Here's a link to Adorno and Horkheimer's essay on the Culture industry:

Note New Jameson Assignment: "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture" and "Historicism and the Shining" are the required texts. "Pleasure: A Political Issue" is now optional.Jameson is known for his injunction "Always historicize," and much of his work is a defense of and a continuation of work in marxist historicization. He is also a forceful ( Read more... )

The following articles are on Electronic Reserves (ERes). There are also copies on paper reserve. The ERes password is THEORY ( Read more... )

1. Barthes PaperWrite a Barthes paper. Take one of the chapters of Mythologies not discussed in detail in class (and not "Myth Today.") There is another collection of his short essays called The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. You could pick one of those too, (include a photocopy of the chapter you pick when you submit your paper to your TA ( Read more... )

"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" This essay was written in 1935, as fascism was surging ahead in Europe. Nazism, marked by grandiose spectacles, performances, and mass mobilizations was, for Benjamin, an aestheticization of politics, a kind of culmination of the late Romantic "art for art's sake" (l'art pour l'art) ( Read more... )

If Marx was a product of an earlier voluntarist∑ period of social transformation, of the age during and before-- on the threshold of-- socialist revolution and the collapse of capitalism, then Adorno is the product of an age marked, as some say our own is marked, by fatalism, an age where the structures of domination, commodification, and control ( Read more... )

To Be Guided To the Essential Point ( Read more... )

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte I would like everyone to read until "Here is Rhodes! Jump Here!" on page 332. If this essay interests you, and if you know or can find out enough about French revolutionary history to help with background, go on reading. In particular, the section beginning on page 344 "On the threshold of the February ( Read more... )

If anyone's interested in more on Feuerbach, most of his works, translated, are here:

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/

You will find at:

http://www.marxists.org/

a wealth of texts, a pretty good guide for students, a glossary, and other useful things.

"Only one man understands me, and even he does not." G.W.F. Hegel ( Read more... )