NeMLA 2024 Panel: Literary Technique and Relations of Production
“Rather than…‘What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time?’ I would like to ask, ‘What is its position in them?’” Ninety years on, Walter Benjamin's question in “The Author as Producer” (1934) still poses a central challenge for literary studies. For Benjamin, the key idea for locating this structural “function [of] the work” is “literary technique,” a “concept…[by] which the unfruitful antithesis of form and content can be surpassed.”
We invite paper proposals on the connection(s) between any text’s “technique” and its position within its historical relations of production—of various forms of surplus, of literature, and/or of social difference. Motivating questions might include: