0.0

credits

Average Course Rating

Recent global crises of capital accumulation have obliged both scholarly and journalistic accounts of capitalism to become more sophisticated and comprehensive. This course will be an introduction to some of those accounts. We will approach the problem of describing capital and its dynamics from several angles: conversations about combined and uneven development, about the racialization of enslaved and “surplus” populations; about the forms of social reproduction (often gendered) proximate to the wage; about technological change, robotification, and its implications for the production of capitalist value; about theories of the value-form itself. One aim of this course will be to think about how a better understanding of capital — its history and its mechanics — can make us better scholars of literature, so we will also devote ourselves to assessing the resources and the limits of earlier literary-critical accounts of literature’s relationship to capital accumulation.