Capital as Literature

Marx Against Himself

Perry Meisel (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

200 Seiten

2026
Routledge (Verlag)
978-1-041-17393-9 (ISBN)

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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.

Perry Meisel, Professor of English at New York University for over 40 years until his retirement in 2016, has written on literature, music, theory, and culture since the 1970s. His articles have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice, Partisan Review, The Nation, The Atlantic, Raritan, October, and many other publications. He is the author of Criticism After Theory from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf (2022), The Myth of Popular Culture (2010), The Literary Freud (2007), The Cowboy and the Dandy (1999), The Myth of the Modern (1987), The Absent Father (1980), and Thomas Hardy (1972). He is coeditor, with Haun Saussy, of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (Columbia, 2011), and coeditor, with Walter Kendrick, of Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924-25 (Basic Books, 1985). He is also the editor of Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice-Hall, 1981). He received his B.A. Summa cum laude from Yale in 1970. He also received his M.Phil. (1973) and Ph.D. (1975) from Yale. He is the recipient of Yale’s Wrexham Prize and Thomas G. Bergin Cup and research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Spencer Foundation. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and PEN and has been a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Institute for the History of Psychiatry at Weill-Cornell Medical College.

Chapter 1 Introduction: Marx’s Counterplot

Chapter 2 A Passage from Capital

Chapter 3 Not by Bread Alone: Use as Exchange

Chapter 4 Marx and Subjectivity

Chapter 5 “Duplex Form” and the Structure of Surplus Value

Chapter 6 Marx and Detail: Capital as a Production Machine

Chapter 7 The Stain of Time: Derrida, Ruskin, Adorno

Chapter 8 The Literary Marx

Coda A Philology of Fetishism: A Psychoanalytic Supplement to Marx

Erscheint lt. Verlag	6.5.2026
Reihe/Serie	Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-041-17393-8 / 1041173938
ISBN-13	978-1-041-17393-9 / 9781041173939
Zustand	Neuware