Brad DeLong wrote:
> >I'm amazed that the literary qualities of even chap. 1 of Capital
> >are being called into question. Section 4 is one of Marx's most
> >deservedly famous passages, the analysis of commodity fetishism,
> >which blends political economy, pyschology, philosophy, and cultural
> >analysis in dazzling ways. As much as I admire Keynes as a stylist,
> >nothing he wrote holds a candle to this.
> >
> >Doug
>
> The Yale Humanities Major speaks: §4 may be dazzling to you literati
> but 'tain't hardly accessible to the toiling masses...
*Capital* of course is not a leaflet (and I think we should return some
day
to the discussion of the various genres of political writing). Seen as
literature,
it is high bourgeois literature, not agitation aimed at the toiling
masses who
toil too much to have much time to read. But I could give you a very long
list of highly admired authors who either are not accessible at all to
the
"toiling masses" or are grossly distorted when they are made available:
Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Milton, Rochester, Pope, Swift (try
reading his finest work, The Tale of a Tub), Sterne, Wordsworth, Austen,
Stendahl . . . . . .Yeats, Pound, Beckett, Pynchon . . . . . . .
Carrol
