The Critic as Accountant

Abstract

Published soon after his controversial study Distant Reading (2013), Franco Moretti’s The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (2013) has generated similar controversy for its argument that the concept of the bourgeois can best be understood by close reading of prose generated concurrently with the rise of the “middle class” and the consistent movement away from realist writing to a more evocative – and evasive – prose that masks the true problems of class inequalities. This essay provides a critique of The Bourgeois, not only summarizing Moretti’s major points but challenging his readings of specific texts and his larger conclusions about the causes and effects of the post-Enlightenment rise of the bourgeois as the dominant social class. Evidence from many important Marxist critics, including Marx, Engels, and Lukacs, as well as theorists such as Derrida, is offered to refute many of Moretti’s conclusions. The essay concludes with an assertion that Moretti’s work is in part a return to material relations that de-materializes the material and advances a mode of reading that supports capitalism.