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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)




9/1/10

from Collier's Encyclopedia, 1979:

CHEEVER, JOHN (1912 - ) American short-story writer and novelist, whose reputation as a master of the short story is unsurpassed among living American authors. His early novels present the mythic, pastoral world of his ancestral New England and its slow extinction by the forces of modern technological society. His later, best-known fiction centers on suburban life and its discontents.
Cheever was born in Quincy, Mass., May 27, 1912, and was schooled at Thayer Academy in South Braintree. In 1935 The New Yorker published his first story, "The Brooklyn Rooming House," and, ever since, Cheever's name has been associated with the magazine, which has published more than 120 of his tales. His collections of stories include The Way Some People Live (1942), The Enormous Radio (1954), The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1959), Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (1961), The Brigadier and the Gold Widow (1964), and the The World of Apples (1973). In 1958, Cheever received the National Book Award for his first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle (1957). His second novel, The Wapshot Scandal (1964), was a sequel to The Wapshot Chronicle. His other novels are Bullet Park (1969) and Falconer (1977).
Cheever's central theme is the loneliness and isolation of the individual, whose personal desires are frequently at odds with the prevailing social order. Although these concerns are most overt in Cheever's tales of suburbia, where the loss of a harmonious New England past is seen as a prelude to the alienation of modern corporate life, the theme of confinement is already present in the apparently pristine world of the Wapshot novels. Here the Wapshot sons, Moses and Coverly, feel the need to break away from the inbred society of St. Botolphs despite the compensatory comforts that make it a paradise lost. Like John Updike, with whom he is often associated in his celebration of a fading community of Protestant values, Cheever thus organizes his fiction around the rhythms of flight and homecoming in the lives of his characters. In Falconer he moves toward a total rejection of confinement as a symbol for the condition of the soul. Ezekiel Farragut is put in a real prison only to find that there are no "fields of paradise on the other side of the wall." Farragut escapes from jail at the novel's close to discover that what is confining in the social order is in fact what defines life and gives meaning to it.

PERRY MEISEL
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