Are the Humanities Inconsequent?: Interpreting Marx's Riddle of the Dog
Adapting the discontinuous and multi-tonal critical procedures of works like Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and Laura Riding's Anarchism Is Not Enough, Jerome McGann subjects current literary studies to a patacritical investigation. The investigation centers in the interpretation of a notorious modern riddle: "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." Working by indirection and from multiple points of view, the book argues that aesthetics is always a science of exceptions, and that any given critical practice is also always an exception from itself. The book works from two assumptions: first, that the riddle of the dog conceals an allegory about book culture and is addressed to the academic custodians of book culture; and second, that any explanation of the riddle is necessarily implicated in the problem posed by the riddle. It therefore remains to be seen--it is the reader's part to decide--whether the book is a friend to man or--perhaps like the riddle of the dog--"too dark to read."
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