sub-sub-librarian

he/him | 20s | marxism and literature

[titusandronicusonice]

by way of introductions...

dayan, 20s, he/him, london and new york

I use this blog like a commonplace book: I'll post excerpts from whatever I happen to be reading, and occasionally works of art I like

general interests: marxism, critical theory, literature, film, history, 17th c. english lit., 19th c. american lit., modernism, classics, new wave science fiction, fantasy, world-systems analysis, psychoanalysis, art history

currently reading:

Homer, Odyssey (Fagles trans.)

Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

Arthur C. Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise

Gene Wolfe, The Wizard Knight

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge

[titusandronicusonice]

I feel like I'm too old now to really get into Dostoevsky

[electropylon]

Angela Barrett's illustrations for William Shakespeare's Macbeth

[titusandronicusonice]

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with bank notes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again [...] there need be no more unemployment and with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community would probably become a good deal larger than it is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like: but if there are practical difficulties in the way of doing this, the above would be better than nothing.

John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936)

[titusandronicusonice]

My town’s library has the Great Transformation would you recommend it?

100%!!! My fav read of the year so far. I really wish I annotated it but it was my leisure read (lol) between assignments and exams for my course.

It can be a bit dated at times (published in 1944) and fairly repetitive (as I'm realising all works of political and economic theory are), but it's so rewarding. Great if you want a heterodox, polemical history of capitalism up to the fascism of his day. There are certainly more approachable books on the same topic, but very few with the same interdisciplinary range you get from works of his time when disciplines weren't as strictly defined and scholars were overly confident. I really appreciated Polanyi's insistence on the self-regulating market being as much of a utopian projection as any socialism is, and the ideological critique overall is excellent.

Also the Ones and Tooze podcast has a good episode on Polanyi if you wanna dip your toes in the pool before jumping in.

Hope you enjoy it, if you end up checking it out! And my messages are always open if you have any other questions :)

[titusandronicusonice]

Adam Smith aura

[titusandronicusonice]

what are your favourite novels?

:0 more asks

Melville's Moby-Dick is my favourite overall, I wrote my final year dissertation on it. The author I've read the most of is Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed is my favourite of hers but I also loved The Word for World is Forest and Tehanu. The Strugatsky brothers I've also read a lot of, I loved Roadside Picnic and Hard to be a God. Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun is incredible. I read Balzac's Père Goriot last year and thought it was amazing—now I'm struggling to pick what novel of his to read next. Conrad's Heart of Darkness is provocative, as is J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. I think about them a lot. Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is also terrific.

Thanks!

[titusandronicusonice]

Dear Titusandronicsonice,

How did you even start reading Hegel and thereby the later Marxists? It seems to me you'd have to read like Hume, Spinoza, Kant, Aristotle, Locke, Descartes, Leibnz before understanding Hegel... But sure what the fart do I know? So how did you go about it?

Sincerely the Pomofrog.

I'll have to let the mask drop and admit I'm a pedestrian when it comes to philosophy. I'm a Marxist and a (now former 😢) student of English literature and I approached Hegel on those terms. Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, and co. didn't feature in my journey. It would help not to stress so much about chronology: a work of philosophy is a lot more than its narrow responses to predecessors and contemporaries.

Honestly a good edition with a scholarly introduction and notes is all you need for most things. I read the penguin edition of Hegel's Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics with an intro and commentary by Michael Inwood and it was indispensable for contextualising and clarifying and summarising his arguments. So don't skip those.

I'd also recommend Terry Pinkard's chapter 'German Idealism: The Thought of Modernity' in The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought (the pdf is free to download). It's a 23-page-long introductory account of German Idealism from Kant to Hegel and it'll familiarise you with the basic premises they were dealing with.

Trying to trace what I'd read up to reading Hegel would make for a very long and convoluted post. In less words I can say Fredric Jameson's writings were hugely influential to me. His Marxism and Form and The Political Unconscious outline a very Hegelian brand of Marxist literary theory and reading them gave me the initial impetus to consider Hegel more seriously.

Thanks for the ask! Open to any other questions :)

[titusandronicusonice]

Freedom's utter frustration in fascism is, indeed, the inevitable result of the liberal philosophy, which claims that power and compulsion are evil, that freedom demands their absence from a human community. No such thing is possible; in a complex society this becomes apparent. This leaves no alternative but either to remain faithful to an illusionary idea of freedom and deny the reality of society, or to accept that reality and reject the idea of freedom. The first is the liberal's conclusion; the latter the fascist's. No other seems possible.

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944)

[titusandronicusonice]

lost my jstor and financial times access I hate graduating

[titusandronicusonice]

Hard not to be convinced by Hegel's thesis that the modern era which gives rise to theories of art coincides with (and is predicated upon) the death of art as such.

[titusandronicusonice]

Once I'm done reading it I'm gonna methodically post everything I've underlined in Hegel's Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics. Followers beware

[titusandronicusonice]

To the student of early capitalism the parallel is highly significant. The condition of some native tribes in modern Africa carries an unmistakable resemblance to that of the English laboring classes during the early years of the nineteenth century

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944)

[titusandronicusonice]

The three predicates of art, according to Hegel:

G.W.F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics

[titusandronicusonice]

What I've gathered on this site is that a lot of people mistake "the personal is political" to mean "the personal = politics" so all they do is moralise their sexual desire and insist on making a public display about it

[titusandronicusonice]

Ironically, the white man's contribution to the black man's world mainly consisted in introducing him to the scourge of hunger. Thus the colonists may decide to cut the bread-fruit trees down in order to create an artificial food scarcity or may impose a hut tax on the native to force him to barter away his labour. In either case the effect is similar to that of Tudor enclosures with their wake of vagrant hordes. [...] Now, what the white man may still occasionally practice in remote regions today, namely, the smashing up of social structures in order to extract the element of labor from them, was done in the eighteenth century to white populations by white men for similar purposes.

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944)

[titusandronicusonice]

'Political Aspects of Full Employment' (1943) by Michal Kalecki

[titusandronicusonice]

essential to any understanding of fascism