Aesthetics as Critique

This Ph.D. seminar will reconsider some classic, highly influential texts within Marxian thought that virtually take for granted–or at least take extraordinarily seriously–the existence, and the importance to critical thought and agency–of a distinct mode of human experience and activity known as the aesthetic. Though our readings will engage various arts and cultural practices, they will emphasize literary art. The classic texts we’ll read will include writings by Kant, Hegel, Marx and Engels, Luxemburg, Lukács, Du Bois, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Sartre, Beauvoir, Raymond Williams, and Jameson. Time permitting, we’ll also try to look briefly at (or at least gesture toward) aesthetics-focused texts by Percy Shelley, Heine, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, Korsch, Mariátegui, Kracauer, Bloch, Marcuse, and Althusser.