Robert Kaufman

Contact

robkaufman@berkeley.edu
4407 Dwinelle

Professor

Bio/CV: 

Robert Kaufman’s teaching and research emphasize several interrelated areas:  20th-21st-century American poetry and its dialogues with modern Latin American, German, French, and British poetry; romantic and 19th-century poetry and poetics; philosophical aesthetics, literary theory, and the history of criticism (esp. since Kant and romanticism); and Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the arts (poetry and the other literary genres; music; cinema; painting, etc.).

B.A., English, UC Berkeley, 1979

J.D., Boalt Hall School of Law, UC Berkeley, 1982

Ph.D., English, UC Berkeley, 1995

After practicing labor and employment-discrimination law for several years, Robert Kaufman returned to UC Berkeley to take a Ph.D. in English. He then joined the English Department faculty at McGill University in Montréal, moving soon thereafter to Stanford University, where he was assistant professor of English and affiliated assistant professor of German Studies and of Modern Thought and Literature.  Kaufman has been a Stanford Humanities Center Fellow, as well as a John Philip Coghlan Research Fellow, and has also spent terms teaching, as invited visiting assistant professor, in the University of Chicago’s English Department and UC Berkeley’s Comparative Literature Department.  He joined Berkeley’s Comparative Literature faculty in July, 2007; at Berkeley he has been both a Hellman Family and Institute of International Studies Fellow. He also teaches in, and is a past Co-Chair of, UC Berkeley’s interdisciplinary Program in Critical Theory.

Professor Kaufman’s interests in experimental poetry and poetics since Romanticism, and in aesthetic, cultural, and literary theory, have led him to pursue three interrelated research projects. The first study is  Negative Romanticism: Adornian Aesthetics in Keats, Shelley, and Modern Poetry (forthcoming from Cornell University Press); the book examines the relationships between “second-generation” British Romanticism and modern attempts (from Keats, Shelley, and Kant, to Brecht, Vallejo, Zukofsky, and the Frankfurt School, to recent lyric poetry and critical theory) to develop a progressive, “critical” poetry, poetics, and aesthetics. Two related book projects are titled Why Poetry Should Matter-to the Left:  Frankfurt Constellations of Democracy and Modernism after Postmodernism? Robert Duncan and the Future-Present of American Poetry.

Professor Kaufman’s essays and articles include:

    • "D.S. Marriott's Time-Lyric," Preface to D.S. Marriott, Letters from the Black Ark (forthcoming from Omnidawn Publishing, 2024)
    • "Lyrik nach . . . Post-Democracy" (forthcoming in "Kaleidoscopics" special issue of the Journal of Adorno Studies, 2024)
    • "Forma lírica, agencia crítica: Vallejo, Marx, Frankfurt" (forthcoming in Forma: A Journal of Latin American Criticism & Theory, 2024)
    • "Adornian Modernism Lately (After Postmodernism, Before Post-Democracy)" (forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook to Adorno, eds. Martin Shuster and Henry Pickford)
    • "Trilce After 100, César Vallejo Now" [co-authored with Victor Quiroz Ciriaco] (forthcoming in Chicago Review, 2024)
    • "César Vallejo Pasa . . . Poesía al Hombro" (forthcoming in Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies)
    • "With Paul Celan" [co-authored with Philip Gerard], Introduction to Jean Daive, Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (City Lights Books, 2020)

[For the "City Lights Live!" video recording of the November 23, 2020 "PAUL CELAN @ 100" celebration of Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan and related publications that commemorated Celan's centenary, with readings and discussions of Celan's poems by Jean Daive and Rosmarie Waldrop, as well as Judith Butler, Mary Ann Caws, Norma Cole, Philip Gerard, Fady Joudah, David Marriott, Michael Palmer, Doris Salcedo, Timothy Snyder, Roberto Tejada, Raúl Zurita, and others, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqziyT7ePc4 For a video-recorded conversation about Daive, Celan, and their poetry and translation work in international contexts, go to the Townsend Humanities Center's February 17, 2021 "Book Chat" featuring Ann Smock, Philip Gerard, and Robert Kaufman at: https://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/media/robert-kaufman-and-philip-gerard ]

  • “Il faut continuer . . . d’être absolument moderne: Adorno’s Modernism Now, Zurita’s Lyric After” (forthcoming in Constelaciones: Revista de Teoría Crítica)
  • “Poetic Form, Ours and Yesterday's: Robert Hass’s Little Book (forthcoming in Modernism/Modernity)
  •  “Afterlives of Poetry, Still-Life of César Vallejo”  (forthcoming in Modernism/Modernity)
  • “Gretel’s Factory” (forthcoming in Journal of Adorno Studies)
  • “Nothing if Not Determined:  Marxian Criticism in History,” in A Companion to Literary Theory, ed. David Richter (Wiley-Blackwell:  Oxford, UK, 2018), 205-217
  • “Frankfurt School,” Entry/Article [discussing the Frankfurt School and Modern Poetry/Poetics, and incorporating the subject-entry “Commodity, Poetry as/against”] in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed. (Princeton UP, 2012), 518-522
  • “Singin’ in the Marxist Rain,” in The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork: On Borders and Fragments, eds. Anke Finger and Danielle Follett (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 327-345
  • “Poetry After 'Poetry After Auschwitz,' ”  in  Art and Aesthetics after Adorno [Townsend Papers in the Humanities, No.3], ed. Anthony J. Cascardi (Berkeley: Townsend Humanities Center/University of California Press, 2010), 116-181.
  • “Afterword: Vicente Huidobro’s Futurity Is Now; ¿Por qué?” in Huidobro’s Futurity: Twenty-First Century Approaches, vol. 6 of  Hispanic Issues On Line, eds.Luis Correa-Díaz and Scott Weintraub (Spring 2010): 248-260
  • “What’s at Stake? Kantian Aesthetics, Romantic & Modern Poetics, Sociopolitical Commitment,” in A Concise Companion to the Romantic Age, ed. Jon Klancher (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 257-282
  • “AfterNach: Life’s Posthumous Life in Later-Modernist American Poetry,” in The Meaning of `Life’ in Romantic Poetry and Poetics, ed. Ross Wilson (Routledge, 2009), 164-190
  • “Lyric Commodity Critique, Benjamin Adorno Marx, Baudelaire Baudelaire Baudelaire,” PMLA 123:1 (January, 2008): 207-215, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25501840#metadata_info_tab_contents
  • “Poetry’s Ethics? Theodor W. Adorno and Robert Duncan on Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion,” New German Critique 97 (Winter 2006): 73-118, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27669156#metadata_info_tab_contents
  • “Everybody Hates Kant: Blakean Formalism and the Symmetries of Laura Moriarty,” in Reading for Form, eds. Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown (University of Washington Press, 2006), 203-230
  • “Lyric’s Expression: Musicality, Conceptuality, Critical Agency,” in Adorno and Literature, eds. David Cunningham and Nigel Mapp (Continuum, 2006), 99-116 [an earlier, briefer version of this essay appeared in Cultural Critique 60 [Spring 2005]: 197-216, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/186264/pdf
  • “Lyric’s Constellation, Poetry’s Radical Privilege,”  Modernist Cultures 1:2 (Winter 2005): 209-234
  • “Adorno’s Social Lyric, and Literary Criticism Today: Poetics, Aesthetics, Modernity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 354-375
  • “Difficulty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics,” in Just Being Difficult: Academic Writing in the Public Arena, eds. Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb (Stanford University Press, 2003), 139-156
  • “Sociopolitical (i.e., Romantic) Difficulty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics,” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (June 2003), https://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20120202055441/http://www.rc.umd.edu/prax...
  • “What Is Construction, What’s The Aesthetic, What Was Adorno Doing?” in Aesthetic Subjects, eds. Pamela Matthews and David McWhirter (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 366-396
  • “Aura, Still,” October 99 (Winter 2002): 45-80, reprinted in Walter Benjamin and Art, ed. Andrew Benjamin, (Continuum Press, 2005), 121-147, https://direct.mit.edu/octo/article/doi/10.1162/016228702317274639/55875...
  • “Brecht’s Autonomous Art, or More Late Modernism!” in Das Brecht-Jahrbuch/The Brecht Yearbook 26 (Fall 2001): 191-211, https://search.library.wisc.edu/digital/AGWC3YWXPIRATG8Y/pages/ACXX53OUZ...
  • “Intervention and Commitment Forever! Shelley in 1819, Shelley in Brecht, Shelley in Adorno, Shelley in Benjamin,” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (May 2001), https://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20120202071030/http://www.rc.umd.edu/prax...
  • “The Work of Romanticism in the Age of Mechanical Postmodernism,”European Romantic Review 12.2 (Spring 2001): 237-245, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10509580108570139
  • “Negatively Capable Dialectics: Keats, Vendler, Adorno, and the Theory of the Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry 27:2 (Winter 2001): 354-384,
    https://www.jstor.org/stable/1344254#metadata_info_tab_contents
  • “Red Kant, or The Persistence of the Third Critique in Adorno and Jameson,” Critical Inquiry 26:4 (Summer 2000): 682-724,
    https://www.jstor.org/stable/1344327#metadata_info_tab_contents
  • “A Future for Modernism: Barbara Guest’s Recent Poetry,” American Poetry Review 29:4 (July/August 2000): 11-16, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27783464#metadata_info_tab_contents
  • “The Madness of George III, by Mary Wollstonecraft,” Studies in Romanticism 37:1 (Spring 1998): 17-25, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25601268#metadata_info_tab_contents
  • “The Sublime as Super-Genre of the Modern, or, Hamlet in Revolution: Caleb Williams and His Problems,” Studies in Romanticism 36:4 (Winter 1997): 541-574, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25601254#metadata_info_tab_contents
  • “Legislators of the Post-Everything World: Shelley’s Defence of Adorno,” English Literary History 63:3 (Fall 1996): 707-733, https://www.jstor.org/stable/30030121#metadata_info_tab_contents
Role: 
Faculty