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danieleales's review
3.0
A decent book. I imagine it would be more enriching (or enraging) to those with more of a interest and knowledge of linguistics
_tourist's review
i only starting reading this slight volume because it wondered into the bookshop. yet it has a weight to it.
time for me to take up the challenge to read marx with charity.
time for me to take up the challenge to read marx with charity.
javorstein's review
4.0
Pretty good book for what it set out to do, which was to highlight the importance of Marx's literary style (roll credits) in interpreting his work. I frankly think this book deserved to be a 600-page close reading of all of Capital, but for all intents and purposes it made the points it needed to: Marx's style is architectonic and expressively dialectical, he uses metaphors to explicate scientific analyses, he shifts from the concrete to the abstract to the concrete, and his critical/polemical/ironic spirit is central to his writing as a whole. I think certain arguments could've been stronger—for instance, substantiating (1) the architectonic nature of Marx's writings and the importance of this; (2) the claim that Marx's use of contradiction and opposites was properly dialectical; (3) that superstructure- and reflection-theory were unfaithful to Marx's use of the terms and how; (4) how Marx's use of polemic and irony were related to alienation under capitalism [the epilogue did this but could've been more substantial in my opinion]. Nonetheless, the book gave a brief explanation for each of these claims and thoroughly-enough showed how those claims then support the overarching thesis of the relevance of Marx's literary style. Overall: a good book that unearths a relatively unexplored area of Marxist study and deserves further investigation and elaboration.
boukiesbookshop's review
5.0
What's more to say about a book called "Marx's Literary Style" that isn't already said in the title? This is a focused look on language and style in Marx's work, and for anyone interested in Marx, Marxist thought, or the greater contemporary literary conversation in general, this is a must-read. For those not interested in Marx's economic or philosophical dimensions, this is a great way to get into one of the most influential thinkers of all time.
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