2nd Session (15 November)

The Prison-House of Agency:

Neoliberal Hegemony and Popular Aesthetics in Britain and the US

Dr Jane Elliott

(King's College London)

6-8pm, Tuesday 15th November

Stewart House, room ST271 (2nd floor)

Dr Jane Elliott is Senior Lecturer in late 20th and 21st Century Literary and Cultural Studies. She is also Humanities Editor for The Public Intellectual journal. Dr Elliott's research focuses on post-1945 fiction, contemporary theory and the novel during and after postmodernism. Her recent publications include Theory After 'Theory', co-edited with Professor Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 2011) and the monograph Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory: Representing National Time (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008).

Her current research explores the conjoined aesthetic and political developments that have emerged since the turn of the 21st-century and the waning of the postmodern moment. Dr Elliott is currently working on a monograph that explores the intersection of neoliberal microeconomics, popular aesthetics and the Left theorization of agency in a variety of American and British novels and films, from the novel and film Never Let Me Go to the horror franchise Saw to Hurricane Katrina documentaries.

Recommended Reading:

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2004). Chapter 11, "28 March 1979," pp. 267-289.

Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Chapter 2, "Freedom," pp. 61-97.

Laurent Berlant, ‘Cruel Optimism: On Marx, Loss and the Senses’, New Formations 63 (Winter 2007/2008): pp. 33-51.

All are welcome to attend.