Rhetorical Materialism: Karl Marx and the Nineteenth-Century Writer as Weaver

Abstract: In Western literature from antiquity through the Romantic period, weaving served as a standard metaphor for the noble labor of the poet. But in the nineteenth century, the grounds of the weaver figure underwent profound transformation. Having long signified a gilded art, the weaver now emblematized a degraded trade. Weaving, or industrialized textile production, thus acquired new significance as a figure for industrial-age authorship specifically, which writers took up variously in articulating their experience of the new conditions of capitalist literary production. For writers like Thomas Carlyle, the figure became something to disavow, taken up ironically in order to critique literature's recent commodification. But for Karl Marx, the new connotations of the weaver figure provided the basis for a theory of authorship's resistance to capitalist exploitation and a humanistic defense of the dignity of labor.