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Breaking from half a century of postmodernist readings of poetry, and bypassing the false divide between formalist and historicist criticism, these essays chart a path toward a new Marxist poetics.In these innovative essays on poetry and capitalism, collected over the last fifteen years, Christopher Nealon shines a light on the upsurge of anticapitalist poetry since the turn of the century, and develops fresh ways of thinking about how capitalist society shapes the reading and the writing of all poetry, whatever its political orientation.
List of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Camp Messianism, or the Hopes of Poetry in Late-Late Capitalism
2 The Poetic Case
3 Reading on The Left
4 Affect, Performativity, and Actually Existing Poetry
5 Infinity for Marxists
6 The Prynne Reflex
7 The Price of Value
8 The Anti-humanist Tone
9 Modernism, Critical Theory, and the Desire for Objecthood
10 Literary and Economic Value (with Joshua Clover)
11 Abstraction, Intuition, Poetry
References
Index
About the author
Christopher Nealon is John Dewey Professor in the English Department at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall and The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in The American Century, and the co-editor, with Colleen Lye, of After Marx: Literature, Theory and Value in the Twenty-First Century.
Summary
Breaking from half a century of postmodernist readings of poetry, and bypassing the false divide between formalist and historicist criticism, these essays chart a path toward a new Marxist poetics.
In these innovative essays on poetry and capitalism, collected over the last fifteen years, Christopher Nealon shines a light on the upsurge of anticapitalist poetry since the turn of the century, and develops fresh ways of thinking about how capitalist society shapes the reading and the writing of all poetry, whatever its political orientation.
Foreword
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