Overview

In this daring study, Amy De'Ath develops a new type of literary criticism attuned to the wayour lives are shaped by capital's impersonal compulsions – by what happens ""behind our backs."" Challenging the symptomatic interpretive methods of Western Marxism, De'Ath argues that value-critical accounts of Marx's work enable a feminist reading methodthat understands how value dissimulates itself from the social forms it generates, obscuring their historical content. Close reading works by Kay Gabriel, Bernadette Mayer, Bhanu Kapil, Marie Annharte Baker, Alli Warren, and Hannah Black, Behind Our Backs explains how these examples of everyday feminized ingenuity—by turns excessive, improper, ironic, and sincere—express the reality of capitalism's appearances, and in doing so call forth dialectical readers. Through this careful collation of poetic cases, capital is revealed to be not a force of human nature, but the expression of a dynamic social configuration—a logic realized every day, and one whose gendering inversions are felt and critiqued in the poetic experiments of trans, queer, Indigenous, and diasporic writing. Feminized poetry, De'Ath demonstrates, is both a central archive and theoretical powerhouse for the critique of political economy.

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9781503643840

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Reviews

""In this brilliant study of social forms, De'Ath shows how a surprisingly speculative strain of contemporary poetry explores unseen connections between the domination of value and the process of feminization. A groundbreaking book for both Marxist and feminist literary criticism.""--Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago ""Using a nimble Marxian understanding of abstraction, De'Ath shows us the mistake we make when we call avant-garde poems 'abstract' and really just mean 'intellectual.' We will be better readers of political poetry because of this book.""--Christopher Nealon, Johns Hopkins University ""Behind Our Backs forges new bonds between a typically uncompanionable trio--Marxist value theory, feminism, and literary critique. It will be seen as a key document in the dissolution of the long-standing antinomy between totality and difference, value and identity."" --Colleen Lye, University of California, Berkeley

""Behind Our Backs forges new bonds between a typically uncompanionable trio--Marxist value theory, feminism, and literary critique. It will be seen as a key document in the dissolution of the long-standing antinomy between totality and difference, value and identity."" --Colleen Lye, University of California, Berkeley

Author Information

Amy De'Ath is Assistant Professor of English at Tufts University.

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