- I am a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dubli... moreI am a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. My interests include world literature, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and Portuguese-speaking cultures. My research has been published in journals including Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, Research in African Literatures, and Rethinking Marxism, among others. I am currently working on two book projects: a monograph entitled Genres of Transition: Literature and Economy in Portuguese-speaking Southern Africa (forthcoming, Liverpool University Press); and an edited collection entitled Roberto Schwarz and World Literature (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan). I am an Associate Editor at CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture.edit
This book argues that literary production in Portuguese-speaking southern Africa has developed distinctive aesthetic idioms that critically respond to crises of global capitalism and related failures of post-colonial governance. Drawing... more
This book argues that literary production in Portuguese-speaking southern Africa has developed distinctive aesthetic idioms that critically respond to crises of global capitalism and related failures of post-colonial governance. Drawing from recent research at the intersection of world-systems analysis and materialist theories of world literature, it identifies and evaluates two generic trends in the post-independence literatures of Mozambique and Angola. From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, there is a marked tendency in Mozambican literary production towards fictional representations of ghosts, spectral effects and gothic narrative techniques. In Angola, there is an analogous outburst of literary expression from the mid-1990s onwards, in which writers increasingly turn towards dystopian images of apocalypse, ecological crisis, and the disintegration of existing modes of social reproduction. Away from a restricted focus on the decline of the post-independence Marxist-Leninist state, the book contends that the upswing in these two genres of writing functions to critically register a world-systemic horizon that both surpasses and includes locally determined, national realities. The patterned repetition of spectral and dystopian forms in Portuguese-speaking southern Africa occurred at a time of heightened capitalisation, in which the region was subjected to newly expropriative forms of accumulation and ecological enclosure via integration into a reconstellated world-system headed by neoliberal finance capital. Through close readings of texts by authors such as Mia Couto, Suleiman Cassamo, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, Pepetela, and Ondjaki, this book asks: What factors drove literary production towards the figure of the spectre in Mozambique and towards dystopia in Angola? What emerging energies and social contradictions found shape in these generic idioms in ways that existing vocabularies were unable to express? What does the geo-temporal passage from spectrality to dystopia tell us about the history of capitalist development in southern Africa, and about the restructuring of political-economic parameters across the globe?
Research Interests: World Literatures, Dystopian Literature, Postcolonial Studies, World Systems Analysis, The Lusophone World, and 14 moreMozambique, Southern Africa, World Literature, Postcolonial Literature, Lusophone Cultures, Dystopian Fiction, Angola, Postcolonial Studies (Literature), Haunting and Spectrality, Marxist Literary Theory, Southern African History, Lusophone Literature, Marxist Literary Criticism, and Lusophone Africa
This article rereads the aporia in Freud's theory of mourning as a problem for representation and aesthetics. Drawing a parallel with Kant's account of the disinterested nature of aesthetic judgement, I argue that the mourner's stubborn... more
This article rereads the aporia in Freud's theory of mourning as a problem for representation and aesthetics. Drawing a parallel with Kant's account of the disinterested nature of aesthetic judgement, I argue that the mourner's stubborn willingness to persist in the reproduction of images of the lost object, in spite of their conscious knowledge of the irreversibility of the loss, wrests a minimal zone of autonomy from the sphere of practical interests. In dialogue with Adorno and Laplanche, I conclude by arguing that Freud's inability to adequately explain the problem of mourning is less a shortcoming of his theory of libidinal economy than it is proof of the enigmaticalness of mourning itself.
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This article critically compares two recent approaches to the problem of aesthetic autonomy: Dave Beech’s Art and Value and Nicholas Brown’s Autonomy. By recentering the differences between these critics’ works around Marx’s categories of... more
This article critically compares two recent approaches to the problem of aesthetic autonomy: Dave Beech’s Art and Value and Nicholas Brown’s Autonomy. By recentering the differences between these critics’ works around Marx’s categories of subsumption, it evaluates the fraught relationship between labor and aesthetics, economy and form, art and the market. Although Beech provides a persuasive account of art’s “economic exceptionalism,” his focus on the qualitative irreducibility of artistic labor risks losing sight of what is socially unique about aesthetic production. Likewise, and inversely, while Brown’s original account of art’s internal overcoming of the commodity-form provides a generative way to rethink aesthetics in modernism’s wake, it rests on a periodizing claim for the total domination of the capitalist market that equivocates on whether artistic labor can truly be “really subsumed” under capital. The article concludes by pondering the political dimension to these theories of autonomy, which mirror in important ways debates within communization circles over subsumption, programmatism, and the aesthetics of revolution.
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This article reflects on the function of desire in the Livro do Desassossego with reference to Lacan’s nuanced reinterpretation of Kantian ethics. Over the course of Pessoa’s posthumous magnum opus, Bernardo Soares, the book’s... more
This article reflects on the function of desire in the Livro do Desassossego with reference to Lacan’s nuanced reinterpretation of Kantian ethics. Over the course of Pessoa’s posthumous magnum opus, Bernardo Soares, the book’s semi-heteronymic protagonist, often expresses his desire to escape from his hometown Lisbon and exchange the mundanity of his daily existence for spiritual and intellectual fulfilment. However, whenever Soares attempts to embark on this escape by way of dreams and the imagination, he is pervaded by an encroaching sense of attachment to the very mundanity of which he would like to free himself. These antagonistic yet mutually reinforcing desires — to stay in the city in which he loves, to escape to somewhere faraway and exotic — result in a condition of disquiet as liberating as it is paralysingly melancholic. Yet, neither does Soares 'céder sur' or 'give up on' his desire, but rather persists in the exploration of his fantasies in the same breath as he acknowledges their constitutive unrealizability. Departing from Lacan’s famous dictum that ‘the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given up on one’s desire’, I argue that Soares’s committed pursuit of oneiric escape marks him out as an ethical subject par excellence.
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This essay explores the homology between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the critique of political economy through an engagement with the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and the related tradition of the neue Marx-Lekture (New Reading of Marx, or... more
This essay explores the homology between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the critique of political economy through an engagement with the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and the related tradition of the neue Marx-Lekture (New Reading of Marx, or NML). Without claiming an easy compatibility between the Marxian and Lacanian fields, the article establishes a dialogue founded on difference and oversight. While the unconscious figures centrally in Sohn-Rethel's account of the non-knowledge or "practical solipsism" of the subject under capitalism, critics have yet to bring a Lacanian perspective to bear on the unconscious dimension of commodity exchange. Likewise, although Lacan's early formalization of the knotting of the Imaginary and the Symbolic offers a nuanced account of the structural impersonality of the social order, its relevance for the NML theorization of the autonomization of value relations has hitherto been overlooked. Reading Lacan "with" the NML, this essay redresses these oversights through a discussion of Slavoj Žižek's interpretation of the problem of form and method in Marx and Freud, and of Michael Heinrich's exegesis of the exchange process as developed in the first volume of Capital.
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This article reads the turn toward the fantastic and the supernatural in post-independence Angolan literature as a critical registration of the trajectory of neoliberal politics in the country. After positing a homology between the... more
This article reads the turn toward the fantastic and the supernatural in post-independence Angolan literature as a critical registration of the trajectory of neoliberal politics in the country. After positing a homology between the corruption of “ideal-type” realism in 1960s Latin America and similar experiments in post-independence Angola, I argue that the fiction of Ndalu de Almeida (Ondjaki) should be understood as a continuation of the social commitment of earlier Angolan writers, as it deploys a set of non realist aesthetic devices in order to challenge the entrenchment of political orthodoxies in the post-socialist Angolan state. To this end, I offer a reading of Ondjaki’s 2012 novel Os Transparentes, which marks a rupture in the author’s own intellectual development while also dovetailing with the recent wave of anti-governmental protests in Angola. Although the central fantastical motif of the novel — a man who is in the process of becoming transparent — has been read by critics as a critique of social inequality and kleptocratic governance, I suggest that it should rather be understood as an ambivalent registration of the encroaching feelings of disillusionment precipitated by the onset of Angola’s neoliberal era. With reference to Jacques Lacan’s concept of “the act,” I read this ambivalence as a specifically ethical dilemma and draw attention to problems of communication and narrative in radical political movements.
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This article offers a comparative reading of literary responses to neoliberalization in Portuguese-speaking southern Africa. Reading the proliferation of spectral effects in the Mozambican literature of the late 1980s alongside dystopian... more
This article offers a comparative reading of literary responses to neoliberalization in Portuguese-speaking southern Africa. Reading the proliferation of spectral effects in the Mozambican literature of the late 1980s alongside dystopian depictions of societal collapse in contemporary Angolan fiction, its suggests that writers in the two states have used distinctive aesthetic idioms to register the reintegration of southern Africa into the neoliberal world-system. In the fiction of Mozambican writers Aldino Muianga and Aníbal Aleluia, I show how the legacy of colonial underdevelopment and its role in the transition to neoliberalism in Mozambique is figured at the level of form through spectral and broadly gothic aesthetic strategies that intimate the rise in class tensions attendant on the establishment of a new national bourgeoisie. In Angola, similarly, I read speculative novels by Pepetela and José Eduardo Agualusa as literary responses to the ecological fallout of the heightening of capitalist extractivism that has accompanied the transition from Afro-Marxism to free market capitalism in postindependence Angola. In this way, the article shows the extent to which literary production in Mozambique and Angola has been used in an attempt to register and critique the trajectory of neoliberal politics in southern Africa and its systemic relation with the restructuring of political economic parameters across the globe.
Research Interests: World Literatures, World Systems Analysis, The Lusophone World, Mozambique, Neoliberalism, and 12 moreSouthern Africa, World Literature, Lusophone Cultures, Angola, Mozambican Literature, World-Systems Analysis, Southern African History, Lusophone Literature, World-Systems Theory, Literatura Angolana, Longue durée, and Lusophone Africa
Although the work of Mozambican authors has routinely been overlooked within the Anglophone academy, due in part to its use of a semiperipheral colonial language and a lack of availability in translation, the study of Mozambican texts... more
Although the work of Mozambican authors has routinely been overlooked within the Anglophone academy, due in part to its use of a semiperipheral colonial language and a lack of availability in translation, the study of Mozambican texts from the period of the “long” 1980s can nevertheless offer valuable insight into both the literary coordinates of neoliberal world-culture as well as the more general strategies used by peripheral writers to mediate moments of economic transition. This article seeks to remedy this disconnect through a series of comparative readings of texts by Mia Couto, Suleiman Cassamo, and Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa.
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This essay brings Jacques Derrida's Spectres of Marx (1993) into critical dialogue with the German-language school of Marxist theory known as Wertkritik. Through an engagement with value-critics such as Robert Kurz and Norbert Trenkle, as... more
This essay brings Jacques Derrida's Spectres of Marx (1993) into critical dialogue with the German-language school of Marxist theory known as Wertkritik. Through an engagement with value-critics such as Robert Kurz and Norbert Trenkle, as well as with figures associated with the neue-Marx Lektüre such as Moishe Postone and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, the essay makes four interrelated arguments: (1) that Derrida privileges the 'exoteric' over the 'esoteric' Marx through a lack of engagement with Marx's categorical critique of bourgeois political economy; (2) that Derrida projects aspects of Marx's early work into his reading of Capital in a way that sets up Marx as a straw dog against which Derrida launches his familiar critique of Western metaphysics; (3) that Derrida trans-historicises the category of labour and shares fundamental assumptions with the same traditional Marxism he sets out to critique; (4) that Derrida misrepresents the categories of use-value and exchange-value, to which he ascribes a teleological process when no such relationship exists. In this way, the essay seeks to contribute to the development of a concept of spectrality as an immanent characteristic of the value-form under capitalism.
Research Interests: Political Economy, Marxism, Hauntology, Value Theory, Jacques Derrida, and 13 moreMarxist political economy, Karl Marx, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Value Form Theory, Labor, Moishe Postone, New readings of Marx, Real Abstraction, Labour Theory of Value, Spectrality, Neue Marx-Lektüre, Wertkritik, and Labor Theory of Value
This paper proposes a reading of João Paulo Borges Coelho's novel Campo de Trânsito (2007) as a literary response to the neoliberal financialisation of oil. Exploring the correspondence between dematerialised forms of capital and the... more
This paper proposes a reading of João Paulo Borges Coelho's novel Campo de Trânsito (2007) as a literary response to the neoliberal financialisation of oil. Exploring the correspondence between dematerialised forms of capital and the abstraction of narrative modes, I argue that materialist motifs of petroleum extraction and workers' resistance in Borges Coelho's text register the 'porosity' of Mozambique's extractives sector, which in recent years has seen an influx of foreign investment after the discovery of globally significant quantities of oil and natural gas. Following the recent move to rethink world literature through the prism of petro-modernity (WReC 2015; Szeman 2017; Macdonald 2017), this investigation invites new angles of literary comparison for which oil would function as a necessary representational logic beyond its particular figuration as a plot-driver at the level of content.
Research Interests: World Literatures, Comparative Literature, Postcolonial Studies, The Lusophone World, Mozambique, and 15 moreCultural Materialism, Neoliberalism, World Literature, Ecocriticism, Lusophone Cultures, Environmental Humanities, Financialization, Mozambican Literature, Lusophone Literature, Financialisation, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Extractivism, Lusophone Africa, Petrocultures, and João Paulo Borges Coelho
Putting Blue Humanities scholarship in critical dialogue with recent research on the 'cultural fix' and 'fixed labour-power' (Shapiro 2014, 2020), this article offers a comparative reading of two Portuguese-language novels in which the... more
Putting Blue Humanities scholarship in critical dialogue with recent research on the 'cultural fix' and 'fixed labour-power' (Shapiro 2014, 2020), this article offers a comparative reading of two Portuguese-language novels in which the figure of the female water-spirit features as an index for two contrasting modes of knowing the ocean. In Jorge Amado's Mar Morto (1936), the water-spirit is registered as a passive and incomprehensible extra-human entity that looms over the poverty of the text's working-class community of dockworkers with an ominous and mysterious edge. By contrast, the water-spirit in Pepetela's novel O Desejo de Kianda (1995) is angry, active and only too immediate, seeking revenge for the extractivist violence carried out in the name of neoliberalism. Activating a broadly hydro-materialist framework, I argue that these differing conceptions of the water-spirit carry with them very different socio-ecological implications, and directly intersect with contemporary debates over hydrological crisis, the privatisation of the oceans and the enclosure of the water commons.
Research Interests: World Literatures, Marxism, Brazilian Studies, The Lusophone World, Marxist theory, and 15 moreCultural Materialism, World Literature, Ecocriticism, Lusophone Cultures, Environmental Humanities, Brazilian Literature, Jorge Amado, Anthropocene, Literatura Angolana, Pepetela, World-Ecology, Lusophone Africa, Blue Humanities, Capitalocene, and Cultural Fix
Critical realism has a long pedigree in Marxist literary criticism. Most fully developed as an aesthetic theory by Georg Lukács, it was conceptually limited by a narrow understanding of realism and the suggestion that only realist art... more
Critical realism has a long pedigree in Marxist literary criticism. Most fully developed as an aesthetic theory by Georg Lukács, it was conceptually limited by a narrow understanding of realism and the suggestion that only realist art could be critical of social reality. In an attempt to revise the rigidity and dogmatism of Lukács' theory, Michael Löwy proposed the category of 'critical irrealism' which emphasised the fact that there were many non-realist works of art that contained powerful critiques of the social order. More recently, the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) has taken up Löwy's arguments to work out the implications of critical irrealism for world-systems analysis and Trotsky's theory of combined and uneven development. This paper seeks to critically evaluate the WReC's theorisation of critical irrealism through a reading of Angolan author Ondjaki's Os Transparetes (2012). Recently published in English translation as Transparent City (2018), Ondjaki's novel is centred around a protagonist that is in the process of becoming transparent. As the novel's most salient non-realist features become a means of launching a trenchant social critique against the institutionalised corruption and industrial malpractice of Angola's 'petroleum dictatorship', it seems as if the text corroborates the WReC's conception of irrealist aesthetics as the determinate formal register of (semi-)peripherality in the capitalist world-system. However, as a category with its conceptual foundations rooted in the tradition of western European literary realism and modernism, is the relevance of critical irrealism for African literatures inherently limited? Might not the persistence of oral traditions and non-European epistemologies within texts like Os Transparentes render irrealism obsolete as an analytical category for literatures produced under non-European social conditions? Opening with an intellectual history of the concept of critical irrealism, this paper argues that the reformulation of Marxist concepts in African contexts is a productive if not vexed theoretical exercise.
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Since the signing of the Rome General Peace Accords in 1992, Mozambique has seen a proliferation of new artistic production and experimentation with new materials and techniques. This article explores the ways in which the incorporation... more
Since the signing of the Rome General Peace Accords in 1992, Mozambique has seen a proliferation of new artistic production and experimentation with new materials and techniques. This article explores the ways in which the incorporation of hitherto unused aesthetic vocabularies in Mozambican contemporary art has brought about a coexistence of artistic paradigms. Focusing on the work of Gemuce and Félix Mula, I argue that this coexistence comprises a coming together of cultural forms from different social contexts, indicating a process of 'translatability’ that tracks patterns of interference across the cultural cartography of global capital and postcolonial geopolitics.
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This article critically evaluates the only extant English translation of José Luandino Vieira’s 1964 short story collection Luuanda. I argue that the text presents three clear obstacles to translation: first, the revolutionary attitude... more
This article critically evaluates the only extant English translation of José Luandino Vieira’s 1964 short story collection Luuanda. I argue that the text presents three clear obstacles to translation: first, the revolutionary attitude that the text has come to symbolise is specific to the political climate of the source culture; second, its language is radically experimental; and third, the form of the text is subversive only with reference to the historico-political context of its country of origin. Through a close examination of Tamara L. Bender’s attempts at negotiating these obstacles for an Anglophone readership, I explore the ways in which cultural difference can be mediated and recreated through translative practices.
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This chapter reads the figure of the zombie in Pedro Costa’s film Casa de Lava as an allegory for the postcolonial migrant worker. Originally intended as an adaptation of Jacques Tourneur’s genre-classic I Walked with a Zombie, Costa’s... more
This chapter reads the figure of the zombie in Pedro Costa’s film Casa de Lava as an allegory for the postcolonial migrant worker. Originally intended as an adaptation of Jacques Tourneur’s genre-classic I Walked with a Zombie, Costa’s film narrates the journey of a paperless, illiterate construction worker from Lisbon to his home in Cape Verde after an on-site accident renders him comatose. While there are no reanimated or cannibalistic corpses per se in Casa de Lava, the film is nevertheless littered with implicit and cinephile references to the aesthetics of canonical zombie movies. When understood alongside the prominence of themes of labour, unemployment, and trans-Atlantic migration, I argue that the ambivalence of this zombie aesthetic can be read as a formal registration of the world-system’s axial division of labour, and as part of a new genre of what Emilie Bickerton has termed ‘post-industrial proletkino’ that reboots the working-class commitment of earlier filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Renoir to address the reconfigured class identities of the late neoliberal era.
Reference: Waller, Thomas (2022) 'Zombie Proletkino: Labor, Race, and Genre in Pedro Costa's Casa de Lava', in Decolonizing the Undead: Rethinking Zombies in World-Literature, Film, and Media, ed. Giulia Champion, Roxanne Douglas, and Stephen Shapiro. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 106-120.
Reference: Waller, Thomas (2022) 'Zombie Proletkino: Labor, Race, and Genre in Pedro Costa's Casa de Lava', in Decolonizing the Undead: Rethinking Zombies in World-Literature, Film, and Media, ed. Giulia Champion, Roxanne Douglas, and Stephen Shapiro. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 106-120.
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Esta entrevista aborda a teoria da literatura-mundial do Warwick Research Collective (WReC), que se define como ‘a literatura do sistema-mundo capitalista’, por meio duma discussão com três membros do grupo: Neil Lazarus, Sharae Deckard e... more
Esta entrevista aborda a teoria da literatura-mundial do Warwick Research Collective (WReC), que se define como ‘a literatura do sistema-mundo capitalista’, por meio duma discussão com três membros do grupo: Neil Lazarus, Sharae Deckard e Michael Niblett. Ao longo da entrevista, abrangemos a conjuntura disciplinar que deu origem à debate crescente da literatura mundial e que estimulou o grupo a juntar-se e a formular a sua teoria; os quadros conceptuais principais que informam as suas leituras, como a análise do sistema-mundo e ‘a lei do desenvolvimento desigual e combinado’ de Leon Trotsky; a sua engajamento com os teóricos brasileiros Roberto Schwarz e Michael Löwy; e o papel da tradução na sua concepção materialista da produção literária global. O trabalho do WReC é uma das mais sofisticadas tentativas de levar por diante a tradição marxista na crítica literária para enfrentar os contornos socioculturais cambiantes do mundo contemporâneo. Esta entrevista procura clarificar as proposições centrais do coletivo assim como problematizar algumas áreas de contenção.
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[This is a pre-print English-language draft of an interview conducted by Thomas Waller with three members of the Warwick Research Collective. It appears in Portuguese in a special issue on “A Literatura-Mundial e o Sistema-Mundial Modern”... more
[This is a pre-print English-language draft of an interview conducted by Thomas Waller with three members of the Warwick Research Collective. It appears in Portuguese in a special issue on “A Literatura-Mundial e o Sistema-Mundial Modern” (World-Literature and the Modern World-System) of Via Atlântica 40 (2021), edited by Mário César Lugarinho, Paulo de Medeiros, and Emanuelle Rodrigues dos Santos, and available at https://www.revistas.usp.br/viaatlantica/issue/view/12108]
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Reading group co-organised for the Marxist Literary Group's Institute on Culture and Society, Saint James United Church, Montreal, 2024. Participants: Thomas Waller (University College Dublin), Seb Boersma (UC Santa Cruz), Fintan... more
Reading group co-organised for the Marxist Literary Group's Institute on Culture and Society, Saint James United Church, Montreal, 2024.
Participants: Thomas Waller (University College Dublin), Seb Boersma (UC Santa Cruz), Fintan Calpin (King’s College London), Josh Jewell (University College Dublin), Rafael Lubner (King’s College London), Ed Graham (Simon Fraser University), Sean O’Brien (University of Bristol), Andy Perluzzo (Concordia University), Ali Suriel (University of Cambridge).
Participants: Thomas Waller (University College Dublin), Seb Boersma (UC Santa Cruz), Fintan Calpin (King’s College London), Josh Jewell (University College Dublin), Rafael Lubner (King’s College London), Ed Graham (Simon Fraser University), Sean O’Brien (University of Bristol), Andy Perluzzo (Concordia University), Ali Suriel (University of Cambridge).
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Paper given at the Marxist Literary Group's Institute on Culture and Society, Saint James United Church, Montreal, June 2024.
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Paper given at the Aesthetics and/or Politics symposium, University of Campinas, April 2024
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Paper given in the 'World-Systems Theory and Literary Studies' seminar at the annual conference of the American Comparative Literature Association, Montreal, March 2024
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Roundtable at the twentieth annual Historical Materialism Conference, SOAS University of London, November 2023
Participants: Thomas Waller, Sean O'Brien, Savannah Whaley, Harry Pitt-Scott, Samuel Fisher, Harry Warwick
Participants: Thomas Waller, Sean O'Brien, Savannah Whaley, Harry Pitt-Scott, Samuel Fisher, Harry Warwick
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Invited talk given in the Representations of Home Open Seminar series at the University of Lisbon, September 2023 Abstract: In his early reading of Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady, originally written in English and then... more
Invited talk given in the Representations of Home Open Seminar series at the University of Lisbon, September 2023
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In his early reading of Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady, originally written in English and then translated into Portuguese for publication in A Sereia e o desconfiado (1965), the Brazilian literary critic Roberto Schwarz identified the simultaneous exclusion from, and invitation to participate in, the social word of the narrator as a key aspect of James’s fictional method. Schwarz’s dense and detailed interpretation, in which glimpses of the wit and sophistication that characterize his later work can be glimpsed, albeit in an early and undeveloped form, touches on questions that inform much of his mature critical output: How does the novel as a form register the unequal class structure that undergirds its production? What is the relationship between the first-person narrator as a literary device and the ideological construction of the enlightened bourgeois subject? How is it possible for literary fiction that seems to disavow or actively suppress its grounding in social reality to aesthetically critique that same reality? If the work of fiction is, as James famously claimed, like a house with a million windows, then Schwarz enjoins us to view it as a house from which we are alternately excluded from and invited to participate in. Through an intellectual biography of Schwarz’s work, and a critical discussion of James’s fiction, this seminar paper discusses questions of realism and modernism, the technique of narrative unreliability, and the politics of literary form.
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In his early reading of Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady, originally written in English and then translated into Portuguese for publication in A Sereia e o desconfiado (1965), the Brazilian literary critic Roberto Schwarz identified the simultaneous exclusion from, and invitation to participate in, the social word of the narrator as a key aspect of James’s fictional method. Schwarz’s dense and detailed interpretation, in which glimpses of the wit and sophistication that characterize his later work can be glimpsed, albeit in an early and undeveloped form, touches on questions that inform much of his mature critical output: How does the novel as a form register the unequal class structure that undergirds its production? What is the relationship between the first-person narrator as a literary device and the ideological construction of the enlightened bourgeois subject? How is it possible for literary fiction that seems to disavow or actively suppress its grounding in social reality to aesthetically critique that same reality? If the work of fiction is, as James famously claimed, like a house with a million windows, then Schwarz enjoins us to view it as a house from which we are alternately excluded from and invited to participate in. Through an intellectual biography of Schwarz’s work, and a critical discussion of James’s fiction, this seminar paper discusses questions of realism and modernism, the technique of narrative unreliability, and the politics of literary form.
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Paper given at the Tenth British and Irish Lusitanists Conference, University College Cork, September 2023
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Reading group organised for the Marxist Literary Group's Institute on Culture and Society, University of Massachusetts Boston, June 2023 Organisers: Thomas Waller, Neil Larsen, and Oded Nir Abstract: The work of Roberto Schwarz... more
Reading group organised for the Marxist Literary Group's Institute on Culture and Society, University of Massachusetts Boston, June 2023
Organisers: Thomas Waller, Neil Larsen, and Oded Nir
Abstract: The work of Roberto Schwarz typically elicits superlative epithets from those who encounter it. Perry Anderson, for instance, has described him as “the finest dialectical critic writing anywhere in the world since Adorno”, while Francis Mulhern, echoing the sentiment, claims that Schwarz is “the most significant Marxist inheritor of the Frankfurt School”. Indeed, in the preface to his magisterial study of Machado de Assis, A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism (1990 [2001]), Schwarz self-consciously positions himself as an heir to the tradition of Marxist dialectical criticism. “My work,” he writes there, “would be unthinkable without the — contradictory — tradition formed by Lukács, Benjamin, Brecht, and Adorno, and without the inspiration of Marx”. And yet, while Schwarz’s name has frequently been invoked in debates over “world literature”, a more specific appraisal of his relationship with the dialectical critics has yet to be made. The purpose of this reading group is thus to reflect, not only on the importance of the Marxist literary tradition for an understanding of Schwarz’s work, but also on the role of Schwarz himself in challenging and reshaping the theoretical terrain of Marxism.
Organisers: Thomas Waller, Neil Larsen, and Oded Nir
Abstract: The work of Roberto Schwarz typically elicits superlative epithets from those who encounter it. Perry Anderson, for instance, has described him as “the finest dialectical critic writing anywhere in the world since Adorno”, while Francis Mulhern, echoing the sentiment, claims that Schwarz is “the most significant Marxist inheritor of the Frankfurt School”. Indeed, in the preface to his magisterial study of Machado de Assis, A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism (1990 [2001]), Schwarz self-consciously positions himself as an heir to the tradition of Marxist dialectical criticism. “My work,” he writes there, “would be unthinkable without the — contradictory — tradition formed by Lukács, Benjamin, Brecht, and Adorno, and without the inspiration of Marx”. And yet, while Schwarz’s name has frequently been invoked in debates over “world literature”, a more specific appraisal of his relationship with the dialectical critics has yet to be made. The purpose of this reading group is thus to reflect, not only on the importance of the Marxist literary tradition for an understanding of Schwarz’s work, but also on the role of Schwarz himself in challenging and reshaping the theoretical terrain of Marxism.
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Paper given at Growing Pains: Contemporary Culture and Crises of Growth symposium, University College Dublin, June 2023
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Panel organised for the nineteenth annual Historical Materialism Conference, SOAS University of London, November 2022 Participants: Thomas Waller, Nicholas Lawrence, and Emanuelle Santos Abstract: Roberto Schwarz has been a key... more
Panel organised for the nineteenth annual Historical Materialism Conference, SOAS University of London, November 2022
Participants: Thomas Waller, Nicholas Lawrence, and Emanuelle Santos
Abstract: Roberto Schwarz has been a key figure in world-literary studies for some time now, but the resurgence of interest in combined and uneven development has led to a renewed engagement with his work. Schwarz’s perceptive and nuanced analyses of Brazilian literature and culture – developed over the period of half a century – have provided scholars in literary studies and beyond with a model of rigorous, dialectical cultural criticism. The paradox of Schwarz’s influence is then that it is the very specificity of his readings and interpretations – always steeped in the particular moment in Brazilian history on which he is working – that has made them so widely influential. Yet this paradox can be explained by the fact that, even when dealing with the most specific of cultural details, the interpretive and political horizon of Schwarz’s work is always the modern capitalist world-system. As such, the readings of the nineteenth century Brazilian realist novel for which Schwarz is best known, although inseparable from the local trajectory of politics and economics in Brazil, are at the same time paradigmatic examples of how to study cultural production in peripheral societies from a materialist perspective.
Nevertheless, despite Schwarz’s enduring influence, there have been surprisingly few attempts to assess the scope and legacy of his work. This panel will highlight the relevance of Roberto Schwarz for contemporary debates around the concept of “world-literature”, defined by the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) as “the literature of the modern capitalist world-system”. Key research questions driving this panel’s discussion are: How can Schwarz’s project of dialectical criticism, which resists distillation into easily digestible lists of “key concepts” or straightforwardly reproducible literary-theoretical models, inform and enrich current world-literary methods of reading? What does Schwarz’s work, which is concerned above all with the specificities of literature and culture in Brazil, have to tell us about materialist approaches to the practice of comparativism, in which literary forms are seen as mediations of the global horizon of the capitalist world-system? And if Schwarz is understood as one of the foremost inheritors of the intellectual projects of earlier dialectical critics such as Georg Lukács, Water Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, then to what extent do engagements with his work entail reconceiving the legacy of the Frankfurt School itself, and Hegelian cultural criticism more generally?
Participants: Thomas Waller, Nicholas Lawrence, and Emanuelle Santos
Abstract: Roberto Schwarz has been a key figure in world-literary studies for some time now, but the resurgence of interest in combined and uneven development has led to a renewed engagement with his work. Schwarz’s perceptive and nuanced analyses of Brazilian literature and culture – developed over the period of half a century – have provided scholars in literary studies and beyond with a model of rigorous, dialectical cultural criticism. The paradox of Schwarz’s influence is then that it is the very specificity of his readings and interpretations – always steeped in the particular moment in Brazilian history on which he is working – that has made them so widely influential. Yet this paradox can be explained by the fact that, even when dealing with the most specific of cultural details, the interpretive and political horizon of Schwarz’s work is always the modern capitalist world-system. As such, the readings of the nineteenth century Brazilian realist novel for which Schwarz is best known, although inseparable from the local trajectory of politics and economics in Brazil, are at the same time paradigmatic examples of how to study cultural production in peripheral societies from a materialist perspective.
Nevertheless, despite Schwarz’s enduring influence, there have been surprisingly few attempts to assess the scope and legacy of his work. This panel will highlight the relevance of Roberto Schwarz for contemporary debates around the concept of “world-literature”, defined by the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) as “the literature of the modern capitalist world-system”. Key research questions driving this panel’s discussion are: How can Schwarz’s project of dialectical criticism, which resists distillation into easily digestible lists of “key concepts” or straightforwardly reproducible literary-theoretical models, inform and enrich current world-literary methods of reading? What does Schwarz’s work, which is concerned above all with the specificities of literature and culture in Brazil, have to tell us about materialist approaches to the practice of comparativism, in which literary forms are seen as mediations of the global horizon of the capitalist world-system? And if Schwarz is understood as one of the foremost inheritors of the intellectual projects of earlier dialectical critics such as Georg Lukács, Water Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, then to what extent do engagements with his work entail reconceiving the legacy of the Frankfurt School itself, and Hegelian cultural criticism more generally?
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Invited talk given in the Environmental Humanities Virtual Talk Series, University College Dublin, June 2022
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Paper given at Dispossessed: A Symposium on Marxism, Culture, Extraction, and Enclosure, University of Warwick, May 2022
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Paper given at Directions in Energy Humanities, symposium, University of Warwick, April 2022
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Invited talk given in the School of Languages and Cultures Seminar Series, University of Sheffield, March 2022
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Invited talk given in the Cultures, Ecologies and Economies of Oil event series, University of Southampton, July 2021
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Invited talk given at the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, University of Glasgow, December 2020
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Paper given at the Flows and Floods: Changing Environments and Cultures conference, University of Warwick, February 2020
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Paper given at the sixteenth annual Historical Materialism Conference, SOAS University of London, November 2019
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