Infinity for Marxists. Essays on Poetry and Capital

Christopher Nealon

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. 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.

Biographical Note

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 (2001) and The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in The American Century (2011), and the co-editor, with Colleen Lye, of After Marx: Literature, Theory and Value in the Twenty-First Century (2022).

Readership

Advanced undergraduates, PhD students, faculty in literary studies

Table of Contents

Introduction

Camp Messianism, or the Hopes of Poetry in Late-Late Capitalism

The Poetic Case

Reading on The Left

Affect, Performativity, and Actually Existing Poetry

Infinity for Marxists

The Prynne Reflex

The Price of Value

The Anti-humanist Tone

Modernism, Critical Theory, and the Desire for Objecthood

10 Literary and Economic Value (with Joshua Clover)

11 Abstraction, Intuition, Poetry

References
Index