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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

Tom Scott: Tom Scott and the L.A. Express

by Perry Meisel

If musical taste is an index of sanity, Tom Scott and the L.A. Express must be among the healthiest people in the world. There's no sensible name for their kind of sound: instrumental rhythm and blues played with the rhythmic assumptions and technical resources of jazz and the open-mindedness of rock. That's not to call Tom scott's band still another example of the mechanical "jazzrock" practiced by groups as apparently distinct as the new Soft Machine and Tower of Power. No, the L.A. Express knows that belaboring your virtuosity is far from where it's at; that the real way to smoke is to be cool. The best art inevitably instructs as much as it gives pleasure.
The shocking immediacy of Scott's bleeding, golden tenor saxophone often obscures the extent of his ambition. Though he suggests King Curtis and Junior Walker, Fathead Newman and Wilton Felder, his playing is hardly mere imitation. Scott has instead forged a hip amalgam of these classic soul styles into a fresh and violently outspoken funk idiom. Indeed, Scott's one of the few young tenormen whose promise seems to me to justify placing his name near those of the masters.
The tunes that feature Scott on tenor (all but two) are the most satisfying on the album, especially the relatively simple stompers. "Strut Your Stuff," a Scott original, repeats a maddeningly restrained march line that's bound to turn up under your fingernails after a single listen. "Bless My Soul" and "Nunya" are somewhat less relaxed soul blitzes, though always supple, thanks to the ease of drummer John Guerin and bassist Max Bennett. Pianist Joe Sample (on apparent loan from the Crusaders since the Express's session work on Joni Mitchell's last album) turns in as much soloing as Scott; though he seems rather deliberately laid back, most sympathetic (and oddly so) to the amorphous balladeering of Scott's soprano on "Easy Life" and "Spindrift."

Originally published in The Boston Phoenix, April 30, 1974
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