Gilbert and Shortall 30th April 2007

On the 30th of April we have two distinguished speakers coming to talk to us at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths about two very interesting and pertinent aspects of contemporary Marxist thought. From 2.00 to 3.30 Professor Geoff Gilbert will be speaking about “The Meaning of Contemporary Realism: The Amortissement of Idiom in Daewoo,” and from 6.30 to 8.00 we have Felton Shortall, author of The Incomplete Marx, who will be presenting a talk entitled “The Structure of Marx’s Capital.” Both talks will take place in the Council Room of the Laurie Grove Baths at Goldsmiths.

Professor Gilbert will be addressing Georg Lukács’ work on literature, and will be considering it as “the last sustained attempt to energise the category of literary realism’ as both concept and project.” Through a critical appraisal of Lukács’ concern with the inauthenticity of reification and its possible supersession via a ‘realist’ critique, Professor Gilbert will be looking at a contemporary social realist novel (François Bon's Daewoo, 2004), and will be considering the resources that modern literature presents to us as a means for conducting a critique of contemporary capitalism.

Felton Shortall’s The Incomplete Marx (1994) charted the development of Marx’s thought through a close consideration of his writings in order to illuminate his unfinished final work, Capital. Claiming that Marx provisionally closed off a full discussion of class struggle in Capital in order to describe the capitalist economy as a stable whole, Shortall argued that an account of the disruptive effects of this struggle upon value should be interpolated into the texts. His talk on the structure of Marx's most famous and influential work will reprise these claims in the light of his subsequent research, and will indicate the extent to which Capital points beyond itself to a conclusion that it's author did not live to complete.

To recap:

2.00 to 3.30pm Professor Geoff Gilbert: “The Meaning of Contemporary Realism: The Amortissement of Idiom in Daewoo,”

6.30 to 8.00pm Felton Shortall, author of The Incomplete Marx, on “The Structure of Marx’s Capital.”

All Welcome