Raunak Kumar

I have an essay contrasting theory camps and communist ones in the latest issue PMLA, which reflects on the 1983 Illinois Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture conference. I sketch a material history of the perilous assumption that professional actions necessarily constitute political activity.

Postdoc research opportunity in modernist & Joyce studies: www.iasil.org/2025/10/job-...

@moneyontheleft.bsky.social gave me the privilege + pleasure of reading an earlier draft; I'm excited to see it made public.

May this vision help generate thousands of curious convos, a robust counterculture on public finance...

....and, one day, radical financial action at a scale of millions.

A Marxist Mosaic

Now out in paperback with @haymarketbooks.org, Jairus Banaji, *A Marxist Mosaic: Selected Writings 1968–2022*. Currently 20% off from the Haymarket Books website.

Melvyn Bragg decides to step down from presenting In Our Time After 26 years on the programme, the legendary presenter bids farewell to the series

A huge moment -- Melvyn Bragg steps down from In Our Time after over a quarter of a century. What a programme and what a legacy! Just a model for how to make great, clever, engaging radio, and a twenty-seven-year experiment that proves there's a huge global audience for smart, scholarly programming.

On the Rural is the first English collection to translate Lefebvre’s crucial but lesser-known writings on rural sociology and political economy

📚 buff.ly/w3mL7nL

Visit us at #RGS2025 or online: buff.ly/QVZnPGz

@rgs-ibghe.bsky.social @uminnpress.bsky.social

The MSA offers a limited number of $500 travel grants for conference participants in the Boston conference this Oct. The deadline is this Friday, August 15! Apply here: www.moderniststudies.org/members/trav...

Don't forget to register for the conference by Aug. 31 for reduced registration rates!

Tarot card image of the empress with a crown of stars. Text reads Weird Modernisms BAMS/ MSA 1- 4 July 2026 Loughborough University, UK

In 2026, the MSA Conference will look a bit different-- weird, even! That's because we're having a joint conference with BAMS @modernistudies.bsky.social in Loughborough, UK from July 1- 4, 2026. The CFP will be out soon! But in the meantime, please save the date.

"Ideology: Marx & Lukacs" by Fredric Jameson 1977 Institute On Culture & Society

Final installment of The Jameson Tapes. Your guide to becoming an “ideological lexicologist”!

The Jameson Tapes, Side A with Isabel Bartholomew, Anna Kornbluh, Caleb Smith, Robert Tally, & Fredric Jameson

NEW!
1st of 2 installments contextualizing Jameson's lectures at the 1977 Institute On Culture & Society, discusses "Marxism & Historicism," historicizing the lectures, recovering them, the commodity as its own ideology, long arc of Jameson's influence

theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/the-jameso...

lol. someone edited David Damrosch's wiki page to mention WReC
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_D...

🎉 New Benchmark Alert: KRISTEVA – Close‑Reading for LLMs📚

I’m excited to announce a new paper accepted to ACL 2025, in collaboration with Patrick Sui, Philippe Laban, and others!

@danieljhartley.bsky.social

Now published: 'Prose Style and Politics: Marx as Dialectical Writer' by Jim Kincaid.

This is also the odd feature of time in Capitalism; periodisation is tricky when we are dealing with the moment of finance capitalism.

I’m trying to think production of ‘intelligence’ in both- ‘accumulation’ and ‘expropriation’. Like ‘money’ its form of mediation of human labour but it’s only usable as ‘capital’. AI is being used in speculative finance, not in imperial power grab, which means we have skipped that phase.

A very compelling argument though!

But we might be missing its paradoxical speculative, creative aspect—how it makes up stuff out of other stuff vis a vis ‘intelligence’—the very next ‘moment’ of capitalism in Arrighi’s schema: finance. We have to look at ‘accumulation’ with its dialectically opposite term ‘expropriation’.

Jameson Session 1 Full Video | Michael Burns Get more from Michael Burns on Patreon

reminder that the Frederic Jameson reading group is up and running over on Patreon. Aiming to make this one interesting for folks with a background in philosophy/theory while also accessible for those without one.

www.patreon.com/posts/jameso...

Pink orange clouds at sunset over a silhouetted treed landscape

It’s been so smoky grey here I’m missing these sunsets 🌅 #sunset

If you want to read deeply researched accounts of what happened to novels in the last fifty or so years, may I recommend Novel Competition: American Fiction and the Cultural Economy, 1965–1999 by Evan Brier uipress.uiowa.edu/books/novel-...

Critiquing ‘spreedsheet school of criticism’ by putting it into genre fiction? Love it

punx not dead

The Arts Council announces Éilís Ní Dhuibhne as the Laureate for Irish Fiction 2025 - 2028  - The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon The Arts Council is delighted to announce the appointment of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne as the Laureate for Irish Fiction 2025 – 2028.   The Laureate for Irish Fiction is an initiative of the Arts Council. The...

artscouncil.ie/news/the-art...

My book Teenage Time comes out August 21st from Bloomsbury: www.bloomsbury.com/uk/teenage-t... Here it is!

Patricia Lockwood · Arrayed in Shining Scales: Solving Sylvia Plath I was under no illusion that The Collected Prose would solve the mystery, or lay to rest the lie, of how Plath was...

‘Any account of Plath’s life must also hurtle, trudge or wander towards her death, and we will always have that wrong.’

@tricialockwood.bsky.social on Sylvia Plath: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

The Irish Novel of History in History 13 June 2025 Raunak Kumar, IIT Roorkee, Roorkee, India How does a national tale become a world text? That is the question which Franco Moretti approaches in Modern Epic, by proposing a very differe…

Next, we have @raunak.bsky.social's article on ‘The Irish Novel of History in History,’ a theoretical analysis of historical narrativity, performed through a deconstructionist reading of Joyce's 'Ulysses'.
modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com/2025/06/13/t...

Screenshot of a pdf of the book ‘Hegel, Haiti and Universal History’, page no. 149, with highlighted text that reads: “By the same token, while we may easily share Sala-Molin's moral outrage, discussed in "Hegel and Haiti," at the way European Enlightenment philosophers railed against slavery except where it literally existed, we cannot deny that a comparable moral outrage is occurring at this moment, one that future generations will find just as deplorable (this is our moral hope), the fact that political collectives proclaim themselves champions of human rights and the rule of law and then deny these to a whole list of enemy ex-ceptions, as if humanity itself were the monopoly of their own privileged members-their war a just war, their terrorist acts a moral duty, their death and destruction legitimated by reason, or progress, or the divine.”

Susan Buck-Morss’s ‘Hegel, Haiti and Universal History’ written in 2009 speaks for this moment as well while a history of violence turns over again… (p. 149)

THE ORIOLE 3rd September 1939 the oriole entered the capital of dawn. the sword of his song shut the sad bed. all things came to an end for all time.

René Char, tr. Tony Montague