Spring 2007 Courses

English 404-01: Marxist Literary Criticism (Çelikkol)

T/TH 10:10-11:40am, HUM 102

This course introduces students to key concepts in Marxist theory and explores the ways in which those concepts have transformed literary criticism. We will first focus on Marx's writing on production, value, commodity fetish, reification, bourgeois society, and the isolated individual and briefly trace the development of these critical concepts in the early-twentieth century. We will then explore recent examples of Marxist literary criticism. As we will see, Marxist concepts such as interpellation and reification strongly bear upon literary criticism, because they address the stakes of representation, the construction of subjectivity, and the shaping of social relations. The interconnected units of the course will organize our inquiries: the birth of the bourgeois individual, the commodity form as metaphor, and literary genre as ideology.

Many of our discussions will focus on specific literary texts, so the reading list for this course includes novels and poems as well as recent Marxist criticism. Our test cases will come from nineteenth-century American literature. Students will produce their own theoretically informed criticism on specific literary works by authors such as Emerson, Thoreau, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Henry James.

Prior knowledge of Marxism is not necessary. This course is open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors and satisfies the pre-1900 American literature requirement. For seniors, it will satisfy the capstone experience requirement.

Spring 2007 Course Listings