The following is the description and syllabus of a graduate course, "Reading Gramsci," designed and taught by Professor Crehan (of the Department of Anthropology) in the Spring 1994 semester at The New School for Social Research in New York City.
Course description:
While many major figures in the marxist tradition have fallen from favour in recent years, Antonio Gramsci's reputation continues to grow. Social scientists, literary theorists and historians, both marxist and non-marxist, are turning to his work in increasing numbers and there is now ahuge, and ever growing, secondary literature on Gramsci. This course, however, will focus on a careful and close reading of Gramsci's own texts, primarily ones from the series of notebooks he wrote during his long imprisonment under Mussolini from 1927 until just before his death in 1937. In the notebooks Gramsci ranges over an enormous number of topics, and the course makes no claims to be exhaustive; the stress is on depth rather than breadth. In the final part of the course we will look at some recent case studies that in various ways engage with Gramscian themes.
One of the reasons for the ever increasing interest in Gramsci, is undoubtedly his central concern with the nature of power and the ways in which power works. How do dominant groups maintain their dominance? Why is this dominance accepted by the subordinate? How can existing power relations be transformed? Much of the course is structured around two themes which run through all of Gramsci's work and through which he explores various aspects of power; firstly, the concept of hegemony, and secondly, the nature of intellectuals and their role in organised political struggle.
RECOMMENDED BOOKS:
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971) David Forgacs (ed.), An Antonio Gramsci Reader (N.Y.: Schocken, 1988)--a useful reader which includes some selections from the Prison Notebooks together with selections from Gramsci's pre-prison and cultural writings. [END PAGE 49]
Anne Showstack Sassoon (ed.), Approaches to Gramsci (London: Writers & Readers Co- op Society, 1982)--an interesting collection of essays on various aspects of Gramsci's work and including a short illustrated account of his life.
GRAMSCI'S OWN WRITINGS:
Antonio Gramsci: Selections From Political Writings 1910-1920, ed. Q. Hoare (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977)
Antonio Gramsci: Selections from Political Writings 1921-1926, ed. Q. Hoare (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978)
Antonio Gramsci: Selections From Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs and G. Nowell- Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1985)
Antonio Gramsci, Letters From Prison, 2 vols., ed. Frank Rosengarten (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)--this is the first complete edition of Gramsci's letters in English. Earlier shorter selections are: Letters From Prison, ed. Lynn Lawner (New York: Harper & Row, 1973) and Gramsci's Prison Letters, ed. Hamish Henderson (London: Zwan, 1988).
BIOGRAPHIES:
Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary (London: Verso, 1990)--first published in Italian in 1965, a straightforward life that draws heavily on the reminiscences of those who knew Gramsci.
Alatair Davidson, Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography (London: Merlin Press, 1977)--explores in considerable detail Gramsci's intellectual and political development and how Gramsci should be located within the history of Italian communism (Gramsci's role in the Turin factory occupations is discussed at length). Includes a detailed account of Gramsci's childhood in Sardinia.
Dante Germino, Antonio Gramsci: Architect of a New Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990).
CLASS TOPICS AND READINGS:
Week 1: Introduction
Week 2: Gramsci and Marx
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, "Introduction" pp. xvii-xcv.
Eric Hobsbawm, "Gramsci and Marxist Political Theory" in A. Showstack Sassoon (ed.), Approaches to Gramsci, pp. 20-36. [END PAGE 50]
Week 3: Gramsci in Italy and the U.S.A. John Cammett (a pioneering American Gramscian scholar and editor of Bibliografia Gramsciana, an exhaustive bibliography on Gramsci) will give a talk.
Week 4: The Prison Notebooks and their Form
Joseph Buttigieg, "Introduction" to Prison Notebooks, vol. I (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 1-64.
Anne Showstack Sassoon, "Gramsci's Subversion of the Language of Politics," Rethinking Marxism, vol. 3, no. 1 (1990), pp. 14-25
Week 5: The Nature and Role of Intellectuals
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp. 3-43
Week 6 & 7: The Modern Prince
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp.123-205
Week 8 & 9: State and Civil Society
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp. 206-276
Week 10: Gramsci and the Southern Question
"Some Aspects of the Southern Question" in Antonio Gramsci: Selections from the Political Writings 1921-1926, ed. Q. Hoare, pp. 441-462
Week 11: Americanism and Fordism
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp. 277-318
Week 12: The Philosophy of Praxis
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp. 321-377
Week 13: Gramsci Applied: A CSE Study in the Production of Hegemony
Paul Willis, Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1981)
Week 14: Gramsci: The Video
Screening of a British documentary film about Gramsci ("Everything that Concerns People") by Tom Nairn, followed by discussion.