2nd Session (15 November)

The Prison-House of Agency:

Neoliberal Hegemony and Popular Aesthetics in Britain and the US

Dr Jane Elliott

(King's College London)

6-8pm, Tuesday 15th November

Stewart House, room ST271 (2nd floor)

Dr Jane Elliott is Senior Lecturer in late 20th and 21st Century Literary and Cultural Studies. She is also Humanities Editor for The Public Intellectual journal. Dr Elliott's research focuses on post-1945 fiction, contemporary theory and the novel during and after postmodernism. Her recent publications include Theory After 'Theory', co-edited with Professor Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 2011) and the monograph Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory: Representing National Time (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008).

Her current research explores the conjoined aesthetic and political developments that have emerged since the turn of the 21st-century and the waning of the postmodern moment. Dr Elliott is currently working on a monograph that explores the intersection of neoliberal microeconomics, popular aesthetics and the Left theorization of agency in a variety of American and British novels and films, from the novel and film Never Let Me Go to the horror franchise Saw to Hurricane Katrina documentaries.

Recommended Reading:

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2004). Chapter 11, "28 March 1979," pp. 267-289.

Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Chapter 2, "Freedom," pp. 61-97.

Laurent Berlant, ‘Cruel Optimism: On Marx, Loss and the Senses’, New Formations 63 (Winter 2007/2008): pp. 33-51.

All are welcome to attend.

1st Session (October 18th)

Seeing Socialism: The Aesthetics of the Plan and the Transparency of Politics

Dr. Alberto Toscano
(Goldsmiths, University of London)

6-8pm, Tuesday 18th October
Senate House, Room 264 (2nd Floor)

Dr. Alberto Toscano is Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is perhaps best know for his numerous translations of the work of Alain Badiou. A cultural critic and a philosopher, Dr. Toscano has published books on the philosophical problem of individuation -Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006)- and on the different readings and misreadings of the concept of fanaticism -Fanaticism: The Uses of an Idea (New York: Verso, 2010)-, as well as authoring articles on a diverse number of topics.

His recent work, from which this talk stems, is on the contemporary status of what Fredric Jameson refers to as 'cognitive mapping.' The project, which is soon to be published as a co-authored book entitled Cartographies of the Absolute (Zero Books), considers contemporary representations of capitalism in film and the visual arts. He is currently working on the relationship between art, political aesthetics and socialist planning, both in the revolutionary art of the 20s and 30s and in later critical debates about communism and 'transparency.'

Recommended reading:

Clark, TJ, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), Chapter 3.

Stites, Richard, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), Chapters 7 and 8.

Michelson, Annette (Ed.), Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (London: Pluto Press, 1984), Dziga Vertov's film manifestos.


All are welcome to attend.