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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)




4/6/10

Traffic: On the Road

by Perry Meisel

Stevie Winwood is pale because he bleeds. Few rock musicians of such enormous depth have worked under so great a burden of influence. And yet the saving distance of England has granted Winwood at once a necessary detachment from his American roots, particularly the towering authority of Ray Charles, and a native climate of technological innovation that was able to provide the catalyst for the slumbering genius of a Hendrix, suffocating in the purity of rhythm and blues before he went abroad.
The logic of Traffic's acquisition of Atlantic's Muscle Shoals studio personnel (whatever the rumored business circumstances) is clear and gratifying. Since drummer Roger Hawkins (who has played continuously for Aretha, to name only his highest credit) and bassist David Hood joined the band a few years ago, Traffic has made its musical stance explicit: the most solid of R & B bottoms (spiced with Rebop's congas) as a foundation for Winwood's bloody struggle with the haunting Genius and his own soul. The addition of Barry Beckett, Atlantic's studio keyboard man, for the recent German tour only clarifies the band's intentions and, indeed, its achievements.
The four jam-length tunes on this new live album, culled from the German performances, embody Traffic's virtues and defects. The astounding, sizzling groove of Capaldi's "Light Up or Leave Me Alone" combines the band's historically most innovative quality - ensemble texture and depth - with its breathtaking, albeit subtle, soulfulness. Winwood's crimson guitar winds in and out of the sinewy brew, now blazing over the beat, now merging with it in a gorgeous display of rhythm chops.
The band's uncanny ability to sustain an unbelievably slow, deep funk is still there; testimony to its abilities on "Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys." And yet the one factor that has always limited the band, that especially destroys the effectiveness of extended improvisation in concert, is Chris Wood's saxophone. Wood is by now one of the great mysteries of rock music. An utterly incompetent soloist, his single virtue (oddly enough, the one hardest to find among hornmen) is the ability to use a single horn as a rhythm instrument. Wood's solo time actually hurts the energy level, much less embarrasses the musical listener.
The band is somewhat sloppier than it was when Hawkins and Hood first joined; the sparkling clarity of each instrument, sewn so precisely within the folds of Winwood's ensemble conception, is perhaps dulled. With the last studio album a disappointment and this new one mostly a casual exercise, one still awaits the full promise of Traffic's latest crew.

Originally published in The Boston Phoenix, November 13, 1973

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