Three-day seminar at ACLA (NYU), March 21-23, 2014
From today’s perspective, 20th c. theories of literature appear neither as consistent epistemologies competing for scientifically verifiable truth, nor as analytic methods that can be adapted or abandoned at will. Rather, a theory constitutes a resource and an affiliation that, while compelling a long-term commitment as well as ideological allegiances, allows for strategic negotiation and ad-hoc bricolage on the part of the individual scholar or a group of scholars. Theories can gain or lose currency, undergo inflation (structuralism), become a state monopoly (Soviet Marxism), be converted (Bakhtin’s appropriation by Western academy), capitalized on (uses of Auerbach’s Mimesis), invested in other, more risky ventures (deconstruction’s applications), even hoarded (some aspects of New Criticism). At worst, entering broad academic fashion, they can become mere symbolic capital.
Constituted during the age of Capital, literary theory can also reflexively engage with its workings. The stream’s particular focus is on the ways in which the major paradigms of Russian literary theory (Historical Poetics, Formalism, Sociological Poetics) arose and defined themselves with the help of categories that had explicit bearing on the logic of (anti)capitalism. Formalist (de-)automatization (“labor theory of value,” “machine production,” “the commodity form”) and autonomy (“division of labor”), Bakhtin’s dread of monologism and emphasis on process (“reification”), Veselovsky’s interest in collective rather than individual creation (cf. “primitive communism”) – examples of such conceptual overlap can be complemented by encounters that were more properly activist, since a number of Russian theorists (Shklovsky, Tynianov, Pereverzev) were also at one time or another involved with anti-capitalist parties or institutions. Their investment in theory was part of a life lived in a polemical engagement with the politics of (anti)capitalism.
Co-organized by Ilya Kliger (NYU) and Boris Maslov (University of Chicago)
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3