Seminar Schedule

Week 1 Module Introduction

Week 2 Nature, History, Origins, Endings

Charles Darwin, from The Origin of Species, Chapter 3, ‘The Struggle for Existence’ (pp. 114-

129), Chapter 4, ‘Natural Selection’ (pp. 130-172), Chapter 14, ‘Recapitulation and

Conclusion’ (pp. 435-460, London: Penguin, 1985).

Week 3 Is there any such thing as the ‘human’?

Charles Darwin, from The Descent of Man, Chapter 1, ‘The Evidence of the Descent of Man from Some Lower Form’ (pp. 21-43), Chapter 3, ‘Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals’ (pp. 85-118), Chapter 21, ‘General Summary and Conclusion’ (pp. 675-689, London: Penguin, 2004) & Charles Darwin, from The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Chapter 14, ‘Concluding Remarks and Summary’ (pp. 319-334, London: Penguin, 2009).

Week 4 Biology & Politics

Peter Kropotkin, Chapter 1 and Conclusion from Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution

(London: Heinemann, 1902), pp. 1–31 & pp. 292–300 & Francis Galton, ‘The Possible Improvement of the Human Breed’, from Essays in Eugenics (London: The Eugenics

Education Society, 1909), pp. 1–34.

Week 5 Theories of Value

Karl Marx, from Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, Chapters 1, Sections 1–4,

‘The Commodity’ (London, etc.: Penguin, 1990), pp. 125–177.

Week 6 Capital & Accumulation

Karl Marx, from Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, Chapters 4, 5, & 6: ‘The General Formula for Capital’, ‘Contradictions in the General Formula’, ‘The Sale and Purchase of Labour Power’ (London, etc.: Penguin, 1990), pp. 247–280.

Week 7: Reading Week

Week 8 The Labour Process

Karl Marx, from Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, Chapters 7 & 10, ‘The Labour Process and the Valorization Process’ & ‘The Working Day’, up to & not including ‘The Greed for Surplus Labour’ (London, etc.: Penguin, 1990), pp. 283–306 & pp. 340–344.

Week 9 Mourning & Melancholia

Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, in James Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14 (London: Hogarth, 1961),pp. 243–258.

Week 10 The Ego & the ID

Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the ID, in James Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 19 (London: Hogarth, 1961), pp.12–66.

Week 11 The Wolfman

Sigmund Freud, ‘The History of an Infantile Neurosis’, from The Wolfman and Other Cases (London, New York: Penguin, 2002), pp. 203–319.

Week 12 Module Review & Essay Preparation

Further Reading

Darwin

There’s an enormous amount and range of resources of Darwin, his work and its influence.

Search on Jstor and MLA bibliography for articles related to your particular interests (you’re bound to find something). There are two key websites that you should have a good browse through:

http://darwin-online.org.uk/

http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/

Here is a select list of texts that will be of use (they’re mostly in the library):

Amigoni, David, Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and Culture in

Nineteenth-Century Writing (Cambridge: University Press, 2007)

Armstrong, Philip, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2007) 

Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: University Press, 2009)

Beer, Gillian. Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: University Press,

1996).

Browne, Janet. Charles Darwin, two vols (London: Pimlico, 2003)

Carroll, Joseph. Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature

(London: Routledge, 2004)

Dawson, Gowan. Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge:

University Press, 2007).

Denenholz Morse, Deborah and Danahay, Martin (eds.). Victorian Animal Dreams:

Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (Ashgate, 2007)

Dennett, Daniel. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

(London: Penguin, 1996).

Desmond, Adrian. Huxley: The Devil’s Disciple (London: Michael Joseph, 1994).

Dyson, George. Darwin Among the Machines (London: Penguin, 1999)

Eldredge, Niles. Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life (New York: Norton, 2005).

Ellegard, Alvar. Darwin and the General Reader (Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg Press, 1958).

Glendening, John. The Evolutionary Imagination in late-Victorian Novels: An

Entangled Bank (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

Gottschall, Jonathan and Wilson, David Sloan. The Literary Animal: Evolution and the

Nature of Narrative (Evanston, ILL: Northwestern University Press, 2005)

Haraway, Donna, Primate Visions (New York: Routledge, 1989)

Levine, George. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction

(Chicago: University Press: 1991).

Levine, George. Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the

World (Princeton University Press: 2007)

Levine, George. Darwin: The Writer (Oxford: University Press, 2011).

Lightman, Bernard and Zon, Bennett. Evolution and Victorian Culture (Cambridge:

University Press, 2014)

Merrill, L. L. The Romance of Victorian Natural History (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1989). Milburn, Colin. ‘Monsters in Eden: Darwin and Derrida’, MLN, 118 (3),

2003, pp. 603-621

Miller, John, Empire and the Animal Body: Violence, Identity and Ecology in Victorian

Adventure Fiction (London: Anthem Press, 2012).

Moore, James. ‘Deconstructing Darwinism: The Politics of Evolution in the 1860s’,

Journal of the History of Biology, 24 (3), 1991, pp. 353-408.

Morton, Peter. The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, 1860-1900

(London: Allen and Unwin, 1984).

Norris, Margot. Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst &

Lawrence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).

Pick, Daniel. Faces of Degeneration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London:

Routledge, 1992).

Richardson, Angelique, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational

Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford: University Press, 2003).

Richter, Virginia, Literature After Darwin: Human Beasts in Western Fiction, 1859-1939

(Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011).

Rupke, Nicolaas A. Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1994).

Schmitt, Cannon. Darwin and the Memory of the Human: Evolution, Savages and South America (Toronto: University Press, 2009).

Secord, James A. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and

Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University

Press, 2003)

Smith, Jonathan. Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (Cambridge: University

Press, 2006).

Steeves, H. Peter. Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology and Animal Life (Albany: State

University of New York Press, 1999).

Stott, Rebecca. Darwin’s Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists (London:

Bloomsbury, 2013).

Stott, Rebecca. Darwin and the Barnacle (London: Faber, 2004).

Vint, Sheryll, Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal (Liverpool:

University of Liverpool Press, 2012)

Wilson, E. O. On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).

Wilson, E. O. Biophilia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).

Marx

We highly recommend David Harvey's lectures on Capital (link here below) and you should

also scroll down the website to find a range of brilliant books on Marx, including Harvey's

Companion to reading Capital:

http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/

There's also plenty of introductions to Marx available through the library, including the

Cambridge Companion to Marx (online access).

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of the Enlightenment (London: Verso,

1997).

Louis Althusser, On Ideology (London: Verso, 2008); Reading Capital (London: Verso,

1997); Lenin and Philosophy & Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press,

2001).

Etienne Balibar, On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (London: NLB, 1977).

Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the

New International (London: Routledge, 2006).

Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction & the Feminist

Struggle (Oakland: PM, 2012) & Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and

Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn: Automedia, 2004)

Richard Godfrey, Jack Gavin & Campbell Jones, ‘Sucking, Bleeding, Breaking: On the

Dialectics of Vampirism, Capital, and Time’, Culture and Organisation, Vol. 10, No. 1

(March 2004), 25-36.

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard UP, 2000);

Multitude: War & Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York & London: Penguin, 2005).

David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (London: Verso, 1999); A Brief History of

Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); A Companion to Marx’s

Capital (London: Verso, 2010); Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography

(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001); The New Imperialism (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2005); The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism

(London: Profile, 2010).

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London:

Verso, 1992); The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998

(London: Verso, 2009).

Ann E. Kaplan & Michael Sprinker, The Althusserian Legacy (London: Verso, 1992).

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Capital, in Collected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996).

Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Macmillan, 1971); A Contribution to the Critique of

Political Economy (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971).

Matthew Maclellan, ‘Marx’s Vampires: An Althusserian Critique’, Rethinking Marxism,

Vol. 25, No. 4 (October 2013), 549-564.

Charles W. Mills, From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism

(Lanham & Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

Shahrzad Mojab, Marxism and Feminism (London: Zed Books, 2015).

Warren Montag, Louis Althusser (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

Antonio Negri, Goodbye Mr. Socialism: Radical Politics in the 21 st Century (London:

Serpent’s Tail, 2008); Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State

(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1999); The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto

for the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Polity, 1989).

Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition

(London: Zed, 1983).

Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2009).

Freud

Cambridge Companion to Freud (online access through Starplus)

Louis Breger, Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision (New York: Wiley, 2000).

Malcolm Bowie, Psychoanalysis and the Future of Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).

Henk de Berg, Freud's Theory and its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003).

Maud Ellman, Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism (London: Longman, 1994)

Sigmund Freud, Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. by James Strachey (London: Vintage).

John Forrester, The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Diana Fuss, Identification Papers: Readings on Psychoanalysis, Sexuality & Culture (London: Routledge, 1995).

Andre Green, Love and Its Vicissitudes (London: Routledge, 2005).

Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (NY: SUNY Press 1991)

Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia UP, 1991); Powers of

Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia UP, 1982).

Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (New York: W.W Norton & Co., 2004); The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997).

Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990).

Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis & Feminism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).

Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989).

Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1970).

Peter H. Steeves, Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology and Animal Life (Albany: State

University of New York Press, 1999).

Elizabeth Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal (Oxford: Polity, 1998)

Slavoj Žižek, Everything You Wanted to Know About Lacan but Were Afraid to Ask

Hitchcock (London: Verso, 2010).