February 10, 2025
Moore Hall B02
4:30 pm
Free and open to the public!

Jameson, Style, and Comparative Literature

 In his 1984 afterword to his first book, Sartre: The Origins of a Style, Jameson writes of what style meant for him.  The book in its form as a dissertation was supervised by Henri Peyre, and Jameson notes that early formation as well as the importance of his teacher, Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, Jean-Pierre Richard, as well as a reading technique shaped by Sartre himself.  But very soon, after, Jameson’s attention to style shifts through his emphasis on the Franksfurt School and on psychoanalysis. The talk will address his use of the term style, its relation to literary terms like narrative and form, but also his tracing of style as symptom of something else, and his development of style in relation to sensation, the signature, singularity, collectivity, and species-being.  Through a reading of the changing nature of attention to style, we can see how he brings together semiotics and dialectics to understand the seeds of time.  The talk will address the implications of Jameson’s work for comparative literature as a field and as a project.  It addresses how to think cultural forms like literature in relation to politics and social change.  To that end, we will consider Jameson’s work on misogyny and fascism, and on feminist utopias.

Ranjana Khanna is Professor of English, Women's Studies, and the Literature Program at Duke University. She works on Anglo- and Francophone Postcolonial theory and literature, and Film, Psychoanalysis, and Feminist theory. She has published widely on transnational feminism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial and feminist theory, literature, and film. She is the author of Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2003) and Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation 1830.

*date, location and time subject to change*