ACLA Seminar Proletarian Aesthetics
The 1920s and 30s witnessed the rise of an international proletarian movement in literature and the arts that sought to revise and revolutionize bourgeois art forms. Working in parallel to political parties and activities of various kinds, the writers associated with the proletarian movement often found themselves restrained by bourgeois art forms and reception models with their embedded notions of individualism and liberalism. This struggle between a new revolutionizing aesthetics and the inherited limitations of the 19th century realist/naturalist novel can be detected in the works of writers situated in different parts of the world, marking a transnational space of contestation stretching far beyond old Europe and the emerging Soviet Union. This seminar proposes to re-examine the proletarian novel and by extension the committed tradition of the 20s and 30s beyond the confines of national literatures emphasizing the international context of this movement. We invite proposals from different national contexts that seek to revise and engage the committed artwork beyond the cold war paradigm that posited these works of art as stale and outdated. Instead, we emphasize the innovations, the tragic optimism found in these works, their attempts to cognitively map the social order, to refigure portrayals of imperialism, colonialism, and war, and to link proletarian and anticolonial struggles, while also considering the failures, the specific problems and deadlocks writers and artists engaged with in their quest for a new radical literary tradition that could transcend the bourgeois art form and contribute to the movement for revolutionary change in local contexts.
Please submit proposals to Hunter Bivens (abivens@ucsc.edu) or through the ACLA website (https://www.acla.org/proletarian-aesthetics) by September 21.
Topics of interest include:
- Revisiting and reexamining particular authors and/or artists associated with the movement
- Revisiting particular national variants of the committed tradition and the connection between revolutionary and anticolonial literature
- The afterlife of the committed artwork and their authors, i.e. how reception histories of particular authors were shaped often during periods that were quite hostile to political commitment in art
- Realism, social realism and proletarian realism
- Tensions between proletarian literature and Popular Front culture
- Discussions of formal innovations or lack thereof
- Questions concerning the intersections between race, gender and class and how proletarian novels address those concerns
Hunter Bivens, Anna Einarsdottir