Description: "A spectre is haunting literature today- the spectre of patacriticism. Nowhere is the threat more evident than in the dog riddle propounded by the late Marx: 'Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.' This book, which explains for the first time what Marx meant, works from two assumptions: 1. That the riddle conceals an allegory about book culture and is addressed to the academic custodians of book culture; and 2. that our explanation is necessarily implicated in the problem posed by the riddle of the dog. 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 Marx's riddle, too dark to read."--Publisher's website
Brief description: Jerome McGann is Emeritus University Professor at the University of Virginia and visiting research professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a director of the online editorial project "Jaime de Angulo's Old Time Stories: Voice, Text, Image."