Neil Larsen is the author of several important books in critical theory: “Determinations: Essays on Theory, Narrative and Nation in the Americas” (2001), “Reading North by South: On Latin American Literature, Culture and Politics” (1995) and “Modernism and Hegemony: a Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agencies” (1990), as well as of numerous essays and critical introductions. He is currently working on two books that will seek to establish what he terms “an advanced, methodical introduction to the workings of Marxian critique in the literary and cultural sphere.”
This talk will be a reflection of Roberto Schwarz’s work on “misplaced ideas” and realism in the case of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis and ask about whether similar arguments could be made about, say, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Henry James’s Washington Square.
Professor Larsen will be developing some ideas that he wrote about in chapter 12 of Determinations, and for readings by Robert Schwarz particularly recommends “Misplaced Ideas,” “Nationalism by Elimination” and A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism.