Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production - Softcover

Warren Montag (editor); Audrey Wasser (editor)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810145111 ISBN 13: 9780810145115

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2022

Synopsis

This collection revisits A Theory of Literary Production (1966) to show how Pierre Macherey’s remarkable—and still provocative—early work can contribute to contemporary discussions about the act of reading and the politics of formal analysis. Across a series of historically and philosophically contextualized readings, the volume’s contributors interrogate Macherey’s work on a range of pressing issues, including the development of a theory of reading and criticism, the relationship between the spoken and the unspoken, the labor of poetic determination and of literature’s resistance to ideological context, the literary relevance of a Spinozist materialism, the process of racial subjectification and the ontology of Blackness, and a theorization of the textual surface. Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production also includes three new texts by Macherey, presented here in English for the first time: his postface to the revised French edition of A Theory of Literary Production; “Reading Althusser,” in which Macherey analyzes the concept of symptomatic reading; and a comprehensive interview in which Macherey reflects on the historical conditions of his early work, the long arc of his career at the intersection of philosophy and literature, and the ongoing importance of Louis Althusser’s thought.

Recent translations of Macherey’s work into English have introduced new readers to the critic’s enduring power and originality. Timely in its questions and teeming with fresh insights, Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production demonstrates the depths to which his work resonates, now more than ever.

About this title

About the Author

Warren Montag is the Louis M. Brown Family Professor of Literature at Occidental College. His most recent books include Althusser and His Contemporaries and The Other Adam Smith. Montag is the editor of Décalages and the translator of Étienne Balibar’s Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness.

Audrey Wasser is an associate professor of French at Miami University, Ohio. She is the author of The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form.

Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810145111
• ISBN 13: 9780810145115
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224