Left Perspectives on Aesthetics across Media II: Marxism, Poetry and Poetics

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

At the outset of the 1951 lecture on Marxist poetics that would become a watershed intervention in Marxist literary criticism, T. W. Adorno reads the room: “The announcement of a lecture on lyric poetry and society will make many of you uncomfortable.” For an interpretative tradition in which more ostensibly objective forms have loomed particularly large, this discomfort continues to haunt many Marxist inquiries into the theoretical and strategic potentialities of the literary art object. The question, therefore, remains critical: what can the most subjective of literary forms teach us about capitalist crisis and collective emancipation today? Taking that question seriously, this panel is dedicated to investigating new directions in Marxist poetry and poetics, both as theoretical mode of inquiry and as constituting a potentially practical answer to the even more pressing question: what is to be done? Papers will address these questions from a range of methodological and historical vectors, including: dialectical affinities between Dmitry Blagoi’s Stalinist poetic criticism, the Frankfurt School, and its contemporary interpreters; labor and market poetics in Pushkin’s mise-en-abyme; the uses of disability in Mayakovsky’s early poetry; and the materiality of Andrey Platonov’s modernist lyric and the poem’s formal role in economic recovery and development.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• George Kovalenko, New York U

Papers

• The Work of Art and Other Kinds of Work - Jacob Emery, Indiana U Bloomington

• Between Ideology and Authorial Class Consciousness: Another Look at Dmitry Blagoi’s Vulgar Sociology - Veniamin Vadimovich Gushchin, U of Southern California

• Cripples in Utopia: Mayakovsky's Materiality of Metaphor - Ros Herling, UC Berkeley

• Lyric Reclamation: Platonov’s Poetics and the Matter of Collective Life - George Kovalenko, New York U

Discussant

• Isobel Palmer, U of Birmingham (UK)