ACLA 2026: Marxism & Lyric

This seminar examines the lyric as a central and contested form in Marxist literary theory. Often viewed as the genre most resistant to historical materialist analysis—associated with interiority, formal autonomy, and expressive immediacy—lyric has nonetheless emerged, across multiple Marxist traditions, as a nexus for theorizing the contradictions of subjectivity, value, and mediation under capital.

Rather than treating the lyric as a minor or aberrant form within Marxist aesthetics, this seminar takes it as a point of entry into foundational questions of cultural production and social form: What becomes of the lyric “I” under conditions of reification? How does figuration reflect or resist the abstractions of the value-form? Can lyric form register the unevenness of global capitalism, or does it retreat into ideology? What are the stakes of lyric address in contexts of revolution, degrowth, crisis, and reification?

While engaging with the canonical texts of Western Marxist criticism—Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno, Caudwell, Jameson—we aim to reemphasize that debates over lyric form have been and continue to be global in scope. From revolutionary cultural programs in the Soviet Union and China, to anti-colonial and anti-imperialist poetics in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia, Marxist theorists and poets have continually returned to the lyric to negotiate the dialectic of the individual and collective, of form and infrastructure. These engagements are not peripheral supplements to a dominant Marxist aesthetic theory, but constitutive episodes in a broader, internally non-identical materialist inquiry into poetic form.

We invite papers that trace the lyric across such formations: the folk lyric as a vehicle of revolutionary education; the ode as an ideological apparatus; lyric abstraction as a correlate of the commodity-form; the poem as a medium of collective memory, grief, or militancy. We are especially interested in work that attends to how lyric form articulates the contradictions of historical time—whether through rupture, repetition, or arrested development—and how these temporalities interact with the structural unevenness of capital accumulation, political struggle, and cultural production.

Topics may include:

• Lyric and the political unconscious
• The lyric sentence and aesthetic autonomy
• Crisis poetics, finance, and abstraction
• Revolutionary and counter-revolutionary lyric traditions
• Translation, internationalism, and world lyric
• The lyric and the temporality of historical unevenness
• Gendered, racialized, and caste-inflected lyric formations
• Lyric and the poetics of infrastructure
• Lyric modes in cultural revolution, populism, or anti-colonial resistance

Abstracts of approximately 250 words should be submitted no later than October 2nd through the ACLA website. Queries may be directed to George Kovalenko grk229@nyu.edu.