Jerome McGann reads from Are the Humanities Inconsequent? Interpreting Marx's Riddle of the Dog. McGann subjects current literary studies to a patacritical investigation. The investigation centers in the interpretation of a riddle of Marx, Groucho that is: "Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read." Working by indirection and from multiple points of view, McGann argues that aesthetics is always a science of exceptions, and that any given critical practice is also always an exception from itself.
Jerome McGann is the author of The Textual Condition, Romantic Ideology, The Beauty of Inflections, Radiant Textuality, Swinburne: An Experiment in Critism, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism, and The Point Is to Change It. He teaches at the University of Virginia, where he is the John Stewart Bryan University Professor.
