Tag Archives: Marxism

Lit and Life: My Intellectual Trajectory

I’ve long held that great literature impacts history harder than lesser literature. I trace the evolution of my ideas in today’s post.

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Conrad and White Male Panic

Tuesday This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post about how Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness provides special insight into white terrorism. At one point I mentioned Conrad’s own racism and sexism, which leads to an interesting literary question: can we consider a work a literary masterpiece if it has one-dimensional depictions of women and Africans? […]

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Does Lit Crit Make Lit Less Fun?

Friday My Ljubljana colleague Jason Blake alerted me to a Chronicle of Higher Education article that wrestles with the question of whether studying literature should be fun. It’s a fairly confused piece, with Baruch College’s Timothy Aubry conflating a number of issues better treated separately. Nevertheless, it’s worth a response because Aubry addresses questions that non-academics […]

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How Capitalism Threatens Art

The Frankfurt School studied how culture gets subsumed by capitalism. We need to start reading Adorno and Benjamin again.

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