As the paradigmatic trend in literary study at present, “postcritique" implies that a great epoch of critique has come to a close. This talk argues that the fundamentally dialectical project of critique – what Marx called the “ruthless criticism of everything existing” and what he practiced as its correlative utopian striving for what does not exist – has not yet taken foot in literary method. To explore what that project might look like, Kornbluh outlines a theory of the critique immanent to the literary form of the novel itself.

Anna Kornbluh is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois–Chicago. Her research and teaching interests center on Victorian literature and critical theory. She is the author of Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (Fordham UP 2014), which studies the emergent trope of “psychic economy” in the period of financialization in the work of both Victorian novelists (Trollope, Dickens, Eliot) and Marx’s Capital.

In conjunction with Red May Seattle. For more information on the lecture, contact Jesse Oak Taylor (English), jot8@uw.edu.