Marxism and the Lyric
Description
This seminar examines the lyric as a central and contested form in Marxist literary theory. Often viewed as the genre most resistant to historical materialist analysis—associated with interiority, formal autonomy, and expressive immediacy—lyric has nonetheless emerged, across multiple Marxist traditions, as a nexus for theorizing the contradictions of subjectivity, value, and mediation under capital.
Rather than treating the lyric as a minor or aberrant form within Marxist aesthetics, this seminar takes it as a point of entry into foundational questions of cultural production and social form: What becomes of the lyric “I” under conditions of reification? How does figuration reflect or resist the abstractions of the value-form? Can lyric form register the unevenness of global capitalism, or does it retreat into ideology? What are the stakes of lyric address in contexts of revolution, degrowth, crisis, and reification?
While engaging with the canonical texts of Western Marxist criticism—Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno, Caudwell, Jameson—we aim to reemphasize that debates over lyric form have been and continue to be global in scope. From revolutionary cultural programs in the Soviet Union and China, to anti-colonial and anti-imperialist poetics in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia, Marxist theorists and poets have continually returned to the lyric to negotiate the dialectic of the individual and collective, of form and infrastructure. These engagements are not peripheral supplements to a dominant Marxist aesthetic theory, but constitutive episodes in a broader, internally non-identical materialist inquiry into poetic form.
We invite papers that trace the lyric across such formations: the folk lyric as a vehicle of revolutionary education; the ode as an ideological apparatus; lyric abstraction as a correlate of the commodity-form; the poem as a medium of collective memory, grief, or militancy. We are especially interested in work that attends to how lyric form articulates the contradictions of historical time—whether through rupture, repetition, or arrested development—and how these temporalities interact with the structural unevenness of capital accumulation, political struggle, and cultural production.
Topics may include:
- Lyric and the political unconscious
- The lyric sentence and aesthetic autonomy
- Crisis poetics, finance, and abstraction
- Revolutionary and counter-revolutionary lyric traditions
- Translation, internationalism, and world lyric
- The lyric and the temporality of historical unevenness
- Gendered, racialized, and caste-inflected lyric formations
- Lyric and the poetics of infrastructure
- Lyric modes in cultural revolution, populism, or anti-colonial resistance
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Chengxiang Lin is a PhD candidate in Asian Studies at Cornell University. His research interests include modern Chinese literature and culture, environmental humanities, media history and theory, and the philosophy of nature and technology. An award-winning poet in Chinese, he is the author of a poetry collection and several chapbooks. His most recent chapbook, Havana, the Recursive Rain, is a long poem inspired by his fieldwork on Cuba’s often-overlooked engagement with cybernetics.
Speaker Bio
George Kovalenko is an Affiliate Scholar in the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University and a Visiting Scholar in New York University’s Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in New German Critique, Poetics Today, and The Wallace Stevens Journal. He is co-editor of the essay collection, Poetics and the Early Frankfurt School, under contract with Routledge. He holds an M.F.A. from NYU and a Ph.D. from the University of Denver.
Speaker Bio
Skylar Xu is a PhD student in Literature at Duke University interested in the interaction between literary forms and the processes of history. She researches the cultural exchange and global circulation of poets and writers in the late 20th century. She holds a BA from Cornell University in Comparative Literature and French, where she completed a honors thesis titled “The translator’s home: poetic exigencies of exophony.”
Papers
Speaker Bio
Dominick Lawton is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. His research encompasses both Russian and Yugoslav literatures, particularly from the state socialist period, with an emphasis on the relationship between materialist theory, political-economic structures, and literary practice. His upcoming book Writing Rebellious Things reinterprets early Soviet literature through its formal responses to the ambiguous new post-revolutionary place of objects.
Speaker Bio
Nate Schmidt is a PhD candidate in the English Department of UC Berkeley. At present he is working on a a critical account of experimental practices in British literature suspended between the aftermath of the 1960s and the emergence of Thatcherism. Other interests include contemporary poetry, psychoanalysis, and British literature of the 1930s.
Speaker Bio
Jose Jarquin is a PhD candidate in the Hispanic Studies Department at the University of California, Riverside. His work engages both Affect Studies and Central American cultural production, focusing on the relationship between affect and ideology in works from the twentieth and twenty-first century that challenge normative social structures generated by different iterations of capitalism. His current project, The Revolution is Felt focuses on affect in revolutionary Salvadoran literature.
Speaker Bio
Murat Narcı completed his BA and MA in the Department of Turkish Language and Literature at Boğaziçi University in 2013 and 2015, respectively. Currently, he has completed his PhD dissertation on the poems of Tevfik Fikret and Nazım Hikmet in the same department in 2023. Before joining the faculty of Özyeğin University, he worked as an instructor at Sabancı University (2015) and Galatasaray University (2021).
Papers
Speaker Bio
Stephen Ellis is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. His research interests include comparative literature, cultural studies, and critical theory. Currently he is completing a manuscript on the ways quasi-scientific metaphors efface crucial dimensions of selfhood.
Speaker Bio
Sthira Bhattacharya is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago. A scholar of modern South Asia, her work is situated at the intersection of new histories of caste and histories of print culture. More broadly, she studies how forms—social and aesthetic, literary and extra-literary, colonial and indigenous—produce historically situated ways of inhabiting and knowing an unequal world. Her research brings together methods from cultural studies, social history, and rhetoric and communication.