Marxism Literary Criticism
Marxist literary criticism is a theoretical approach that examines literature through the lens of social and economic power structures. It focuses on how literature reflects and perpetuates class struggle, exploitation, and inequality. This approach emphasizes the relationship between literature and the socioeconomic conditions of the time, and seeks to uncover the ideological implications of literary works.
6 Key excerpts on "Marxism Literary Criticism"
- Noël Carroll, John Gibson, Noël Carroll, John Gibson(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...38 Literature and Marxism Espen Hammer DOI: 10.4324/9781315708935-38 I Introduction The writings of Karl Marx initiated a historically new and unprecedented interest in the relationship between literature and society. Although his predecessor G. W. F. Hegel, in his Aesthetics, had paved the way for a thoroughgoing historicization of literature, arguing that works of art in general must be understood as “of their time,” Marx put forward a position whereby the literary work becomes a reflection of the society from which it springs. 1 The work reflects society in the ideological sense of being a coded (and for Marx ultimately illusory or misleading) representation of the interests of the dominant class. However, it also reflects society in the sense of being a reflection upon it and hence a source of significant social critique. The tension between ideology and critique, as well as the various ways in which these can be played out against each other, suggesting that in this tradition the social and the cognitive function of literature have been pivotal concerns, forms the basis for most of the debates that have raged over the promise and prospects of a Marxist literary criticism. In some types of Marxist literary criticism, such as the one we find in Louis Althusser, the writing at stake is little more than a symptom to be decoded and diagnosed by the critic. In other Marxist criticism, such as in Georg Lukács and Arnold Hauser, which is inspired by Hegel’s view of art as capable of contributing to our self-understanding, the literary work of art is viewed as putting forward a particular vision of its own society, in particular of the central norms and commitments on which various key social arrangements are founded. While this vision will necessarily be tainted by ideology, its proponents strongly believe that literature offers genuine insight and understanding of social conditions...
eBook - ePubKey Concepts
A Guide to Aesthetics, Criticism and the Arts in Education
- Trevor Pateman(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Marxist Critical Theory DOI: 10.4324/9781315625621-34 In Marxist theory, art and literature are treated as social and material practices which are produced by and within specific historical conditions. Crucial to Marxist thought is the question of class relations within production. Literature and art are not created in isolation by the individual writer or artist, as romantic theories of art might suggest, but are the product of the labour of a number of workers, for example, printer, stage hand, pupil painter and picture restorer; nor are they value-free. Marxists are concerned with the extent to which the received beliefs of groups and classes within society, especially those of the dominant class which controls the means of production, are reproduced in art and literature. This raises the central issue of art and ideology which is discussed below. The reception of works is also important. Why are some works suppressed or ‘lost’? Why are some texts and works of art ‘rediscovered’ and some plays ‘revived’ in later periods, and what are the ideological reasons for the ‘rediscovery’ and ‘revival’? Then there is the role of criticism. How does criticism mediate our reading of literature and the way we see art and drama? Although discussions of art, literature and cultural practice can be found in the work of Marx and Engels, they did not formulate a coherent cultural theory; we need to turn to later Marxist theorists for an overview of Marxism and the arts. However, if we want to place the arts within a social and political structure, then we need to consider the concepts of base and superstructure formulated by Marx. The base can roughly be defined as the economic foundation on which the superstructure rests. Exactly what constitutes the superstructure is more difficult to decide...
eBook - ePubUsing Critical Theory
How to Read and Write About Literature
- Lois Tyson(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In other words, one of the purposes of such a literary text is to criticize the oppressive socioeconomic ideologies it represents. And only in texts like these is it relatively easy for students new to Marxist theory to spot these ideologies at work. That’s why our study of Marxist concepts in this book focuses on literature in which the socioeconomic ideologies represented are not buried in the background. Finally, Marxist concepts can be used in service of the theoretical approaches discussed in the following chapters of this book. For example, Marxist concepts can be helpful when we want to understand how classism, the American Dream, or any of the other ideologies described in this chapter oppresses members of a particular group—a political minority—by denying them equal access to education, employment, housing, and other sources of socioeconomic power. So a Marxist understanding of socioeconomic oppression can be helpful even when our primary goal is to use feminist; lesbian, gay, or queer; African American; or postcolonial concepts to understand a literary work. Marxist theory and cultural criticism: Pretty Woman (Touchstone Pictures) We can also use concepts from Marxist theory for the purposes of cultural criticism. That is, we can use Marxist concepts to help us analyze the cultural messages sent, whether deliberately or not, by the everyday productions of the culture in which we live, such as movies, games, television shows, song lyrics, toys, and other productions of popular culture discussed in Chapter 1. Indeed, those cultural productions that in some way represent human behavior—that have characters and a plot—can be analyzed using concepts from Marxist theory just as we use those concepts to analyze literary works...
eBook - ePubThe Meaning of Ideology
Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives
- Michael Freeden, Michael Freeden(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Again, it is surely no accident, in the old Marxist phrase, that most Marxist criticism has been directed towards the novel, as the form that most obviously preoccupies itself with social relationships and attitudes. Few Marxist critics have concerned themselves with analysing the ideological alignments of poetry. One distinguished exception to this generalization is Raymond Williams. 45 This, again, isn't to say that poetry exists in a pure aesthetic sphere isolated from history, but that 'ideology' may not be the most helpful category in attempting to think its relationship to history. (One might possibly make an exception, as with prose fiction, for those poets who quite consciously and explicitly engage with the state of their society, like Yeats or Eliot, who were in fact studied in Eagleton's Criticism and Ideology.) But even if one were to retain the term ideology, there is a danger in its use to which Fredric Jameson points: that the analysis of culture in ideological terms involves Marxism in an instrumental, functional, understanding of culture, always grasped as 'the instrument, witting or unwitting, of class domination, legitimation, and social mystification' (op. cit., Ref. 14, p. 282). As a corrective to this, Jameson invokes Paul Ricœur's insistence on the dual nature of hermeneutics, both a demystification, and the manifestation and restoration of a message to be listened to, rather than challenged. Nor is he worried by the religious dimension of this positive aspect of hermeneutics: rather, he insists that Marxism must evolve its own equivalent (pp. 282–3). His term for this is the 'Utopian'. 'All class consciousness of whatever type', he suggests, 'is Utopian insofar as it expresses the unity of a collectivity'; but only in an allegorical sense in which 'all such collectivities are themselves figures for the ultimate concrete collective life of an achieved Utopian or classless society' (pp. 290–1)...
eBook - ePubBeginning theory
An introduction to literary and cultural theory: Fourth edition
- Peter Barry(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Manchester University Press(Publisher)
...244) that traditional Marxist criticism tends to deal with history in a fairly generalised way. It talks about conflicts between social classes, and clashes of large historical forces, but, contrary to popular belief, it rarely discusses the detail of a specific historical situation and relates it closely to the interpretation of a particular literary text. As Newton implies, this suggests one of the main differences between the Marxist criticism of the 1960s and 1970s and the cultural materialist and new historicist criticism (Chapter 9) which came to the fore in the 1980s, since the latter very often dealt closely with specific historical documents, attempting, in an almost archaeological spirit, to recreate the ‘state of mind’ of a particular moment in history. ‘Leninist’ Marxist criticism A much harder line about literature than Marx and Engels themselves would have approved of was generally pursued by officially sanctioned Marxists, at least until the 1960s. In the 1920s, during the early years after the revolution in Russia, the official Soviet attitude to literature and the arts was very enlightened and ‘experimental’, and characteristically modern forms of art were encouraged. The 1930s saw reaction throughout the whole of Soviet society, and the state began to exert direct control over literature and the arts as well as everything else. At the first Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934 liberal views were outlawed and a new orthodoxy imposed, based on the writings of Lenin rather than those of Marx or Engels. Lenin had argued in 1905 that literature must become an instrument of the Party...
eBook - ePub- Francis Mulhern(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...What is at issue, then, is not just a dismantling of the category of Literature, or the ways in which the texts thus labelled have usually been studied, but a study and critique of the bourgeois literary formation – of the ways in which the relations of intertextuality have been constructed within that formation; of the ways in which different practices of writing have been caught, held and defined in relation to one another; and of the ways in which critical and institutional practices have borne upon the reproduction of those differences. It also involves an attempt to think outside that formation, to construe the internal economy of the field of writing in terms which by-pass the distinctions posited by the concept of Literature. My purpose, then, is not to develop a Marxist theory of ‘popular fiction’, but to suggest some ways in which what is commonly referred to as popular fiction may be analytically occupied by Marxists in order to call into question the system of critical concepts of which popular fiction itself forms a part. As a prelude to doing so, however, it will be necessary to indicate that Marxist criticism has, for the greater part of its history, been an essentially bourgeois enterprise at the level of its founding theoretical assumptions, if the kind of critical strategy suggested above is to be developed and inserted within Marxism as part of a substantially reformulated critical problematic. It will also be necessary to consider the relationship between Marxism and popular fiction from another angle: historical and critical rather than strategic...
