Marxism and Form:
How to Read Dialectically
Princeton University
Paul Nadal
Course Description
“All thinking is exaggeration, insofar as every thought that is one at all goes beyond its confirmation by the given facts.”
— Theodor Adorno
“For good or ill, the dialectic requires you to say everything simultaneously whether you think you can or not.”
— Fredric Jameson
“The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse.”
— Karl Marx
— Theodor Adorno
“For good or ill, the dialectic requires you to say everything simultaneously whether you think you can or not.”
— Fredric Jameson
“The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse.”
— Karl Marx
How to read history through form—not just around it? How do we move from culture to political economy, aesthetics to politics, and back? This seminar surveys the methods of dialectical materialism and Marxist aesthetic theory. Rooted in the Greek dialegein—from dia (through) and logos (discourse)—dialectics involves holding oppositions and articulating mediations between aesthetic form and social process. Through exemplary models of literary criticism, students learn to historicize texts across disciplines, engaging with topics such as racial capitalism, uneven development, gender, labor, and contemporary culture.
Course Requirements
(I) Leading Discussion x 2
(II) Term paper—20 pages double-spaced. You may expand on your conference presentation. Or: a dissertation prospectus or dissertation chapter of similar length. Dissertation materials submitted for this course must demonstrate significant engagement with seminar readings.
Since this is primarily a seminar/discussion class, your active participation is vital. As the texts will be the focal point of class discussions, please bring them to class. Papers that are not handed in by the due date will be accepted but no written comments will be made on late papers.
Semester Schedule
Week 1 Introductions
Week 2 What Is Critique? What Is It For?
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Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” (2004)
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Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading” (2009)
- Rita Felski, from The Limits of Critique (2015): Introduction, Chs. 1, 4
- Fredric Jameson, “Metacommentary” (1971)
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Christopher Nealon, “Reading on the Left” (2009)
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Carolyn Lesjack, “Reading Dialectically” (2013)
- Joshua Clover, “Communist Realism” (2014)
Recommended: Adorno, “Opinion Delusion Society” (1961)
Week 3 Hegel & Marx
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Hegel, “Sense-Certainty; Or the ‘This’ and ‘Meaning’” Phenomenology of Spirit (58-66)
- Hegel, The Science of Logic (selections): “Preface to the First Edition” (7- 11); “General Concept of Logic” (23-38); On beginnings p. 51 (starting with “But further, that which begins already is, ...”) to end of p. 57; On dialectics p. 741 ( “This no less synthetic than ... “) to end of p. 753.
- Marx, Grundrisse (Introduction)
- Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”
Recommended: Marx & Engels, The German Ideology, Preface and Part 1; Robert Lucas Scott, Reading Hegel (2025)
Week 4 Adorno
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Adorno, from Aesthetic Theory, Hullot-Kentor translation: “Toward a Theory of the Artwork,” “Universal and Particular,” and “Society” (pp. 175-261)
- Adorno, from Negative Dialectics: “Infinity” (pp .13-15); “After Auschwitz,” “Metaphysics and Culture,” “Dying Today” (pp. 361-373); “Self-Reflection of Dialectics” (pp. 405-408)
- Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame”
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Roberto Schwarz, “Adorno/Beckett”
Week 5 Form and History / Abstraction
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Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Introduction)
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Roberto Schwarz, “Objective Form”
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Leigh Claire La Berge, “The Rules of Abstraction”
- Phillip Brian Harper, “Black Personhood in the Maw of Abstraction” Recommended: Andrew Cole, “The Name of Metacommentary”
Week 6 Reading Totality
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Annie McClanahan, “Behavioral Economics and the Credit-Crisis Novel”
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Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (selections)
- Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick (selections) (watch: It Follows [2015), dir. David Robert Mitchell)
Recommended: Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping”; Kevin Floyd et al., eds., Totality Inside Out; Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility”; Adorno, “What Is Mechanical Reproduction?”; Sarah Brouillette, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary; Jasper Bernes, “Character, Genre, Labor”
Week 7 Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)
Week 8 Reading Lord Jim Dialectically
- Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth (Chs. 1-3)
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Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism”
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Sylvia Wynter, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation”
Recommended: Nathan K. Hensley, “Allegories of the Contemporary”; Eli Jelly-Schapiro, Moments of Capital (esp. “Interrelations” Ch.)
Week 9 Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (1976)
Week 10 Reading The Woman Warrior Dialectically
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Christopher T. Fan, Asian American Fiction After 1965 (selections)
- Mark McGurl, “Autobardolatry” from The Program Era
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Adorno, “Punctuation Marks”
Recommended: Yoon Sun Lee, “Type, Totality, and the Realism of Asian American Literature”; Colleen Lye, “Racial Form”; Anna Kornbluh, “Writing” from Immediacy