“Poststructuralism, Representation, and the State”

On the books one finds the following description for ENGL 510: “A study of the major issues in literary criticism and theory since about 1965. Offered: jointly with C LIT 510.” The vagueness of this description is symptomatic of the impossibility of any general overview of literary criticism and theory. To do such an over-view one would have to pre-comprehend a number of notions: 1) that literary criticism and theory share “major issues”; 2) that 1965 or thereabouts marks an important shift in both fields, if they can be designated a such (perhaps here the reference is to Derrida’s work); and 3) that providing such an overview is free from the power/knowledge determinations that would otherwise critique the politics of truth embedded within such an overview. Yet, a number of intellectual movements, including the work of Foucault, Derrida, feminism, postcolonial studies, ethnic and racial studies, etc. that emerge around and after 1965 contest exactly that which these acts of pre-comprehension mandate. Hence, we will commit ourselves to the impossibility and necessary failure of achieving the mandate set for this course. Indeed, we will learn how to think about the conditions of impossibility and failure as enabling intellectual work and not the negation of work.

Secondly, I will refocus the aspiration of the class, keeping with the spirit of the work that we will be reading for the class. While the course will offer students an advanced “introduction” to a number of thinkers that have been important to the “fields” of cultural theory, English studies, Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, it will establish a singular orientation while reading this work (to expose the logic, stakes, and the limits of what is brought together and produced as a reading for this course). We will focus on the ideas of “representation and the state” as we study the works of a number of thinkers, including Karl Marx, Gayatri Spivak, Lisa Lowe, Frantz Fanon, David Lloyd, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Joseph Roach, Jacqueline Rose, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, David Theo Goldberg, and Jacqui Alexander. When reading each thinker, we will ask ourselves how the interventions each has sought to produce has affected our thinking about representation and the state, two notions without which capitalist democracies are unthinkable. We will pursue the post-1965 periodization as a framework for engaging the crisis of culture in capitalist democracies, and we will study that crisis through analyzing different theories of representation and the state.