What comes after language in literary theory? How to think culture, structure, texture, and subjectivity outside of, or partially independent of syntactic and semantic conceits, regardless of syntagmatic and paradigmatic modes of thought? Put differently: In what sense may critical theory and Continental philosophy address the affective, ecological, and material disposition of culture, structure, textuality, and subjectivity?
This seminar inquires into the stakes, means, and ends of contemporary theory after linguistic and cultural constructivism. It thus examines some of the major thematic strands of today’s post-linguistic turns: those of affect, ecology, and materiality. If structuralism and poststructuralism, cultural studies and discourse analysis, and psychoanalysis and deconstruction continued to revolve around the intricacies of meaning-making, modeled after language-based complexities, the late twentieth-century, millennial, and postmillennial trends in theory seem to focus on what may be called the primacy of the somatic – the felt, the lived, the affective, the sincere, the ecological, and, thus, the material. Seemingly, after irony, cynicism, and language games: affect, ecology, and materiality. Therefore, the participants of this seminar will examine how contemporary post-linguistic turns have revised, ridiculed, and dismissed – but also, at times, worshipped, embraced, and returned to – the terms and concepts that were constitutive of literary studies qua cultural studies: race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, as well as class and sociality. While reading seminal texts by (post)structuralists including Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler the participants will examine in particular the current themes of affect, ecology, and materiality via the writings of Bruno Latour, Karen Barad, Fred Moten, Jack Halberstam, Quentin Meillassoux, Catherine Malabou, Brian Massumi, Steven Shaviro, Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, and others.

Students must have purchased and started reading Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction by October 24. The majority of the texts to be discussed, however, will be made available digitally, after the introductory session.