This course will introduce students to Marxism, both as a revolutionary practice and as a theory of modern culture. We will start out by spending a couple of weeks familiarizing ourselves with Marxs own writings, getting a handle on some of his most important concepts (e.g., the dialectic, ideology, materialism, the commodity, class struggle, and so on). Then well try to answer the question of how Marxism, initially a theory of political economy, became in the twentieth century a means of analyzing culture. Here, we will read critics and theorists including Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, Slavoj iek, Silvia Federici, and Walter Benn Michaels. Along the way, well test Marxisms claims by looking at works of literature (Kafka, Brecht), film (Eisenstein, Godard), and painting (Surrealism, Pop Art). This class should be of interest to students of literature, visual art, and philosophy.
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