There were 23 of us we could just barely form a comfortable circle for discussion. We met on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings - 50 minutes of intense engagement with a different text each day. The article was also a review of Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s book The Hundreds, a collaborative text that demonstrates affect theory, in short sections of 100 words, or multiples of hundreds. Near the end of the semester, we took a detour and discussed Hua Hsu’s New Yorker article about “affect theory” and the work of Lauren Berlant. The crisis, in this case, related to how it felt to be alive in 2019, in New Orleans - many of the students on the verge of graduating into a precarious (if not outright apocalyptic) future to come. Rather, it was the very pertinence of the ensemble that makes up what is called “critical theory.” Together, our class came to an alternative, anxious definition for the term: “crisis thinking.” It wasn’t because we’re in a so-called post-theory moment, or because the subject seemed abstruse. It wasn’t “difficult” in the usual ways: not just because Marx’s formulation of base and superstructure is subtler than it seems at first, or because Freud’s “unconscious” is so frustrating because, well, it’s unconscious. IN THE SPRING of 2019 at Loyola University New Orleans, the English department once again offered a particularly difficult course on critical theory.
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