Annotations on V. N. Voloshinov’s study “Marxism and the Philosophy of Language” (1929), on topics such as reflexion vs. refraction, consciousness and signs, language and ideology, Saussurean structuralism, verbal interaction, and theme vs. meaning.

This is a note on Walter Benjamin’s essay on collecting, “Unpacking My Library” (orig. published in German in 1931). Benjamin’s reflections on collecting are analyzed with reference to Modernist themes in Baudelaire and Proust, and to the Modernist concern with memory in the structuring of the self. The essay is held to be a half-ironic…[Read more]

A summary of the main thesis of Susan Horton’s approach to metacriticism in “Interpreting Interpreting: Interpreting Dickens’s DOMBEY” (1979), and a commentary on the situatedness and the specific agenda of metacritical projects.

Some critical notes on Fredric Jameson’s article “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (New Left Review 146 [1984]: 53-92), from the standpoint of a more comprehensive cultural criticism.

Annotations on Georg Lukács’s Hegelian study THE THEORY OF THE NOVEL, prior to his Marxist development—mainly on the contrast between the world-views of the novel and the epic. From a course on Marxist literary theory at Brown University (1988).