I
had John Rutherford’s saucy translation of this book, which had been sitting on my
shelf since 2004, before finally picking it up last spring. Having grown up watching the musical on TV, I thought the book might be dull and predictable, but I was
astonished to find a story about the perils of story-telling and the pleasures
of reading. Even the second part was replotted mid-way by Cervantes to foil his
many imitators and forgers.
I now understand why Marx and Engels, themselves a
kind of Quixote/Sancho Panza pair, considered this work to be a model for how
modern ideological media can be both manipulative and mind-expanding.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HAROLD BLOOM. Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. Unless you read Spanish, you've never read Don Quixote.
As
an undergraduate in the 1980s studying away while the socialist systems were breaking
up, I was struck by the language of The Communist Manifesto; "a spectre
is haunting Europe", "all that is solid melts into air", and so on. Later I made
a career out of examining the literary features of social scientific texts.
This
thin book by a Venezuelan poet and critic was only translated last year, almost
50 years after its first publication, and the parts I had read before made a
deep impression on me. Silva is a worthy match for Marx since, for both of them, rhetorical figures and poetic flourishes are not merely
there for decoration, ornamentation, wordplay, or illustration but are
integral features of the intellectual, textual, and political work of
theoretical communication and collective mobilization.
In Marx's Literary Style, the Venezuelan poet and philosopher Ludovico Silva argues that much of the confusion around Marx's work results from a failure to understand his literary mode of expression. Through meticulous readings of key passages in Marx's oeuvre, Silva isolates the key elements of his style: his search for an "architectonic" unity at the level of the text, his capacity to express himself dialectically at the level of the sentence, and, above all, his great gift for metaphor. Silva's unique sensitivity to Marx's literary choices allows him to illuminate a number of terms that have been persistently, and…
Even if you’re not a professional academic or a
tuition-paying student, sometimes it’s worth making the effort to read a book
that is genuinely challenging without being merely frustrating.
Mele’s
proficiency in Italian, German, English, and French, along with his erudition in
19th and early 20th-century philosophy, sociology, and
literary criticism, are abundantly on display here. And yet he guides us through
the fascinating labyrinth of the massive works of these cutting-edge thinkers
of "the pre-history of postmodernity" with ease and without ever overwhelming
us.
You’ll leave this book wanting to read everything Simmel or Benjamin ever
wrote or at least to return to the dazzling passages Mele quotes from and
comments on.
This book reconstructs and compares the social theories of modernity of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, two classic thinkers in German social thought. The author focuses on five main topics: the historical-sociological method through which they investigate modernity; how are the concepts of history and society possible; the consequences of modern metropolis on the construction of individual subjectivity; the aestheticization of everyday life caused by the expansion of commodity culture; and the female culture as a counter-power to the domination of masculine objective culture. In the decades since Simmel and Benjamin, urban reality has undergone profound changes and we may…
Marx's masterpiece Capital (Das Kapital) was ignored or misread, as well as selectively and creatively interpreted by the generation of social scientists who came after him. Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel attempt to supplement what they call 'historical materialism' or to engage in debates about 'socialism' through their readings of The Communist Manifesto and occasionally Capital.
Although these and other classical sociologists did not have access to most of Marx's published and unpublished works as we do today, each is concerned with revising and refining Marx's unfinished critique of political economy. Despite their differences with Marx and with one another, they share his concern with how empirically detailed and scientifically valid knowledge of the social world may inform historical struggles for a more human world.
