“If one wants to study the conception of a world-view that has not been exposed systematically by its author (and whose essential coherence is to be found not in a single essay or in a series of essays, but in the entire development of all his intellectual work, in which the elements of such view of the world are implicit), we need to do careful, preliminarily philological work, carried out with the greatest scruples of exactness, of scientific honesty, of intellectual loyalty, and without preconceptions or prejudice.” Taking as a starting point Gramsci’s note from notebook 16 § 2, this course proposes a philological reading of the fragmentary Prison Notebooks to reconstruct both the “world-view” and the possible political uses implicit in such Gramscian concepts as hegemony, praxis, Renaissance, Reformation, popular literature, Americanism, subalternity…
Professor, Literature Program
