Poetics and Theory Reading Groups

The Poetics and Theory reading group provides a forum for graduate students and faculty to engage in rigorous, focused discussion of texts that have made a significant contribution to the fields of philosophy, literary theory and poetics, social and political theory, and psychoanalysis. The reading group meets regularly to discuss a text, or set of texts, selected at the beginning of each semester on the basis of participants’ current research interests. While students enrolled in the Program in Poetics and Theory are especially encouraged to participate, the reading group is open to all members of the graduate student community, as well as to faculty.

The P&T reading group theme for 2019-2020 is COMMUNITY (broadly construed). We will be reading literary, political, philosophical, and theoretical texts that clarify and complicate our understanding of collective life. We are interested in questions such as: How do communities emerge in alliance, out of resistance, through forms of engagement and disengagement? How have communities been forged through coercion, collective trauma, socio-political crises, environmental calamity, and shared history? What are community’s antitheses and how can we think about the subversion or perversion of a collectivist ideality? What does it mean to appear for and among others, and how should we approach different vectors of visibility? How are communities unavowable, inoperable, minoritized, majoritized, constructed, mediated, and mobilized? We are interested in contract, surveillance, the artwork, immunity, capitalism, civility, race, performance, technology, dystopia, exile, citizenship, ritualism, poetry, democracy, animality, embodiment, gender, sexuality, speech, and violence all within the context of community.

Questions about the Poetics and Theory Reading Group? Please contact P&T graduate assistant Nicole Grimaldi at nicole.grimaldi@nyu.edu.

Past Reading Groups

2018-2019

For 2018-19, the reading group has been named PER/VERSE, and is being collaboratively organized by students taking the P&T certificate. It seeks to engage with texts from the fields of theory, poetics, and the teratological spaces in between. Collaboratively organized by Poetics and Theory students, this year’s theme is “perversion,” broadly understood. How has “perversion” come to signify a range of ways for engaging with power, discourse, and disciplines? What does perversion do to various epistemic, political, and sexual apparatuses by twisting them from their original courses?

2016-2017

Spring 2017 P & T reading group in conjunction with Prof. Rebecca Comay’s workshop Hegel’s Phenomenology: Death, Sovereignty, Theater

The reading group this semester will function as a preparation for Prof. Rebecca Comay’s workshop on Hegel’s Phenomenology in April. Students who are planning to attend Professor Comay’s workshop are especially encouraged to participate, but everyone with an interest is warmly welcome.

For participants in the reading group who are planning to take Prof. Comay’s 2 credit workshop (COLIT-GA.2991.002 Hegel’s Phenomenology: Death, Sovereignty, Theater) for credit, it will be possible to sign up for a 2 credit Individual Research so as to form a full 4 credit course.

The reading group will have four meetings before April and one concluding meeting in May after Prof. Comay’s workshop. Our first meeting will be Friday February 17th, 3 pm. Room 305

Reading:

“Preface: On Scientific Cognition” pp. 1-45 in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, A. V. Miller translation.

“Introduction” pp 46-57.

Readings: 2015-16

Tuesday, October 6, 2015
19 University Place, Rm. 305 | 6:30PM

Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (pp. 690-712)
Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (Chapter 7)

Friday, October 23, 2015
19 University Place, Rm. 305 | 2:00PM

Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (sections reprinted in Selected Writings [1988], Mark Poster, ed.) and The Mirror of Production (Chapters 1-2)

*Throughout the spring semester, the Program in Poetics and Theory will collaborate with the Feminist Reading Group at NYU, which is conducting a series of discussions on the theme of “feminist porn wars.”

Monday, February 1, 2016
19 University Place, Rm. 305 | 6:00PM

Jennifer C. Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (Introduction and Chapter 1)

Monday, February 15, 2016
19 University Place, Rm. 305 | 6:00PM

Juana María Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (Chapter 4)

Monday, February 29, 2016
19 University Place, Rm. 305 | 6:00PM

Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (Introduction, Chapter 5, and Conclusion)
Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human(Introduction, and Chapters 2 and 6)

Monday, March 21, 2016
19 University Place, Rm. 305 | 6:00PM

Carole S. Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (selected chapters)
Ian Halley, “Queer Theory by Men”
Robyn Wiegman, “Dear Ian”

Monday, April 4, 2016
19 University Place, Rm. 305 | 6:00PM

Drucilla Cornell, The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography, and Sexual Harassment (Chapter 3)

Monday, April 18, 2016
19 University Place, Rm. 305 | 6:00PM

Mireille Miller-Young, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography (Chapters 4-5)

Monday, May 2, 2016
19 University Place, Rm. 305 | 6:00PM

Linda Miller, “Fetishism and Hard Core: Marx, Freud, and the ‘Money Shot’ ”
Tristan Taormino, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young, eds., The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (essays by Tobi Hill-Meyer and Bobby Noble)

2014-15

Tuesday, February 24, 2015
19 University Place, Rm. 222 | 6:30PM

Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism (Chapters 1-4)

Friday, March 13, 2015
19 University Place, Rm. 222 | 4:30PM

Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism (Chapters 5-6 and Appendix 1)

Tuesday, March 31, 2015
19 University Place, Rm. 337 | 6:30PM

Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism (Chapters 7-8 and “Note on the ISAs”)

Tuesday, April 14, 2015
19 University Place, Rm. 337 | 6:30PM

Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism (Chapters 9-11)

Tuesday, April 28, 2015
19 University Place, Rm. 337 | 6:30PM

Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism (Chapter 12)

2013-14

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (§10) and The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (§10)
Jacques Derrida, “Geschlecht I: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference”

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Martin Heidegger, “Language in the Poem” and What Is Called Thinking? (I)
Jacques Derrida, “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand”

2012-13

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (Preface and Introduction)

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (Preface and Introduction)

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (§§90-110)

2011-12

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Spinoza, Ethics (Bks. I-II)
Gilles Deleuze, “Spinoza and the Three ‘Ethics’ “

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Spinoza, Ethics (Bks. II-III)

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Spinoza, Ethics (Bks. II-III)

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Spinoza, Ethics (Bk. III)

2010-11

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Étienne Balibar, “The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism”

Friday, February 11, 2011

Marc Redfield, The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror

2009-10

Friday, December 11, 2009

Georg Lukács, “What is Orthodox Marxism?” and “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” (I)
Antonio Gramsci, “The Study of Philosophy,” “State and Civil Society,” and “Critical Notes on an Attempt at Popular Sociology”

Friday, February 5, 2010

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Chapters 3-4)

Friday, February 19, 2010

Ernesto Laclau, “Articulation and the Limits of Metaphor”