Moretti 1983
From Commonplace Book
Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken as Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms. Pub. 1983. London: Verso, 2006.
Ch. x: Dialectic of Fear
- 83: The fear of bourgeois civilization is summed up in two names: Frankenstein and Dracula.
- Dracula : Capitalist :: Frankenstein : abjected worker
- 84: ...the monster expresses the anxiety that the future will be monstrous.
- 91: ...when Harker explores the castle, he finds just one thing: 'a great heap of gold...' what about Dracula's English library?
- 94: This is the point: money should be used according to justice. Money must not have an end in itself, in its continuous accumulation. It must have, rather, a moral, anti-economic end to the point where colossal expenditures and losses can be calmly accepted. This idea of money is, for the capitalist, something inadmissable. But it is also the great ideological lie of Victorian capitalism, a capitalism which is ashamed of itself and which hides factories and stations beneath cumbrous Gothic superstructures; which prolongs and extols aristocratic models of life; which exalts the holiness of the family as the latter begins secretly to break it up.
- copy passages on 96-8, 106-7
