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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)




4/14/10

Larry Coryell: The Eleventh House

by Perry Meisel

The terms "rock" and "jazz" have been bandied about as opposites for so long now that the real distinction in pop music - one between blues and non-blues feeling - has been altogether ignored. So many jazzmen spend time on the road playing R & B that things should've been clearer long ago. But, alas, conventional categories save us from having nothing to say when we don't know what's happening. As it turns out, Charlie Parker and Stevie Winwood share more than Winwood shares with, say, Todd Rundgren or that Parker shares with Pharaoh Sanders.
The standard rap on Larry Coryell has been that he's straddled that no-man's land between jazz and rock longer perhaps than anybody else around. What he's in fact straddled is a choice between two basic moods - between a pure blues feeling that seems to have bored him and an outrageous metal heaviness that's never commanded his full belief.
Coryell has finally brought the two together in a workable, at times superb combination in his new band, The Eleventh House. The melodic, restraining quality of the blues tempers the gratuitous impulse to scream. While the band can smash and soar with frightening power and agility, it can also dazzle in a ballad setting. Pianist Mike Mandel's "Adam Smasher" and Coryell's own "Iam-Ejercicio" are the clearest examples of charted shifts, within single tunes, between a swinging blues funk and a square, almost classical, sense of time suspension (the latter a jazz tradition by now, but one that marks a break with the blues). Though a few of the tunes are self-indulgent earsplitters (notably "Yin"), Coryell manages to maintain a sure balance of assertion and cool throughout the album.
The unique blend of Randy Brecker's trumpet, Mandel's piano, and Coryell's guitar represents a resolution of moods even in the way melodies are sounded. Each instrument eases the bite of the others, just as most of the soloing returns to the lyricism of the blues after flights of frenzy or rage. Drummer Alphonse Mouzon (formerly with McCoy Tyner) roots the band in strong, driving rhythms welded to funk even in the craziest forays.
Coryell's solo piece "Gratitude 'A So Low' " combines a new and happy precision with his traditional ebullience. If his rides occasionally lack drama, they still demonstrate a meeting within, at last, of the humanity of the blues and the exotica of technology.

Originally published in The Boston Phoenix, March 12 1974
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