William Marx, "Libraries of the Mind" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Aug 3, 2025

William Marx, a Professor of Comparative Literature at the Collège de France, delves into the fascinating concept of our mental libraries. He explores how forgotten and overlooked texts—what he calls 'dark matter'—influence our understanding of literature. Marx emphasizes the importance of reading aloud and the intersection of oral traditions with written texts. He critiques cultural biases in the literary canon and champions the need for diverse literary experiences, urging us to embrace a more inclusive approach to literature in our minds.

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INSIGHT

Literature Lives in the Mind

Literature primarily exists as a mental act in the reader's mind, not just in physical books.
Books and texts are vehicles, but literature comes alive through reading and interpretation.

INSIGHT

Orality Shapes Literature's Roots

Ancient literature originated in oral traditions before becoming written texts.
Literature transcends its material form, existing in oral, memory, written, and digital media.

ADVICE

Reading vs Knowing Books

Don't feel pressured to have read every book on your shelves; knowing about texts counts too.
Mental libraries include books read, known about, or heard of — it's not just physical reading.

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Erich Auerbach wrote his classic work Mimesis, a history of narrative from Homer to Proust, based largely on his memory of past reading. Having left his physical library behind when he fled to Istanbul to escape the Nazis, he was forced to rely on the invisible library of his mind. Each of us has such a library—if not as extensive as Auerbach’s—even if we are unaware of it. In this erudite and provocative book, William Marx explores our invisible libraries—how we build them and how we should expand them.
Libraries, Marx tells us, are mental realities, and, conversely, our minds are libraries. We never read books apart from other texts. We take them from mental shelves filled with a variety of works that help us understand what we are reading. And yet the libraries in our mind are not always what they should be. The selection on our mental shelves—often referred to as canon, heritage, patrimony, or tradition—needs to be modified and expanded. Our intangible libraries should incorporate what Marx calls the dark matter of literature: the works that have been lost, that exist only in fragments, that have been repurposed by their authors, or were never written in the first place. Marx suggests methods for recovering this missing literature, but he also warns us that adding new titles to our libraries is not enough. We must also adopt a new attitude, one that honors the diversity and otherness of literary works. We must shed our preconceptions and build within ourselves a mental world library.

William Marx is professor of comparative literature at the Collège de France. He is the author of The Hatred of Literature, The Tomb of Oedipus: Why Greek Tragedies Were Not Tragic, and other books.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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