Transvaluations of Value: Poetics and Political Economy
Session P28, 8:30–10:00 A.M., Friday, 20 November 2015
Modernist Studies Association
Herman Rapaport, “Transvaluations of Value: Fredric Jameson, Jackson Mac Low”
Barrett Watten, “The Poet/Critic: Transvaluations of Value After Modernism”
Tyrone Williams, “‘The Changing Same’: Value in Marx and Amiri Baraka”
This panel takes up debates between poetics and political economy after the recent turn to Marxist political economy as a materialist interpretive strategy for poetry and poetics. In a contrary move, a return to the aesthetic as a construction of value, sited in a more classical reading of modernist form by Charles Altieri, appropriates the concept of “value” for self-reflexive poetic forms. The three presenters will develop approaches to the concept of value that are irreducible either to economism, especially the commodity form, or to the aesthetic, e.g. modernism, and will seek to articulate more inclusive accounts of value that extend political economy to other value-producing registers in the horizons of art, history, ethics, and politics. [See next post.]
