Background
Macherey, Pierre was born in 1938.
literary theorist metaphysician Marxist
Macherey, Pierre was born in 1938.
Ecole Normale Supérieure.
Lecturer in Philosophy, Paris I.
A student and disciple of the structural Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Pierre Macherey is best known for his application of Althusser’s theory of ideology to the field of literary studies. Literature is a form of ideological production to Macherey, and in his most important book. A Theory of Literary Production (1966), he argues that when 'read against the grain’ literary texts will reveal the contradictions of the ideology within which they were composed. Since any ideology is concerned to disguise all its internal contradictions, this turns the literary text into a particularly fruitful area of study for the Marxist critic. Machercy’s work has had a very considerable impact on literary theory and criticism, and the ‘reading against the grain approach that he advocates has been widely adopted, perhaps most notably in the Englishspeaking world by Terry Eagleton.