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midterm exam and instructions

Posted by Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on

It’s that time. Here are the instructions for your midterm and a link to the template you’ll use to write the exam and upload to Dropbox:

  • Due Wednesday March 22nd at 5pm via this upload link
  • Exams received after that time but before Thursday at midnight will be penalized one letter grade
  • Exams received after Thursday night will receive a zero.
  • I estimate the exam should take you about 2 hours, though of course your results may vary and feel free to take as much time as you need
  • Feel free to contact me with any issues, logistical or otherwise, via email
  • No class on Tuesday Mar 21: see you on Friday Mar 24 as usual
  • Write answers right on this document beneath the corresponding question and replace the word “template” above (in “midterm template”) with your last name

Here’s the template. Good luck, everyone!

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more Gramsci in the news

Posted by Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on

Here’s some  more Gramsci for your cultural diet. The podcast The Dig recently featured the great Michael Denning, Professor of American Studies at Yale, who has written Gramscian analysis of US literature and culture for the past 30 years, including his magnificent book The Cultural Front. As a bonus, the second episode includes a riff on Althusser’s borrowing from and divergence from Gramsci about 3/4 of the way through. It’s a lot, but there’s a TON of stuff relevant to our course in here.
 

Gramsci & Hegemony w/ Michael Denning

Your browser does not support the audio tag. Featuring Michael Denning on Antonio Gramsci. Part one of an expansive two-part interview.

Gramsci, Organization, Crisis w/ Michael Denning

Your browser does not support the audio tag. Featuring Michael Denning on Antonio Gramsci. The second of a two-part interview.

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Gramsci in the news!

Posted by Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on

Well, whaddya know: Antonio Gramsci made the news this week. The Chronicle of Higher Education is the premier “trade journal” of academica, where academics and university workers read about current goings-on. Here, the cultural studies critics Bruce Robbins is rehearsing an argument with the literary critic John Guillory, whose recent book Professing Criticism has spawned a vigorous debate on the role of politics in humanities teaching and writing in higher ed.

As you can see, Robbins invokes Gramsci’s distinction between “organic” and “traditional” intellectuals in order to clarify his objections to Guillory’s argument about the need for scholar/professors to work in a “self-authorizing” and autonomous way, rather than align themselves with political institutions and arguments (e.g., supporting Democratic Socialists of America or righting against the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe). Robbins believes that, although academics have generally been “traditional” intellectuals in Gramsci’s sense, aligned with a “neutral” institution (academia) that serves something “higher” than the partisan pursuits of capitalist accumulation and party politics, since the 60s, many academics have been plausibly “organic” to fundamental social groups.

We’ll talk more about these categories tomorrow, but I thought it was cool to find an unfolding argument in the ether that’s so perfectly targeted to our reading!

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Some resources on Marx

Posted by Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on

As promised, I wanted to alert you to a few things I’ve posted in the past for students with regard to Marx and Engels:

  • this post shows a picture of the “camera obscura” and explains the way the object works as a metaphor for Marx.
  • Here I talk a bit about the relevance of Marx in the 2010s and places you might go to dig deeper into Marx’s work or postmarxist political thinking.
  • This clip from the comedy series Portlandia captures, in a very funny and absurd way, some of the themes of Marx’s “fetishism of commodities” and “alienation of labor” arguments.
  • Finally, here’s a look at examples of the “fetishism” of commodities from our friends at Apple. We’ll dig into this stuff today.
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Prizes and Awards

Posted by Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on

Be sure to submit anything appropriate you have to the department’s annual awards. Cash money!!

Prizes & Awards

Every year the English Department offers a variety of prizes and awards for both undergraduate and graduate students. The prizes and awards program provides a wonderful opportunity for students to have their work recognized in the fields of literary analysis and criticism; linguistics and rhetoric; creative fiction, non-fiction, and poetry; personal essay; and drama.

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First day plan

Posted by Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on

Hi 306/301 students:

Two quick things as we move towards Opening Day on Friday:

 

1. You are encouraged, but not obliged, to read Jonathan Culler’s introduction to “theory” here. I’ll digest some of its main ideas on Friday, but I think you’ll find it useful to orient yourselves before we dive in the deep water with Nietzsche for Tuesday.

2. You are also welcome (but not required) to introduce yourselves to me and to each other via Padlet, using the whimsical prompt I’ve created.

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