Immediacy: Some Theses on Cultural Style
Anna Kornbluh, Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago
September 22nd at 4:30 in Baker Hall 255B, the Swank Room
This talk considers contemporary aesthetics in a variety of media to identify a common style rooted in rejecting mediation, and connects this style to the priorities of flow, speed, and expressivity in stagnating capitalism.
There will also be a seminar with Professor Kornbluh on “Marxist Cultural Criticism.” This workshop returns to two classics of dialectical cultural critique to explore some past and present questions about periodization, cultural studies, and marxist aesthetic theory. What should be our methods for cultural interpretation today?”
September 23, noon-1:15 in Baker Hall 254Q
Readings are available:
- Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture - Fredric Jameson
- Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism - Fredric Jameson
Anna Kornbluth is is the author of The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (University of Chicago 2019), Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club (Bloomsbury "Film Theory in Practice” series, 2019), and Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (Fordham UP 2014).