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51); of the extraordinarily fluid series of registers and idioms in which Edgar-Tom speaks (chapter 8, "Tom's Voices, " and chapter 10, "Tom's Places"); of the scene in which Edgar-Tom leads the blinded Gloucester (chapter 14, "Shuttered Genealogy"); and of the duel between Edgar and Edmund (221-24). Because of readings like this, I will put Lear on my undergraduate syllabus next year for the first time since I can't remember when. I always avoid the play because I feel like students don't get it and I don't know how to tell them what they are supposed to get. Poor Tom has changed this; it has given me a provocative way of thinking about Lear, and an exciting, challenging model for reading it (to follow and to resist) which I did not have before.

This introductory essay intends to advance the core arguments of a lengthy interrogation of Marxism and form in the twenty-first century. This shorter version of the project cannot include the set of close readings and detailed examinations of individual forms and texts that conclude the longer version. What I will attempt in what follows is to foreground the basic principles of a Marxist formalist method for the contemporary conjuncture, as well as address the stakes of such a critical project in the context of contemporary discussions surrounding form, genre, literariness, disciplinarity, and reading. Such an analysis of contemporary Marxist formalism must, of course, address the currently vibrant field of new formalism, which, as I shall argue, stands at times in polar opposition to Marxist praxis. This essay therefore has two projects. As indicated by the title of this special issue of Mediations, the core of Marxist literary critique is built upon a constant process of negation and sublation, on the need to develop a Marxist critical "now" by constantly revisiting and continually questioning its own method. In this essay I will 1.) illustrate the dialectical connection between literary form and the form of thought that determines how we talk about literature (and form) in the first place, and 2.) gesture into the direction of a Marxist critical method for the twenty-first century that eclipses much contemporary controversy surrounding concepts such as reading, method, literariness, literature, literary history, and form by developing a negative dialectical account of form in historically specific relation to a general process I will describe as capitalism's cultural regulation.

At the center of Enrique Dussel's Twenty eses on Politics stand a series of basic yet monumental questions. What is power? What is politics? Can power be held? Can it be taken? Can it be exercised? If so, how? What is the relationship between power and the people, power and politics, politics and the people? Dussel's twenty theses are best read not as answers to these questions, but rather as propositions, or strategies for producing answers to such questions in the rst place. eses 1 through 10 propose a rethinking of the big questions the book addresses through a series of preliminary re ections on the interpretive and conceptual choices we tend to make when approaching questions of politics or power. Why is it that we often think of power as a negative thing? What if we thought of power as something positive? at is, what if we assumed that power does not simply equal domination, but instead that it is inherently a positive force? How would such a rst step allow us to rethink categories such as "the people," "politics," "the state," "political institutions" and "democracy" in productive and innovative ways that additionally gesture toward the particular determinations of the present? eses 11 through 20 contain guidelines for a practical implementation of a carefully developed methodological framework for rethinking political philosophy in the current conjuncture.

Marxism and the Critique of Value aims to complete the critique of the value-form that was initiated by Marx. While Marx’s “esoteric” critique of value has been rediscovered from time to time by post-Marxists who know they’ve found something interesting but don’t quite know which end is the handle, Anglophone Marxism has tended to bury this esoteric critique beneath a more redistributionist understanding of Marx. The essays in this volume attempt to think the critique of value through to the end, and to draw out its implications for the current economic crisis; for violence, Islamism, gender relations, masculinity, and the concept of class; for revolutionary practice and agency; for the role of the state and the future of the commons; for the concepts that come down to us from Enlightenment thought: indeed, for the manifold phenomena that characterize contemporary society under a capitalism in crisis.

Amplified by recent economic crises, the engagement with the logic of finance capital has in the past few years frequently been carried out on the plane of time. Works such as Franco Berardi's The Soul at Work and After the Future, Slavoj Žižek's Living in the End Times, Christian Marazzi's Capital and Language, Bernard Stiegler's For a New Critique of Political Economy, and of course the recent work of Paul Virilio are but a few of many examples of a wider theoretical interest in the relation between finance capital and the modalities of thinking time it requires (and abolishes) that directly mirror a distinct formal and narratological shift in recent novelistic production. Yet, the essay shows, the contemporary novel has for about fifteen years been able to generate precisely those answers other forms of thought have as of yet failed to produce, illustrating rather surprisingly that, in contrast to the novel, theory and criticism has added little to our analysis of the actual structural and epistemological foundations of a crisis often merely described and taxonomized, yet not more rigorously understood than that which Fredric Jameson already cursorily diagnosed in 1994 as a "weakness in imagination," existing "for whatever reason." Recent changes in novelistic form, in particular since the novel's artistic function and ontology consists precisely in being a form of questioning time, allow us to illustrate the precise relation between structural and epistemological form that undergo a distinct change as we move into full finance capital and to understand the resulting epistemological crisis that is often mischaracterized as a crisis of time (hence falsely universalizing and ontologizing time and ultimately exempting time from time).

FlashPoints series, Northwestern UP, 2021

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In How to Read a Moment, Mathias Nilges shows that time is inseparable from the stories we tell about it, demonstrating that the contemporary American novel offers new ways to make sense of the temporality that governs our present.

“Time is a thing that grows scarcer every day,” observes one of Don DeLillo’s characters. “The future is gone,” The Baffler argues. “Where’s my hoverboard!?” a meme demands. Contemporary capitalism, a system that insists that everything happen at once, creates problems for social thought and narrative alike. After all, how does one tell the time of instantaneity? In this moment of on-demand service and instant trading, it has become difficult to imagine the future.

The novel emerged as the art form of a rapidly changing modern world, a way of telling time in its progress. Nilges argues that this historical mission is renewed today through works that understand contemporaneity as a form of time shaping that props up our material world and cultural imagination. But the contemporary American novel does not simply associate our present with a crisis of futurity. Through analyses of works by authors such as DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, Charles Yu, and Colson Whitehead, Nilges illustrates that the novel presents ways to make sense of the temporality that controls our purportedly fully contemporary world. In so doing, the novel recovers a sense of possibility and hope, forwarding a dazzling argument for its own importance today.

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This book brings together essays that ask how one may chart more productive engagements with the methodological foundations of literary studies, a discipline that is finding itself in a moment of severe crisis. The temptation to reduce methodological debates to method wars constitutes one of the main obstacles for what ought to be the common goal of our discipline: to articulate the possible and indeed necessary futures of literary studies.

How do we think about the future of literary studies in the funerary climate that has engendered the belief that we need to fight our internal wars for survival? How might (must?) our understanding of what literary criticism is and does change? How do we formulate possible futures for literary studies while grappling with the significant problems that our present poses? The chapters in this volume stage hopeful interventions that seek to contribute to the effort to explore the futures of literary studies by way of and conceived as a collective endeavor. Together, the authors advance a call for better, more useful, more active, more networked, and, yes, even for abandoned versions of the always multiple and joyously contradictory discipline that is called literary studies.

This book will be beneficial to students and scholars of English literature, literary theory and literary studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice and are accompanied by a new Preface.

This essay argues that Theodor Adorno's reflections on the novel form respond to a problem that is focused in his commentaries on the cinema: how to develop forms of aesthetic rationality at a historical moment in which medium-specific aesthetic reflection may be obsolete. Adorno's commentaries on novelistic and filmic language register this historical situation of art. At the same time, this line of thought serves a crucial underlying interest of Adorno's aesthetic theory-to maintain art's thought of uneven development, its vanishing distinction from the technological forms of its social context. FULL TEXT In The Language of New Media (2001), Lev Manovich calls attention to an oddity in the development of computer-generated images in film. These images, in films such as Terminator 2 (1991) and Jurassic Park (1993), initially appeared "too perfect" or "too real." In order to appear like photographic images, the computer graphics of these films needed to be "degraded": "their perfection had to be diluted to match the imperfection of film's graininess" (201-02). This effect was achieved, for example, by reducing the resolution of the computer-generated images or softening their edges through computer-generated algorithms, procedures that allowed the images to blend with film footage. The unwelcome excessive detail and sharpness of computer-generated images, and the attempt to overcome this quality, suggest an ambiguous regression in technical development, a movement that proceeds in opposing directions simultaneously, forward and backward: at once a technological advancement and an apparent regression to the "imperfection" or lack of technical mastery that marked an earlier stage of development. Framed in these terms, this moment echoes an earlier juncture in the history of thinking about film, one that also involved a discrepancy between the demands of cinematic work and the contemporary state of technological advancement. In his 1966 commentary "Transparencies on Film," Theodor Adorno notes the particular situation of cinema at the moment he is writing, in which "awkward and unprofessional cinema" may play a certain role: While in autonomous art anything lagging behind the already established technical standard does not rate, vis-à-vis the culture industry-whose standard excludes everything but the predigested and the already integrated, just as the cosmetic trade eliminates facial wrinkles-works which have not completely mastered their technique, conveying as a result something consolingly uncontrolled and accidental, have a liberating quality. (199) Adorno's interest in film aesthetics is usually associated with his attempt to think about cinematic construction or montage, which would run counter to the semblance of mimetic immediacy in the filmic medium. In the passage cited above, however, we get a different scenario: the construction of film as art is apparently seen as involving not an imminent progress or mastery of cinematic technique, but rather a relaxing or deterioration of such technique.

This article situates Beckett's trilogy in relationship to theoretical explorations of the role of biographical and autobiographical form in the history of the novel and literary modernism. While modernist literature has been read as marking the collapse of nineteenth-century models of narrative development, the work of Beckett and Theodor Adorno suggests an alternative scenario, according to which modernism becomes invested in iterative modes of diachronic form that perpetuate the normative aspirations of nineteenth-century developmental thought.

While critical commentary on Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) has been various and divided, few have questioned its seismic importance for the development of Western Marxism. Strangely though, in view both of the recognized importance of this text and the expanding contemporary appreciation of Adorno’s work, Dialectic of Enlightenment has regularly generated negative commentary and critical animosity. In view of this critical context, the aim of this paper is not to mount a global defense of Dialectic of Enlightenment, but rather to reconstruct certain parameters of the book that are missed in the common criticism that Horkheimer and Adorno relinquish the project of enlightenment and lapse into indeterminate ahistorical generalization. I argue that the mutation in Marxist thought in Dialectic of Enlightenment, to be properly understood, needs to be seen as intrinsically involved with the particular linguistic turn developed in this text. The revised project of enlightenment it elaborates hinges on a reflection on the language of the epic and the novel and a series of textual operations that are central to this reflection: reporting, description, stylization, parody, reading. In this this way Dialectic of Enlightenment anticipates Adorno’s later thinking about and through the language of the epic and the novel, which plays a fundamental if generally underappreciated role in his work. These textual operations become intrinsic to a revised conception of what it means to think historically, to imagine historical difference and progression, in the wake of the purported ruin of systems of enlightenment thought, after the demise of any margin of critical difference offered by cultural criticism and artistic reflection, and after the foundering of the revolutionary aspirations of the European left. This reconception of enlightenment thought in Dialectic of Enlightenment follows from the claim that intrinsic social contradiction is no longer operative as a driver of historical development, and a corresponding recognition that forms of thought predicated on negation and contradiction have lost their critical purchase. Where received modes of Marxist and Hegelian dialectic may have been appropriate for an ostensibly liberal phase of capitalism, in which social contradictions propel historical development, in the ruins of this historical phase, thought is challenged to develop modes that integrate the manifest irrationality of its social context. This paper attempts to describe certain of these modes in its account of various textual operations developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment, operations that contribute to this text’s reimagining of what thought might look like in the middle of the twentieth century.