Over the last twenty years or so, postcritique has become a momentous challenger to established ways of doing literary scholarship. To some, postcritique is the most significant reorientation of literary criticism since the 1980s, when the New Historicists chased deconstruction out of English departments. To others, postcritique represents a lamentable surrender to the de-politicizing agenda of the neoliberal university. In this class, students will have the opportunity to reexamine the tradition of critique and gain an understanding of how postcritique emerged from it. We will study major examples of critique and postcritique and trace the intellectual histories that animate these different practices of literary scholarship. Central figures are likely to include Marx, Freud, representatives of the Frankfurt School, Fredric Jameson, Paul Ricoeur, Rita Felski, Bruno Latour, Eve Sedgwick, and Heather Love.
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