Entries tagged with critical theory

September 29, 2024

Entry 61: History Is What Hurts

Remarks on Jameson and Language

The media, for once, are getting it right: with the announcement of Fredric Jameson’s passing on September 22, one often sees a likeable photo of an engaged, outer-directed, smiling and welcoming, if prodigious and awe-inspiring scholar and critic in early or late days of his notable life and career. There is something of the Peaceable Kingdom in the intellectual devotion and worldly accomplishments evoked: “For Fredric Jameson, Marxist Criticism Was a Labor of Love,” per The New York Times. While Critical Theory, in both nature and practice, accentuates the negative, Late Jameson presents a beneficent gaze that is rarely encountered—especially with Marxists. The Grand Narrative of Progress Toward a Better Life seems activated by his very presence, a moment of positivity restored at the moment of loss. … More

December 21, 2019

Entry 39: Ozone Holes

Pleased to learn of publication of my anti-Trump poem “Plan B” in Lana Turner, I took the magazine’s offer of a free download of Lana Turner 11 (the digital version of Lana Turner 12 is not yet out) as an anticipation of things to come. The website also links to Lana Turner 10, where I published a poem written after the 2004 election, “Blue States (After Fearing),” and indeed there is a connection to the present “Plan B,” written in November 2016. (The paywall is still up for Lana Turner 10, and readers should get the entire issue, but I will provide a .pdf of the poem here). In that poem, I tracked the psychological state I was in after the 2004 election—where George W. Bush achieved his first popular majority, thought he had a mandate, had earned capital and was going to spend it by demolishing Social Security, only to fail spectacularly to do so. At the time, my serious interest in the emergence of fascist imaginaries in American democracy began, and I would spend the next dozen years interrogating their present and past history, through my research, teaching, and travels in Germany. “Plan B” is a culmination of this effort, a poem registering the psychological state of the 2016 election through the perversion of public discourse that, in Adorno’s words from The Authoritarian Personality, indicate a “readiness” to accept anti-democratic forms of government. Adorno links these psychological preconditions of “readiness” to an ensemble of personality traits in and as “ideology”: … More

January 9, 2015

Event 49: Tomb of Fourier

Maquette of destroyed statue of Charles Fourier

Modern Language Association
Vancouver, Canada
8–11 January 2015

371. The Surrealist Enlightenment
Presiding: Jonathan P. Eburne, Penn State University, University Park

1. “Material Wonder as Catalyst for the Surrealist Collection,” Katherine Conley, Coll. of William and Mary
2. “Thanks for the Memories: The Repetitions of De Chirico’s The Disquieting Muses,” Joanna Fiduccia, Univ. of California, Los Angeles
3. “Sapere imaginare: Surrealism and Quantum Physics,” Nathalie Fouyer, Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York
4. “Light of the Image @ Four Corners: Breton’s Ode to Charles Fourier,” Barrett Watten, Wayne State Univ. [Presented in absentia]

March 12, 2010

Entry 11: For a Left Ashbery Critique

from “Ashbery’s Historicism: 
Nonsite Hypotaxis and Modernity Critique
in The Double Dream of Spring“

Presented at John Ashbery in Paris: International Conference
12 March 2010, Institut Charles V, Université Paris Diderot

What makes The Double Dream of Spring both unique and exemplary for Ash­bery’s work is its positive critique of social modernity, rather than a mere ironic reversal of modernism, at the intersection of critical theory, poststructuralism, and romanticism. In the figural space of his works, Ashbery inverts of the poetics of radical particularity—seen in terms of an aesthetic of the fragment and the condition of reification under capitalism—that relocates what Altieri terms its “aesthetic agency” in an interplay of “partial local coherence” that at once proposes and disposes of any horizon of totality. … More