Graduate Reading Groups
Graduate Program Reading Groups
Critical English Studies Reading Group: Open Admissions
The English Studies Reading Group convenes irregularly to read and discuss new works of scholarship that examine aspects of English Studies as a discipline and profession. In 2022, the group convened to discuss Rachel Sagner Burma and Laura Heffernan’s The Teaching Archive. This year, it will focus on Danica Savonick’s Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College (Duke UP, 2024).
From Duke UP: In Open Admissions Danica Savonick traces the largely untold story of the teaching experience of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich at the City University of New York (CUNY) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. [. . .] This period, during which CUNY guaranteed tuition-free admission to every city high school graduate, was one of the most controversial in US educational history. In addition to recovering the pedagogical legacy of these writers, Savonick shows how teaching in CUNY’s free and open classrooms fundamentally altered their writing and, with it, the course of American literature and feminist criticism.
This year, the group aims to bring faculty and students at Cal Poly into conversation with faculty and students at the University of Northern Georgia, Kurunegala Open University of Sri Lanka, and Cambridge University. Meetings will take place over Zoom, days and times TBD. However, participants should expect that meetings will occur in the early morning (7-730AM) in order to accommodate time differences. Meetings will be recorded and made available to participants.
There are funds available to purchase copies of Savonick’s book for participants. If you are interested in participating and would like a copy, then please contact me at: sruszczy@calpoly.edu by Friday, October 11. At that time I will place an order for books.
The Radical Theory Reading Group: Immediacy
The Radical Theory Reading Group convenes students and faculty in the graduate program to read and discuss a major new work in the field of contemporary critical theory, broadly and interdisciplinarity defined. This voluntary, non-credit-bearing reading group will meet in person once a month throughout Winter Quarter (days/times TBD). My hope is that this mode of engagement – open-ended in terms of its structure, informal but rigorous, and, maybe most importantly, democratic in its approach to critical inquiry and knowledge production – will inspire participants to take new directions and make new connections in their thinking and research.
Now in its second year, RTRG will read Anna Kornbluh’s major new work Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2023).
From Verso Press: “Contemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. These are values absorbed from our current economic conditions of "disintermediation": cutting out the middleman. Like Uber, but for art. Immediacy names this style to make sense of what we lose when the contradictions of twenty-first-century capitalism demand that aesthetics negate mediation. Surging realness as an aesthetic program synchs with the economic imperative to intensify circulation when production stagnates. "Flow" is the ultimate twenty-first-century buzzword, but speedy circulation grinds art down to the nub. And the bad news is that political turmoil and social challenges require more mediation. Collective will, inspiring ideas, and deliberate construction are the only way out, but our dominant style forgoes them. Considering original streaming TV, popular literature, artworld trends, and academic theories, Immediacy explains the recent obsession with immersion and today's intolerance of representation, and points to alternative forms in photography, TV, novels, and constructive theory that prioritize distance, impersonality, and big ideas instead.”
Of Kornbluh’s book, Mark McGurl (of Stanford) writes: “The sensation of reading Anna Kornbluh's Immediacy is of someone turning on the light in a dark room. Suddenly one beholds a world one had only been stumbling through and can begin, with Kornbluh's help, to trace a whole new set of relations between the disparate phenomena that define contemporary culture. The shocking conceptual clarity and rightness of its dialectical reversal of everything we thought we knew about life lived under conditions of postmodern hyper-mediation should make this book the starting point of future discussions of the nature of the present.”
Professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago, Anna Kornbluh’s research and teaching interests center on the novel, film, and cultural aesthetics in theoretical perspective, including formalist, Marxist, and psychoanalytic approaches. She is the author of Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso 2023), The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (University of Chicago 2019), Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club (Bloomsbury 2019), and Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (Fordham UP 2014). Essays on climate aesthetics, TV, academic labor, and psychoanalysis have appeared in venues like The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, Diacritics, Differences, and Portable Gray. She is a member of the UIC United Faculty bargaining team and the editorial boards of Novel, Mediations, Genre, and Parapraxis, as well as the founding facilitator of InterCcECT (The Inter Chicago Circle for Experimental Critical Theory), and a partner in Humanitiesworks.org.
Copies of Immediacy will be made available free of charge to any students who wish to participate. (I will also make an effort to source funds to purchase copies for interested faculty.) If you are interested in participating, please send an email to me (rahatch@calpoly.edu) as soon as possible, and no later than Friday, October 18.