ABSTRACT
Despite the most recent events, indeed perhaps because of them, I remain skeptical of the ease with which Marx has been dismissed. Without wishing to reinvent a debate concerning the predictive. value of Marxist theory, I do want to raise the issue of whether the analytical and critical component of Marx's work is easily abandoned at the very moment when capitalism appears least able to legitimate itself in terms that are anything other than cynical. It is striking that many conservative intellectuals, classical liberal humanists, and postmodern radical cultural critics alike proclaim the bankruptcy of Marxist historical and critical analysis precisely at a time when the economic has assumed such an unmediated presence in our own culture. Twenty years ago, when I entered graduate school, efforts to deal with the material bases of literary production were dismissed contemptuously by even my most liberal professors as "vulgar economic determinism." Today, the socioeconomic is widely thematized, not only in scholarship identified under the rubric of "cultural studies," but also in literary studies proper, particularly in that loosely structured movement sometimes called "new historicism," sometimes "cultural poetics" (both terms strike me as euphemisms for what is more like an approach to cultural history that acknowledges, however cautiously, a relationship between literature and political economy). The tendency is evident in work on the literature of all periods, but I shall limit my comments to the particular case of "early modern studies" (that this phrase has begun to displace "Renaissance studies" in current usage is itself indicative of a growing distrust of nostalgic and idealist categories; "early modern" may entail a residual caution with respect to economistic explanations, but it does strike me as marking an inclination towards a more materialist cultural history and theory). Whether the theme is literal, as in recent studies of print technology, theater, and the market (Newton 1982; Murray 1983; Loewenstein 1985; Agnew 1986; Newman 1989), or figurative, as in the prevalence of terms like "circulation," "exchange," "negotiation," and "cultural capital" in Stephen Greenblatt's brilliant but puzzlingly evasive Shakespearean Negotiations (1988),1 the presence of the economic in current literary critical discourse inverts earlier norms of literary history. Though often masked by the more Nietzschcan or Foucauldian term "power," the economic is foregrounded in literary studies today in ways that were unthinkable a generation ago.
