Dartmouth Events

Theory in Dispute Series

Theory in Dispute Series Neil Larsen, UC Davis Towards a Critical Theory of 'Theory' Respondent: Amy Allen, Dartmouth

Wednesday, April 29, 2015
4:15pm – 6:30pm
Reed Hall Room 108
Intended Audience(s): Public
Categories: Conferences, Lectures & Seminars

Neil Larsen (1952 -  ) is a Professor at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches in both the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program in Critical Theory. He researches, writes, lectures and publishes extensively in the areas of Critical Theory, Marxian theory, critique and exegesis, Latin American literature and culture (including, especially, Brazil), postcolonial studies and, more recently, film and television. He has published his work in Spanish, Portuguese and German as well as English. Larsen is the author of Modernism and Hegemony (Minnesota UP; 1990); Reading North By South (Minnesota UP;1995); and DeterminationsEssays on Theory, Narrative and Nation in the Americas (Verso; 2001). His current book projects are “Towards a Critical Theory of ‘Theory’ “, and its sequel, “Principles of Immanent Critique,” both intended to serve the general scholarly, intellectual and the pedagogical aims of providing the public and especially students with an advanced, methodical introduction to the workings of Marxian immanent critique in the literary and cultural sphere. He is a member of the editorial collectives for the online journal Mediations and the German-language journal of Critical Theory, Krisis. His most recent work includes: “The Idiom of Crisis: on the Historical Immanence of Language in Adorno,” in Language without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity, ed. Gerhard Richter (Fordham UP; 2009); "Race, Periphery, Reification: Speculations on ‘Hybridity ‘ in Light of Gilberto Freyre's Casa-grande & senzala,"  Cultural Critique number 79 Fall, 2011 pp. 1-26; "Lukács sans Proletariat, or Can History and Class Consciousness be Re-historicized?," in Timothy Bewes & Timothy Hall, eds., The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence: New Essays on the Social, Political and Aesthetic Theory of Georg Lukács (London: Continuum Press, 2013); and “Literature, Immanent Critique and the Problem of Standpoint,” in Mathias Nilges & Emilio Sauri, eds. Literary Materialisms (Palgrave; 2013). While contributing to and helping to supervise and edit the German-to-English translation of its contents, Larsen also recently co-edited, along with Josh Robinson, Mathias Nilges and Nicholas Brown, Marxism and the Critique of Value (MCM’ Press, 2014), the first representative collection of essay-length writings from the contemporary German-language current of  ‘Wertkritik’ (“value critique” or sometimes “value-form critique”), by critical theorists such as the late Rober Kurz, Roswitha Scholz, Norbert Trenkle and Ernst Lohoff. He is also currently a co-editor, along with Werner Bonefeld, Chris O’Kane and Bev Best, of a proposed three volume “Handbook of Critical Theory,” to be published by Sage Publications. He has lectured regularly in the United States, Canada, the UK, Brazil and Argentina.

 

For more information, contact:
Carol Bean-Carmody

Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.