Today is Karl Marx‘s birthday (1818-1883).

Frye in one of the “Third Book” notebooks:

Marx himself was undoubtedly a great writer in the anatomic tradition: he had the satirist’s truculence, excremental imagery, & inability to finish books.  (This aspect of ironic mythos is the counterpart of the endless form of romance.)  If Norman Brown’s book [Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History] had been obsessed by Marx instead of Freud, & he had added Marx to his studies of Luther & Swift, he’d have written an even more remarkable book.

The point is that literary criticism has to develop canons for — not judging, but — incorporating Marx, Freud, Luther, Paul, Jesus, instead of allowing determinists to make them a standard for critical categories. (CW 9, 80)