This course will center a few important nineteenth-century novels, poems, and essays—Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm—within a critical genealogy of theories of the negative. Negativity is central to dialectical thought (from Hegel to the Frankfurt School and particularly, Adorno), to psychoanalysis (from Freud onwards), to the Gothic, and to more contemporary theory from Lee Edelman to Fred Moten. Beginning with John Keats’s short essay “On Negative Capability,” we will read “the Victorian” and nineteenth-century Western modernity more broadly through the vantage point of negative, considering what these literary texts contribute to theory, and vice-versa. We will extend this critical genealogy into the present, and we will consider why some recent theoretical interventions have wanted to amend or move away from negativity. These include the queer of colour writings of the late José Esteban Muñoz, and certain strands of affect theory, ecocriticism, and the new materialism. We will also consider how others, such as Jean-Thomas Tremblay and Steven Swarbrick in Negative Life (2024), have sought to recuperate its importance to both aesthetics and politics. This course will hopefully also include some guest speaker lectures and visits.
