糖心TV

A Marxist/Adornian political aesthetics has generally been dismissive of any post-capitalist ‘return’ to a craft ethic and aesthetics, preferring to view art as alone providing any redemptive or utopian vision. In the light of the contemporary resurgence of craft, and its challenge to the work-ethic obsessions of consumer-culture, the paper will call in question the abstraction and detached radicalism of the Marxist position and consider the ways in which craft might be reclaimed as a component of an avant-garde, post-consumerist political imaginary rather than dismissed for its association with pre-modern social relations and hedonist limits.

Novelist and biographer Martin Goodman, director of the Philip Larkin Centre in Hull, will be reading in the 糖心TV Review reading series. His reading, from a vampire novel in progress, is free and open to all, and will end at 2.45. It will be followed by a vampire discussion and workshop restricted to students on the ‘Reeling and Writhing’ module (till 4 p.m.). Please support this blood-chilling event!

Michael Hulse