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NEW FROM ROUTLEDGE 2026

'Capital' as Literature: Marx Against Himself



’CAPITAL’ AS LITERATURE: MARX AGAINST HIMSELF


Studies of Marx, particularly of his masterwork Capital (1867), are as a rule tutelary—they attempt to explain him. Even literary readers of Marx, from Raymond Williams to Fredric Jameson, seek to secure Marxist tenets by means of Marxian style. ‘Capital’ as Literature: Marx Against Himself departs from this tradition by reading Capital as literary in its own right rather than as political economy with style as its filigree rather than its focus. Here, Marx emerges in a different light. If literature is writing that calls whatever is settled into question, then Marx's writing is literature, not because of its revolutionary program, but because Marx's rhetoric, particularly its key trope of chiasmus, undoes the coherence of the notions it propounds, especially in Capital. Marx's chiasmatic style turns Capital into a mise en abyme and Marx's enterprise into an example of what it describes rather than its foil or antidote: the structure of capital itself. Capital, like capital, is a self-begetting production machine whose fungibility as a form is one and the same with the money economy it unravels. ‘Capital’ as Literature: Marx Against Himself shows how this irony unfolds and what the implications are for epistemology, cultural studies, and literary criticism.




ALSO FROM ROUTLEDGE 2022

Criticism After Theory from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf



CRITICISM AFTER THEORY FROM SHAKESPEARE TO VIRIGINIA WOOLF

The argument of this book is a simple one: that criticism after theory is a single movement of thought defined by synthesis and continuity rather than by conflict and change. The most influential figures in criticism since Saussure—Bakhtin, Derrida, and Foucault—are wholly consistent with Saussure's foundational Course in General Linguistics (1916) no matter the traditions of complaint that have followed in Saussure's wake from Bakhtin forward. These complaints vitiate—despite themselves and often hilariously so—the misconceptions that have made cottage industries out of quarrels with Saussurean semiology that are based on notions of Saussure that are incorrect. The materialist criticism dominant today is actually dependent upon on the legacy of a presumably formalist structuralism rather than a step beyond it. New Historicism, postcolonialism, gender studies, environmental criticism, archive studies, even shared and surface reading are, like deconstruction, the by-products of Saussure's structuralism, not its foils. Saussure's sign is sensory and concrete. Language and materiality are not distinct but one and the same—history, society, the psychological subject, even the environment are systems of signs, material archives read and reread by futures that produce the past after the fact. Without Saussure, contemporary criticism would have no identifiable or effective source. The book begins with chapters on Saussure and Derrida, Bakhtin and Shakespeare, and Freud and Foucault followed by chapters on Victorian and American fiction, D.H. Lawrence and modern poetry, Virginia Woolf and Melanie Klein, and the historicist tropology of psychoanalysis. It concludes with a coda in life writing on the author's epileptic disability.




Portuguese translation of THE MYTH OF POPULAR CULTURE (Blackwell Manifestos, 2010) now available from Tinta Negra (Rio de Janeiro, 2015)



OS MITOS DA CULTURA POP: DE DANTE A DYLAN

O renomado crítico cultural americano Perry Meisel detona as noções convencionais sobre a divisão entre “alta” e “baixa” cultura.

O autor transita pela provocante teoria de que a cultura pop experimentou ritmos dialéticos. A hábil análise que o livro apresenta de três tradições culturais duradouras – o romance norte-americano, Hollywood, e o rock inglês e americano – nos leva a um ciclo histórico da cultura pop que tem Dante como ponto de partida e revisita ícones como Wahrol, Melville, Hemingway, Twain, Eisenstein, Benjamin, Scorsese e Sinatra.




THE MYTH OF POPULAR CULTURE: FROM DANTE TO DYLAN

The Myth of Popular Culture discusses the dialectic of "highbrow" and "lowbrow" in popular culture through an examination of literature, film, and popular music. With topics ranging from John Keats to John Ford, the book responds to Adorno's theory that popular culture is not dialectical by showing that it is.

Available as eBooks

COURSE IN GENERAL LINGUISTICS. Trans. Wade Baskin. Co-ed. with Haun Saussy. By Ferdinand de Saussure (Columbia University Press, 2011)

THE MYTH OF POPULAR CULTURE: FROM DANTE TO DYLAN
(Blackwell Manifestos, 2010)

THE LITERARY FREUD (Routledge, 2007)

THE COWBOY AND THE DANDY: CROSSING OVER FROM ROMANTICISM TO ROCK AND ROLL (Oxford University Press, 1998)

FREUD: A COLLECTION OF CRITICAL ESSAYS (Prentice-Hall, 1981)




3/20/10

John Mayall: Jazz-Blues Fusion

by Perry Meisel

It's common wisdom among John Mayall fans that you can never relax when you listen to those early electric albums that powered the British Blues Revival--you've got to be ready to change the song when the next one comes along. Something embarrassing might happen--an anemic vocal, a windless harmonica solo, an uninspired use of the lustrous horn sections punching behind the thundering guitar leads. It was a labor of love, though, listening to those big band recordings. Though the initial response to Mayall's subsequent drumless group was a generous one, due largely to the novelty of pairing acoustic guitar with reeds and harp, Mayall's appeal suffered a serious decline because of it. His lack of taste as a player, complicated by his limited chops, had usually been hidden by the power of the earlier bands, with Eric Clapton, Peter Green, or Mick Taylor on guitar. The lightweight band put Mayall himself too much to the fore.
Now that he's back with a full group on his new live album, one's interest is rekindled. But the characteristic problem is intensified: the mixture of relief and pleasurable anticipation at the news that he's again sporting a big electric band with horns is qualified by that nagging wince, cut after cut, at Mayall's own cluttering of the music with his omnipresent - indeed, omnivorous (but with what poor teeth!) - harmonica. Though Mayall means the harp to be a rhythm instrument much of the time, one still has to ask, What, then, is the point of the horn section? Particularly exasperating is Mayall's sheer vanity in the face of some of the best soloists he has ever fronted.
Freddy Robinson plays a fast, cool guitar, rich with turns and lush chording reminiscent of Wes Montgomery. And yet his one stylistic weakness - the temptation to say too much too fast - flaws his performance throughout. Like Mayall, he often takes up an undue portion of the ensemble sound, filling when unnecessary.
When Clifford Solomon's alto rears its burning head midway through the first tune "Country Road" (a Mayall original, like all the cuts), Robinson's guitar, much less Mayall's harmonica, palls by comparison. Solomon's soloing (on tenor and alto) is consistently the best in the band. He achieves that rare mix of sparseness and funk that one looks for in a blues soloist. His tone is hard and rich on square, high-stepping numbers like "Country Road" and "Mess Around"; smooth and swinging on "Good Time Boogie" where he opens up the way you always wish a horn player would.
If Mayall's harmonica is a sore thumb during guitar and sax solos, it is downright outrageous when it cuts in on Blue Mitchell's trumpet. The very fact that Blue - one of the jazz greats - is blowing in a Mayall band at all is enough to raise questions better left unasked. Blue gets squeezed out or challenged by Mayall time and again: on "Country Road," on "Good Time Boogie" (where he starts to cook on his first chorus and then - toot! toot! - you can hardly believe Mayall's nerve) and "Dry Throat," a tight, funky tune perfect for Blue's cool, subtle horn. Except on "Got To Be This Way," where Mitchell finally gets it on, his trumpet is uninspired - but what can you expect from the kind of environment Mayall has created on these live sets?
For the most part, Mayall seems to have grossly neglected the ensemble sound of the band. Magnified by his apparent indifference to the horns - a double irony, given the power of his hornmen and the title of the album - Mayall's job of arranging and directing is shockingly sloppy. To call the album a jazz-blues fusion is as misleading as it is pretentious: the very idea of a "fusion" of jazz and blues is absurd in the first place. The common parent of jazz and rock, the blues is a given unity, calling on individual talents to make it or break it. But why the "problem" of "fusion" at all? Why all the fuss that began with Kooper's BS&T? There's no clear distinction between rock and jazz, much less jazz and the blues. "Fusion" occurs when you're unaware of it: as usual, self-consciousness kills.
But for John Mayall - an enormously important and devoted musician in spite of himself - a look in the mirror shatters the rare beauty always about to be born.

Originally published in Rock, August 14, 1972
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