Tom Eyers contrasts the different “movements” of the novel and the lyric poem: while moments of stasis in the novel are swept up in its narrative trajectory, atemporal moments in poetry can be juxtaposed against other kinds of temporality — for Eyers’s purposes, most importantly the temporalities of politics and history. The Theory of the Novelbecomes a theory of the lyric, undoing the persistent belief that history can only be made to appear in narrative.

What do Edgar Allen Poe, Theodor Adorno, György Lukács, and John Dos Passos have in common? All four writers understand the prevailing logic of art to be one of formal subordination. That is, they all believe that the work of art produces “a resolution that will make what we already know worth knowing.” This logic organizes the form and content of Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, a seemingly open text that, in Godek-Kiryluk’s reading, closely aligns with both Poe’s theory of composition (...) and Lukács’s desire for immanent critique. (shrink)

Ben Parker, arguing that Lukács uses “recognition” to mean anagnorisis rather than in the sense of acknowledgment, corrects a commonplace reading of History and Class Consciousness: not only to challenge assumptions about the “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” essay but also to derive a new theory of the novel from History and Class Consciousness.

Lukács describes his intellectual trajectory from 1910 - 1960.

Works of art exist. How are they possible?

Juliana Spahr reviews Jason W. Moore's Capitalism in the Web of Life.