Jordan / MASCULINITY IN BEOWULF AND FIGHT CLUB Marxism, Not Manhood Accommodation and Impasse in Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club

Despite their different immediate contexts of production and cultural affiliation, Seamus Heaney’sBeowulf andChuckPalahniuk’sFight Club participate in a larger problematic concerning the fate of masculinity in the modern world. Heaney knowingly casts his task as a translator in terms of a test of manhood in which he strives to claim a place for an ancient, implicitly masculine wisdom in contemporary world culture. Palahniuk drama-tizes a situation inwhich contemporary culture ismade responsible for a crisis inmascu-line identity. However, although Fight Club’s take on its protagonist’s attempt to resolve this crisis is surely ironic, its logic implies that action is required against the effects of globalized capitalism, which should be understood not as emasculating but as dehuman-izing and as requiring a response that goes beyond the merely cultural. Key words: Seamus Heaney, Chuck Palahniuk, masculinity, modernity, political agency, myth, virtue, history, capitalism, heroism Given the prevalence of the notion that there is considerable tension between contemporary culture and masculinity, it is perhaps unsurprising that two of the cult successes of the last years of the millennium should reflec