These two upcoming events will be hosted by the 19th Century Study Group, a faculty group sponsored by the Leslie Center. If you are interested in attending, please RSVP to humanities.center@dartmouth.edu indicating the event you would like to register for.
Prof. Christian Haines (Penn State University) Discusses "Metabolizing Nineteenth-Century Poetry: On Marx's Notion of Social Metabolism and its Aesthetic Implications"
Christian Haines' essay draws out the aesthetic, especially literary, implications of Karl Marx's notion of social metabolism (gesellschaftlicher Stoffwechsel). Marx's notion of metabolism has become a touchstone for ecological critiques of capitalism, as in work by John Bellamy Foster, Kohei Saito, and Jason W. Moore. Metabolism operates as a mediating device parsing and connecting environmental transformation at scales ranging from the individual laboring body to working class populations to the geographic division between the city and the countryside. He situates the concept of metabolism within Marx's critique of political economy. For Marx, metabolism names not only a process of material transformation but also a historically-situated principle of formal change. He argues that this principle illuminates nineteenth-century poetry in terms of its material conditions of possibility and the constitution of lyric personhood and pays special attention to Walter Benjamin's analysis of Charles Baudelaire, suggesting that Benjamin's reading practice models a metabolic theory of aesthetics.
Christian P. Haines is Associate Professor of English at Penn State University. He's the author of A Desire Called America: Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary Commons (Fordham UP). His essays have appeared in journals including South Atlantic Quarterly, symplokē, and the minnesota review. They've also appeared in edited volumes such as Money and American Literature (Cambridge UP) and Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn (U of Minnesota Press). He's Associate Editor of the journal Utopian Studies and editor of a forthcoming special issue of Cultural Critique: "Marxism, Form, and Futurity." He's currently writing a book, Fear of a Red Planet, on Marxism, ecology, and literature.
Tuesday, February 3
12:30-2:00 pm
Dartmouth Hall 104
Lunch will be provided. Please write to humanities.center@dartmouth.edu to register for this event.
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Yuliya Komska (German Studies) Discusses "Curious George: The Civilizing Process."
In today's internet memes and concerned parent group chats, Curious George, the "monkey" contrived by the Jewish-German-Brazilian Margret and H. A. Rey in 1939, routinely appears as an indomitable and de-civilizing force. And yet, compared to his nineteenth-century literary precursors, he seems tame. By revealing this non-linear ancestry, likely influenced by the Yoruba figure of the "trickster monkey," on the one hand, and by placing George's formation in the context of Jewish-German historian Norbert Elias's influential work The Civilizing Process, also completed in exile in 1939 and haunted by the rise of fascism, on the other, I push against the simplistic "single-origin" narratives of Curious George that dominate academic and non-academic criticism. Instead, I consider the interpretive potential of this literary character's biography re-imagined without a clear beginning or end. I argue that it helps us reframe Curious George's endurance as a case of what historian Emma Rotschild calls "infinite history," i.e., a record of momentous long-term transformations in social and natural environments that trouble readers across cultures to this day.
Thursday, February 26
12:15pm-1:45pm
Dartmouth Hall 101
Lunch will be provided. Please write to humanities.center@dartmouth.edu to register for this event.