Critical Practice: ENGL 302
This course will introduce students to one of the leading and strongest currents of literary criticism currently practiced in the U.S. and globally: Marxian cultural theory. Based on the philosophical and theoretical interventions to European thought of Karl Marx, Marxian cultural theory attends to the literary, aesthetic and cultural ramifications of Marx’s foundational understanding of the historically distinct emergence of both modernity and urban industrial capitalism. At the broadest level, Marxian cultural theory produces nothing less than a total re-presentation of the literary and/or cultural object. Beginning with Marx before moving on to his intellectual inheritors, we will ask, firstly: What was unique about the rise of modernity and industrial capitalism? Why did Marx argue that modernity required a wholesale rethinking of the foundations of European thought? And lastly, what method did Marx innovate and promote as a corrective to the thinking that he argued was foundationally unsound and critically and practically useless in the era of scientific modernity? The second aspect of the course will then present to you a set of methods developed by Marxian scholars in the twentieth century for understanding, examining and theorizing literary production. We will pay close attention to both how these methods understand literary and cultural production and also why these scholars argue that under the conditions of capitalist modernity literary and cultural production becomes an essential, foundational and indissociable aspect of modern life and society. By the end of the course we will be able to perform the following action: offering a Marxian interpretation of a literary object.
This was my first class as an official English Major, and boy was it a doozy.
I assumed that English classes had a simple formula: read some books, talk about it, write about it. As such, I wasn't at all prepared for what I encountered on the first day of class. Ten minutes after class had started, Professor Chandan Reddy bursted through the door. Flustered and panting, he apologized for being late; he had a class on the other side of campus. If there was one word to describe him, it would be quirky. He's stylish - hipster stylish - from the fancy-framed glasses, skinny tie, tight dark wash jeans (rolled up slightly of course), and paisley patterned purple socks (his socks were something my friend got a kick out of observing each day).
Before we could digest his dramatic entrance, he asked us "Who can tell me what Marxism is?" The class was silent. He smiled slightly, nodded, and then said "Okay, well to explain Marxism, we're going to have go back in time a little." He then proceeded to launch into a furiously paced two hour lecture in which he described several centuries worth of philosophic ideology, hardly stopping to take a breath let alone wait for us to catch up in our frenzied attempt to take notes. When the bell rang to signal the end of class, he smiled and said "Okay, so that brings us to Marx. Next class we'll start talking about Marxism."
I was winded, and I hadn't even opened my mouth for two hours. And that's kind of how I felt for the entire quarter. ENGL 302 required a kind of academic intellect the likes of which I had never experienced before. It was saturated with the thick philosophical concepts of Hegel and Marx concerning nature/nurture, commodification, and modernity. The daily readings we had to do were often dense, highly pedantic pieces of work in which I would recognize streams of words individually but fail to understand what they meant together in the sentence. Professor Reddy even said at one point that we would be confronted with words which we might not understand, so we shouldn't be afraid to ask: I wasn't afraid to ask so much as unwilling since almost every other word seemed foreign and I figured his patience would wear thin.
However, the class was a great experience for me. It challenged me intellectually more than any English class I've ever taken, and I definitely feel like I'm a stronger student because of it (after all the arduous reading we had to do, nothing intimidates me anymore). In addition, every day I was left in absolute awe of Professor Reddy. HE'S JUST SO GODDAMN SMART. Having the opportunity to just be around him on a day to day basis is something I think every English Major should have, because despite speaking in such a way that seems like he swallowed a thesaurus, he's not pedantic at all. He doesn't lord his intellectual supremacy over anyone, he's a very humble and approachable guy, and it's obvious how much he loves what he teaches.
I assumed that English classes had a simple formula: read some books, talk about it, write about it. As such, I wasn't at all prepared for what I encountered on the first day of class. Ten minutes after class had started, Professor Chandan Reddy bursted through the door. Flustered and panting, he apologized for being late; he had a class on the other side of campus. If there was one word to describe him, it would be quirky. He's stylish - hipster stylish - from the fancy-framed glasses, skinny tie, tight dark wash jeans (rolled up slightly of course), and paisley patterned purple socks (his socks were something my friend got a kick out of observing each day).
Before we could digest his dramatic entrance, he asked us "Who can tell me what Marxism is?" The class was silent. He smiled slightly, nodded, and then said "Okay, well to explain Marxism, we're going to have go back in time a little." He then proceeded to launch into a furiously paced two hour lecture in which he described several centuries worth of philosophic ideology, hardly stopping to take a breath let alone wait for us to catch up in our frenzied attempt to take notes. When the bell rang to signal the end of class, he smiled and said "Okay, so that brings us to Marx. Next class we'll start talking about Marxism."
I was winded, and I hadn't even opened my mouth for two hours. And that's kind of how I felt for the entire quarter. ENGL 302 required a kind of academic intellect the likes of which I had never experienced before. It was saturated with the thick philosophical concepts of Hegel and Marx concerning nature/nurture, commodification, and modernity. The daily readings we had to do were often dense, highly pedantic pieces of work in which I would recognize streams of words individually but fail to understand what they meant together in the sentence. Professor Reddy even said at one point that we would be confronted with words which we might not understand, so we shouldn't be afraid to ask: I wasn't afraid to ask so much as unwilling since almost every other word seemed foreign and I figured his patience would wear thin.
However, the class was a great experience for me. It challenged me intellectually more than any English class I've ever taken, and I definitely feel like I'm a stronger student because of it (after all the arduous reading we had to do, nothing intimidates me anymore). In addition, every day I was left in absolute awe of Professor Reddy. HE'S JUST SO GODDAMN SMART. Having the opportunity to just be around him on a day to day basis is something I think every English Major should have, because despite speaking in such a way that seems like he swallowed a thesaurus, he's not pedantic at all. He doesn't lord his intellectual supremacy over anyone, he's a very humble and approachable guy, and it's obvious how much he loves what he teaches.
The following four documents are reflections that we had to write in response to the readings we were assigned. They give an idea of the kinds of reading we had to do, and characterize the intellectual struggle I had in wrapping my head around them. The hardest part of the reflections was having to summarize the author's main arguments into a concise paragraph, because so much material and so many concepts were covered in each. It's clear that the only way I could make sense of the readings was by latching onto a certain phrase or sentence and analyzing it piece by piece rather than trying to describe the entire enormous entity. It's also funny, looking back on this now, how I would attempt to criticize the authors or try to find flaws in their arguments and ideologies: it was my way of getting even with them for writing such complicated pieces.
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And here is my final essay for the class. It's a convergence of the many ideas we discussed throughout the quarter, synthesized rather successfully I think. As we were writing this essay and comparing it to what we had written in our reflections before, my partner and I both reveled at the fact that our writing styles had changed slightly to evoke Professor Reddy's spirit. Our sentences seemed more complex, more academic, and we definitely threw around some big words that we had picked up along the way ("epistemology" is one that I have a certain love/hate relationship with).
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