In 1979, the British philosopher Gillian Rose delivered a series of lectures on Critical Theory, aesthetics, and politics at the University of Sussex, nominally as part of an undergrad great books course. Fresh off her close exegesis of the work and style of Theodor Adorno in The Melancholy Science, Rose’s lectures, now published as Marxist Modernism, serve not only as “introductory lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory,” but highlight Rose at the early heights of her interpretative, synthetic, and creative powers. These crucial lectures laid the foundations for some of her later major works—Hegel Contra Sociology, The Broken Middle, Mourning Becomes the Law—and preceded her late style turn to the consolations of Christian piety. In them, Rose elucidates the authors at hand—Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Brecht, Horkheimer, Lukács, and others—as well as their interconnections, influences, and implications. More than a primer, Rose extrapolates and speculates in a marvel of clear, if pointed, ways on Critical Theory itself, its styles as much as its arguments, and its (all too necessary) emphases on mediation, aesthetics, and politics. How do Rose’s interpretations help or challenge understandings of the Frankfurt School? How do the lectures collected in Marxist Modernism highlight dilemmas, for both Marxism and modernism, concerning subjectivity, consciousness, society, politics, and sensory experience—dilemmas that have only intensified today?
In this course, we will read the entirety of Marxist Modernism alongside excerpts from the theorists it addresses (largely, though not exclusively, drawn from Verso’s classic Aesthetics and Politics collection), the art works and movements she references (from modernist writers to expressionist painters to Prolekult, and beyond), short bits of Rose’s other works, and reflections on Rose herself by her contemporaries, including Fredric Jameson, Jenny Turner, and others. How can we understand modernism as an art movement, a historical situation, and a political and stylistic impulse all at once? Why does Rose find modernism so vital for thinking Marxism anew in the waning days of Actually Existing Socialism? Are Rose’s Hegelian provocations convincing? How does Rose’s thought demonstrate new ways of approaching and applying Critical Theory? What, if any, influence can we see here of Rose’s engagements with Judaism? And how can Rose’s understanding of Critical Theory—as both Marxist social theory and itself modernist innovation—guide us to different ways of understanding theory today?
