Department of English

This course will focus on the works of Marx, with an eye to how those works entail and are elaborated into accounts of globality. We will bring a philosophical, rhetorical, and methodological attention to Marx’s writings in order to see how those writings might be appropriated in unorthodox ways to generate cultural criticism. We will begin by familiarizing ourselves with Marx’s early writings, paying particular attention both to the hinge between idealism and materialism and to Marx’s method of interpretation. We will then closely consider Marx’s writings on colonialism, dispossession, and the global economy; second international theories of imperialism; anarchism; the Latin American dependentistas and world-systems theory; Atlantic slavery; and selected Marxist theories of gender, sexuality, and race.