Tutors | Marxist Criticism & the Frankfurt School

thumb-smallDr Marc Di Sotto
Postdoctoral tutor in English Literature

My thesis examined how ideas about trauma and memory have come to govern the way we construct and perceive the relationship between past and present, in the realm of both critical theory and contemporary literature and culture more generally at the “End of History.” This work engaged with a range of critical approaches including trauma theory, memory studies, and psychoanalysis, filtered through questions about ideology and aesthetics, drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Žižek, and Fredric Jameson.

My other research interests include realism and the aesthetics of documentary, problems of testimony and historical representation, and entrepreneurialism and the idea of work in the neoliberal fantasy.

thumb-smallDr James Leveque
Postdoctoral tutor in English Literature

I recently completed a PhD exploring the religious and political implications of the avant-garde poetics of Guillaume Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, and F. T. Marinetti. By developing a methodological framework based on the theories of art and religion of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Max Weber, and Pierre Bourdieu, the dissertation illuminated the ways in which avant-garde poets modernised or obscured their biblical and religious literary antecedents. Furthermore, this research has provided the foundation for a postdoctoral project on the place of conservative and reactionary politics in radical aesthetic practices in Modernist American and French literature.

I also have interests in the conjuncture of literary and social theories, the revival of spiritual and aristocratic attitudes in literature, and aesthetics and work.

thumb-smallPablo San Martín
Third year PhD candidate in English Literature

My research interests gravitate around the interactions between philosophy and literature in the long eighteenth century. I am particularly interested in the way in which Romantic poetry and poetics engage with Enlightenment epistemology, historiography, political philosophy, and early social science. My doctoral research project traces the development of the conceptions and uses of myth in the work of Percy Shelley within the intellectual context of the late Enlightenment, especially concerning the fields of mythography, epistemology, and historiography.

The theoretical framework of this project is inspired by The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Adorno and Horkheimer. I complement the idea of a dialectic between enlightenment and myth with the concepts of myth developed by Northorp Frye and Mircea Eliade, Perry Anderson’s analysis of the concept of agency within the paradigm of historical materialism, the description of the pragmatics of scientific debate and narrative knowledge proposed by Jean-François Lyotard, and Fredric Jameson’s studies of utopia, as well as with more traditional intellectual history.