Rethinking intellectual history and reading texts -- Poetics of historiography: Hayden White's Tropics of discourse -- Reading exemplars: Wittgenstein's Vienna and Wittgenstein's Tractatus -- Who rules metaphor? Paul Ricoeur's theory of discourse -- Habermas and the grounding of critical theory -- Sartre and the question of biography -- Marxism in the textual maelstrom: Fredric Jameson's The political unconscious -- Reading Marx: the case of The eighteenth Brumaire -- Bakhtin, Marxism, and the carnivalesque -- Marxism and intellectual history.