Reading Marx Writing: Melodrama, the Market, and the ‘Grundrisse’

by Thomas Kemple

A Stanford University Press classic.

296 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1995

Reviews

[Michelle Swann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomas M. Kemple’s Reading Marx Writing: Melodrama, the Market, and the ‘Grundrisse’ (1995) offers an innovative and interdisciplinary reading of Marx’s unfinished manuscript, approaching it not as a technical draft of Capital but as a complex literary and rhetorical text. Kemple argues that Marx’s writing style—its digressions, reversals, and emotional intensity—reveals a melodramatic structure that mirrors the tensions of the capitalist market itself. Drawing on literary theory and critical hermeneutics, he interprets the Grundrisse as a self-reflexive work where Marx simultaneously analyzes and dramatizes the contradictions of economic life.
The book’s major strength lies in its originality: Kemple reframes Marx as both economist and storyteller, emphasizing the performative and affective dimensions of his prose. This perspective opens fresh ways of thinking about Marx’s method, highlighting how crisis, suspense, and repetition function as rhetorical as well as theoretical devices. This book is a significant contribution to Marx scholarship. It challenges economistic readings by insisting that the Grundrisse’s form is inseparable from its content and that Marx’s writing process itself enacts the dialectical tensions he sought to explain. Kemple’s study ultimately reminds readers that to understand Marx fully is to take seriously the drama and artistry of his thought as much as its economic rigor.