Capital as Literature

This is Perry Meisel at his best. Meisel’s ‘Capital’ as Literature rivals Louis Althusser and his school’s Reading ‘Capital’ by enabling a new reading of its epistemological structure beyond its ideological concerns and political impact. After his groundbreaking studies of Freudian discourse, Meisel offers a thrilling new insight into an unresolved lingering question, the origins of a postmodern aesthetics with Marx as primal witness to its hidden workings.

–Anselm Haverkamp, Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich

Perry Meisel’s staggering capacity for close reading brilliantly shifts our view of Marx from that of a fierce social advocate–though he is always that– to one of a self-aware and self-questioning writer in conversation with himself. ‘Capital’ as Literature will unsettle classical Marxists while drawing a new and different kind of reader into the orbit of Marx’s appeal.

–Roi Tartakovsky, Tel Aviv University

Perry Meisel

Professor of English at New York University for over 40 years until his retirement in 2016, Perry Meisel 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)
• Thomas Hardy (1972)

He is coeditor, with Haun Saussy, of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (2011), and coeditor, with Walter Kendrick, of Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924-25 (1985). He is also the editor of Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays (1981).

Meisel received his B.A. Summa cum laude from Yale in 1970, and 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.