Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9781438477756

Table of Contents

Reviews

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

In Capital in the Mirror, editors Krier and Worrell offer a collection of thought-provoking essays that reassess the relationship between social theory and aesthetic philosophy ... While groundbreaking in its interdisciplinary formulations, the volume demands some level of fluency with a variety of scholarly languages. - CHOICE 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

"""In Capital in the Mirror, editors Krier and Worrell offer a collection of thought-provoking essays that reassess the relationship between social theory and aesthetic philosophy … While groundbreaking in its interdisciplinary formulations, the volume demands some level of fluency with a variety of scholarly languages."" — CHOICE ""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"

""In Capital in the Mirror, editors Krier and Worrell offer a collection of thought-provoking essays that reassess the relationship between social theory and aesthetic philosophy While groundbreaking in its interdisciplinary formulations, the volume demands some level of fluency with a variety of scholarly languages."" — CHOICE ""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

Author Information

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.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available