The Jargon of Finitude”
Recommended Text:
Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination, pp. 104-120; pp. 326-366