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Summary
Analyzes contemporary capitalism through the products of culture and art for fresh insight into emancipatory possibilities concealed within capitalism’s darkest dynamics.
Aesthetic objects, crafted as poetic reflections of the contradictory worlds that they inhabit, are simultaneously theorized and theorizing. In Capital in the Mirror, eminent critical theorists explore the aesthetic dimension for reflective visions of capital that are difficult to obtain through even the most rigorous statistical analyses. Chapters address inequality, alienation, ideology, warfare, and other problems of contemporary capitalism through the cultural prisms of Herman Melville, Thomas Mann, Charles Dickens, J. W. Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, Walt Whitman, Bertolt Brecht, and science-fiction cinema. Famous narrative elements in their works, such as Ahab’s pursuit of the white whale in Melville’s Moby-Dick, demonic production and perverse desire in Mann’s Doctor Faustus, socially electrified bodies of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and dystopian projections of current sci-fi cinema, are theorized as stylistically distorted reflections of social life within capital. The authors reveal theoretical powers latent within these condensed images that prefigure the dark dynamics of capitalism. Focusing on dark images of domination and also prophetic images of transformation, the book points the way toward emancipation, social regeneration, and human flourishing.
“This book makes a very important contribution to critical theory and the critical ‘human sciences’ and is a model of how to do a larger analysis of contemporary capitalist cultural products.” — Jeffrey A. Halley, coeditor of Bourdieu in Question: New Directions in French Sociology of Art
Dan Krier is Professor of Sociology at Iowa State University and the author of Speculative Management: Stock Market Power and Corporate Change, also published by SUNY Press. Mark P. Worrell is retired Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York College at Cortland and serves as an associate editor for the journal Critical Sociology. Together they have coedited The Social Ontology of Capitalism and Capitalism’s Future: Alienation, Emancipation, and Critique.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
The Mirror of Capital: An Introduction to Critical Poiesis Dan Krier and Mark P. Worrell
PART I. TWILIGHT
1. An Insane Book, an Insane Country, an Insane System:
Moby-Dick, U.S. Hegemony, and the Catastrophe of Capital
Tony Smith
2. Marxist Aesthetics, Realism, and Photography: On Brecht’s War Primer Christian Lotz
3. The Poetics of Nihilism: Representing Capital’s Indifference in Dickens’ Hard Times Patrick Murray and Jeanne Schuler
4. The Repressed Returns: Mann’s Doctor Faustus and the Fugue of Capital Dan Krier
PART II. DAWN
5. “Shakespearean Politics” and World History Tony Smith
6. The Radical Implications of Hölderlin’s Aesthetic
Rationalism Michael J. Thompson
7. From Mirror to Catalyst: Whitman and the Literature of Re-Creation James Block
8. The City of Brothers Mark P. Worrell and Dan Krier
9. Critical Theory, Sociology, and Science-Fiction Films: Love, Radical Transformation, and the Socio-Logic of Capital Harry F. Dahms
10. Magical Marx: Objective Method and Aesthetics Mark P. Worrell
