This seminar is designed to provide English majors with intensive and closely supervised work in critical reading and writing. Although sections of the course may address any literary question, period, or genre, they all provide an introduction to critical and methodological problems in literary studies.

At first, the two most common uses of the word “value” in English seem worlds apart: the economic sense of “value,” worth, relation to price; and the ethical sense of “value” as something one stands by, or believes beyond question. But the two senses of the word have many backdoor connections—one of them, famously, centered on the question of aesthetic judgment, which leads us to use language like “literary value,” or “artistic value.” When we use the word “value” in these different senses, it can seem like we are relying on mere analogy. There are other ways to explore the connection, however, and this semester we’ll be doing that. Emerging out of Adorno’s classroom at the University of Frankfurt in the 1960s, the critics Hans-George Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt had argued that the mode through which Marx presented his ideas were not incidental but rather necessary to his critique of political economy. Loosely grouped under the rubric of “value form theory,” the Marxist thinkers that followed in their footsteps have turned our attention to the dialectic of essence and appearance (or content and form) in Marx’s theory of value. Since the 2008 financial crisis, and the onset of a capitalist present riddled with unremitting crisis with no end in sight, this strain of Marxist theory is attracting more interest than ever before. It’s a different strain of Marxist theory from the one that in the 1960s had laid the foundation for the linguistic materialisms that placed culture and symbolic action at the center of social change. What are the implications of Marxist value-form theory for literary and cultural analysis? And can a literary approach offer anything to ongoing debates in social theory about abstract labor, exchange society, and crises of capital accumulation? Please purchase the Penguin edition of Capital Vol 1 by the start of the semester. Working with a hard copy of this edition, and no other, required.

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