Marxism Literary Criticism

12 Key excerpts on "Marxism Literary Criticism"

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  Marxist Literary Criticism Today

  • Barbara Foley(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Pluto Press

    (Publisher)

  PART II

  Literature

  Passage contains an image

  4

  Literature and Literary Criticism

  What we have to accomplish at present [is] the ruthless criticism of all that exists …

  — Karl Marx to Arnold Ruge, 1843, MEC

  What is literature? What is literary criticism? What principles are distinctive to the project of Marxist literary criticism? Drawing upon the basic principles of Marxism set forth in the previous three chapters, our discussion will now examine the ways in which historical materialism, political economy, and ideology critique can be mobilized in the study of literary texts and traditions. We shall consider the ways in which a critical approach to the connections between literature and society can help us understand how things that we think of as being beyond politics—like novels and poems, as well as how we are trained to read them—are in fact profoundly political. It is precisely because literature is often seen as sealed off from the domain of politics that it is important to undertake this scrutiny; ideology is often most influential when it is most invisible. Accordingly, before we examine some of the key concerns of Marxist literary criticism and Marxist pedagogy, we shall interrogate several of the conceptions of literature and literary study—many of them ideologically saturated—that, functioning as common sense, prevail in capitalist society, especially in the literature classroom.

  Before we begin, one proviso. A persistent but mistaken assumption guiding the construction of various introductory textbooks used in high school and college classrooms over the past several decades is that literary criticism comprises a series of approaches corresponding to various perspectives and disciplines—New Criticism, psychoanalysis, myth and symbol criticism, feminism, critical race theory, postcolonialism, post-structuralism, New Historicism, reader-response theory, affect theory, ecocriticism, queer theory, and of course Marxism—that can then be “applied” to various texts. This methodological assumption is frequently accompanied by the idea that these approaches are best deployed in connection with texts whose explicit subject matters clearly relate to the chosen perspective or discipline. Thus feminist theory is seen to match up best with a novel by Virginia Woolf or a poem by Adrienne Rich; postcolonialism with a novel by Chinua Achebe or a memoir by Arundhati Roy; and Marxism with an industrial novel by Elizabeth Gaskell or a play by Bertolt Brecht. While delimiting any kind of critical inquiry by mechanically aligning it with a set of texts assumed in advance to be its appropriate testing ground, the “applications” approach to literary criticism is, I propose, especially constraining when imposed upon Marxist literary criticism. For Marxism is often held to be relevant only to texts produced during the capitalist era and directly reflecting economic relationships and class conflicts.

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  The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature

  • 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. In the perhaps most ambitiously cognitivist accounts of literature, such as the one found in Theodor W. Adorno, the literary work of art is not only considered capable of disclosing central features of its own society’s collective self-understanding, but viewed as the only

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  Georg Lukács

  • G.H.R. Parkinson(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 Marxism and Literary Criticism: 1 The Literature of the West

  I

  It is perhaps for his Marxist literary criticism that Lukács is best known. It is true that this fills only a little over four of the seventeen volumes of his collected writings;1 still, this is a substantial amount of work, which covers a period of nearly forty years — from articles in Die Linkskurve (1931-2: cf. chapter 1 , section IV ) to a short book on Solzhenitsyn published in 1970. It also forms a remarkably unified whole, and the task of the pages which follow will be to present in a systematic form its main outlines. The task is a complex one, and will require more than one chapter. As the social and economic background of Russian literature differed considerably from that of the rest of European literature, it will be convenient to discuss Lukács’ account of Russian literature separately in chapter 6 and to devote the rest of the present chapter to what will for convenience be called the literature of the West.

  First, however, there is some preliminary work to be done. One of the aims of this book is to place Lukács within his intellectual context, and in the case of his Marxist literary criticism this involves the performance of two tasks. First, it has to be shown how much there is in this criticism of what may be called ‘classical’ Marxism — that is, the views expounded in the writings of Marx and Engels. Second, it is also necessary to place Lukács’ criticism within the context of what was regarded as Marxism in the Russia in which Lukács took refuge after 1933; that is, in the context of what may briefly be called Stalinism. It was mentioned in the first chapter (section IV ) that Lukács claimed that his concessions to Stalinism — in particular, his recantation of views put forward in History and Class Consciousness

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  Critical Theory Today

  A User-Friendly Guide

  • Lois Tyson(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 Marxist criticism

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003148616-3

  Students new to the study of critical theory often ask why we study Marxist criticism given that the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, thereby proving that Marxism is not a viable theory. In addition to ignoring the existence of communist countries in other parts of the world, such a question overlooks two important facts. First, beyond some relatively small and relatively short-lived communes, there has never been a society completely in keeping with the principles developed by Karl Marx (1818–83), just as there has never been a democracy completely in keeping with its formal definition. Second, even if all communist countries were true Marxist societies and even if all of them had failed, Marxist theory would still give us a meaningful way to understand history and current events. Indeed, one could use Marxist criticism to interpret the failure of a Marxist society. However, before we can attempt a Marxist interpretation of such political events, or of events of any kind, we must first, of course, understand Marxist theory.

  The fundamental premises of Marxism

  What exactly is Marxist theory? Let’s begin to answer that question by answering another: what would Marxist critics say about the preceding chapter on psychoanalytic criticism? They would say that, by focusing our attention on the individual psyche and its roots in the family, psychoanalysis distracts our attention from the real forces that create human experience: the economic systems that structure human societies. Indeed, Marxist critics would have the same complaint, more or less, about all the other theories discussed in this book. If a theory does not foreground the economic realities of human culture, then it misunderstands human culture. For the way in which a society is organized economically determines how that society is organized culturally, and by culture Marxist thinkers mean all the institutions and productions a given society generates, including its system of education; the philosophies and religions to which its citizens subscribe; its system of government; its laws; its media; its forms of entertainment; the art, music, science, and technology its citizens produce; and so forth. To cite the simplest examples, if a society’s economic system is feudal – if a relatively small number of landowners provide homes and protection in return for the labor and loyalty of agricultural workers – then the culture growing from that system will support the belief that feudal landowners rule by some sort of divine right. If a society’s economic system is capitalist – if it promotes private profit from the sale of goods for money – then the culture growing from that system will support the belief that monetary wealth is a sign of superiority. In short, economics is the base on which the superstructure of culture is built because getting and keeping economic power are the motive behind all cultural institutions and productions. Economic power, therefore, always includes social and political power as well, which is why some Marxists today use the term socioeconomic class – rather than class, social class, or economic class

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  Analyzing Literature-to-Film Adaptations

  A Novelist's Exploration and Guide

  • Mary H. Snyder(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  So, Marxist critics distinguish in a text what’s on the surface and what’s hidden underneath, and they relate the subverted meanings within the text to Marxist themes. Perhaps there is a class struggle going on under the surface of the text, and thus a Marxist critic would point out where this is hidden in the folds of the text. Marxist critics also “relate the context of a work to the social-class status of the author” (161). Marxists will also look at a literary genre with reference to the social period it came out of, or that produced it (since Marxists believe that a text is produced not only by the author but the author’s particular social standing during a particular time in history, and that particular social class itself). Marxists also relate the work to the “social assumptions” of the time in which it was read, or “consumed” (161). Finally, Marxists believe that a text is influenced by the political environment in which it was written and examine the implications of the politics of the author’s time and how it affected the writing of the work (161). Questions that you would ask of a text if approaching it from a Marxist perspective might be:

  1. How are class differences presented in the work? Are characters aware or unaware of the economic and social forces that affect their lives? 2. How do economic conditions determine the characters’ lives? 3. What ideological values are explicit or implicit? 4. Does the work challenge or affirm the social order it describes? (Meyer 2008, 2122)

  I will mention only briefly cultural materialism, which is related to Marxist criticism, but in many ways is considered to be the British version of new historicism, in that they are very similar. However, there are differences. Cultural materialism

  takes a good deal of its outlook (and its name) form the British left-wing critic Raymond Williams. Instead of Foucault’s notion of “discourse” Williams invented the term “structures of feeling”: these are concerned with “meanings and values as they are lived and felt”. Structures of feeling are often antagonistic both to explicit systems of values and beliefs, and to the dominant ideologies within a society. (Barry 2009, 177)

  Thus, according to Williams, cultural materialism focuses on the values put forth in a novel, through the characters or the narrator, or in some other way, and shows those values are in opposition to the values of the time period in which the work was written. In this way, cultural materialism represents a more optimistic type of criticism, showing that it believes literature can go up against what it is writing within, to write against, and be successful at it. Although cultural materialism like new historicism doesn’t place its main focus on only the literary texts of a particular time period, it broadens its scope to all forms of culture, including television and popular music. This allows cultural materialism to use the past to help us understand the present. When we are researching a literary text, the nonliterary texts don’t have to be limited to texts of the time period in which the literary text was written, but can be texts and other media in culture, from other time periods including the present, that have a connection with the literary text in some way. Cultural materialism, then, “involves using the past to ‘read’ the present, revealing the politics of our own society by what we choose to emphasize or suppress about the past” (Barry 2009, 178).

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  On Native Grounds

  An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature

  • Alfred Kazin(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Mariner Books

    (Publisher)

  Camille , adored Beethoven and Tolstoy, and thought always of the revolution as an opportunity for the Russian people, so long kept in darkness under Czarism, to share in the best of human art and culture, and to use it as the starting-point for their own development. But just as Lenin’s political example was more dangerous than he knew, so the optimism, the messianic drive that lies at the heart of the dialectic, became a norm by which to judge the literature of past and present.

  Yet it is not the intellectual legerdemain, the totalitarian control inherent in Bolshevism, that explains the course of left-wing criticism; it is ineptitude. The Marxist critics were not all of them party-line journalists; they were merely betrayed by their confusion of Socialism with the Communist party, as they confused Socialism with their desire to whip literature into an ideal order preparatory to Socialism. Just as the Communist equates humanity with the proletariat, the proletariat with the party, the party with the central committee, the central committee with the top bureaucracy, the bureaucracy with Stalin, so the left-wing critics equated their own notion of what was wanted in literature with the dialectic and Socialism. The critic, having accepted the Marxist doctrine, found himself lost just where he needed guidance most. For the crucial question that followed upon the dialectic, the central problem for Marxist critics, became this: What is to be salvaged from the “bourgeois past” and what is to be rejected? If literature in any period is fundamentally only the reflection of the great social-economic realities of that period, what is “progressive” and serviceable to the Cause, and what is to be condemned? Though they rarely attacked the problem so directly, this was in reality the only question Marxist critics ever asked themselves. And it was upon their solution to that problem that their success or failure depended. Had they handled it well, they would have kept a proper relation in their minds between the demands of taste and the demands of “class analysis,” and they would not have underestimated the “backwardness” of the past or overestimated the zeal and sloganeering of their own revolutionary literature.

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  Criticism and Ideology

  A Study in Marxist Literary Theory

  • Terry Eagleton(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Verso

    (Publisher)

  5

  Marxism and Aesthetic Value

  The authors I have discussed in the previous chapter are all ranked by conventional estimation as ‘major’. If the issue of literary value is indeed a legitimate component of Marxist criticism, should not such a criticism be devoted to transvaluating received assumptions, rather than merely reproducing them? It depends, naturally, on the valuations in question. Marxist criticism should indeed decisively intervene in the ‘value-problem’; but nothing is to be gained by that form of literary ultra-leftism which dismisses received evaluations merely because they are the product of bourgeois criticism. The task of Marxist criticism is to provide a materialist explanation of the bases of literary value – a task which Raymond Williams, in his discussion of the English novel, seems to me to have left largely unachieved. It should not, then, be a matter of embarrassment that the literary texts selected for examination by Marxist criticism will inevitably overlap with those works which literary idealism has consecrated as ‘great’; it is a question of challenging the inability of such idealism to render more than subjectivist accounts of the criteria of value.

  It would seem absurd for Marxist criticism to be silent on the qualitative distinction between, say, Pushkin and Coventry Patmore. Yet such a theoretical prudery is in vogue within Marxist aesthetics. At its simplest level, it appears as an egalitarian unease about the ‘élitism’ of assigning certain works to second-class status: how patrician to prefer Blake to Betjeman. In its more sophisticated form, it presents itself as a rigorous scientificity hostile to the idealism of ‘normative’ judgement. The critic’s task is not to range works upon an evaluative scale but to achieve scientific knowledge of the conditions of their historical possibility. Whether the work in question is to be approved or censured is irrelevant to that end; evaluation is thus evacuated from the realm of literary science, to be furtively cultivated, perhaps, as a private pleasure.

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  The Dematerialisation of Karl Marx

  Literature and Marxist Theory

  • Leonard Jackson(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Marxist theory and literature Passage contains an image

  Chapter Six Economistic Marxism and Critical Interpretation

  The Case of Landscape and Caudwell's History of Poetry

  Summary

  I want in this chapter to do something very difficult: namely, to defend a simple and unfashionable economistic and historicist model of Marxist interpretation, based directly on Marx's claim that, in art, the class straggle is worked out at an ideological level. A consequence of this is that works of art can sometimes give us information about underlying class struggle, when it is not apparent to less sophisticated instruments.

  In the first section of this chapter I construct a deliberately simplified case study in a very familiar area — English landscape painting — to show how, by the application of Marxist theories of history and ideology, it is possible to find in works of art what amounts to a political unconscious: 1 that is, a deep political content of which both audience and creator may be unaware, but which is nonetheless profoundly important for both. This underlying content is an embodiment of some phase in the class struggle.

  In the second section some critical objections to this procedure are considered, using an article by Dr Leavis on jack Lindsay's Marxist interpretation of Bunyan. It is usually thought that Scrutiny easily saw off the Marxist challenge in literary criticism in the 1930s; my example suggests the encounter was a draw.

  The third section shows how it is possible to rewrite the whole history of English poetry on these lines, using the work of Christopher Caudwell, and to place it within a general philosophical theory — which Caudwell called 'dialectical materialism', though not every dialectical materialist would have approved. Some criticisms of this approach are also offered, but a protest is entered against the way the modern left has dismissed Caudwell.

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  Classical Marxism in an Age of Capitalist Crisis

  The Past is Prologue

  • William Briggs(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge India

    (Publisher)

  3

  Validating Marxist analysis

  Marxist thought has influenced a range of disciplines as diverse as art history, cultural studies, philosophy and the social sciences (Little 2007: 230). The recurrent themes of alienation, labour theory, class conflict, modes and relations of production, have become the focus for different approaches to Marxist analysis. Little points out that “there are many areas where Marxist methods have been employed, and there are many strands within Marx’s thought that have given rise to these various approaches” (2007: 230). This plethora of Marxist interpretations of just about everything is both a blessing and a curse. The ‘currency’ is certainly cheapened when the tag ‘Marxist’ can be so liberally attributed to any field of research, but we can leave this aside in our quest to validate Marx’s analytical and methodological approach to the world and to capitalism. At the same time, if we are to defend classical Marxism it is important to stress that which is pertinent and to discard that which is not.

  Maguire (2010), while outlining a range of contemporary perspectives within Marxism, argues that whether a school of thought is regarded as neo-Marxist or post-Marxist is of little consequence. What is important, for Maguire, is how Marxism deals with what he describes as practical problems (2010: 155). Whether by intent or by accident, what emerges in such a construction is a tendency towards relativism. For more than a century Marxism has attempted to deal with ‘practical’ problems as they have arisen. Bernstein’s (1975) attempts to ‘revise’ Marxist theory was an initial point of departure that ultimately led to Laclau and Mouffe’s claim that “it is no longer possible to maintain the conception of subjectivity and classes elaborated by Marxism, nor its vision of the historical course of capitalist development” (2001: 2–4). The simple fact is that there has been and remains a crisis within Marxist theory and that this has played a role in the ability of capitalism to withstand its own crises. Lukacs’ defence of ‘orthodox’ Marxism and his conviction that “all attempts to surpass or ‘improve’ it has led and must lead to over-simplification, triviality and eclecticism” (1976: 1), is well worth remembering. Marx’s method of analysis was a response to society as it existed. His approach involved a “willingness to make those assumptions he felt were necessary in order to make sense of things that he, unwaveringly and unchangingly, felt had to be accounted for” (Rosen 1996: 7). Marxism, necessarily seeks first to understand capitalism and then to challenge it.

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  Outside Literature

  • Tony Bennett(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Above all, certain doctrines will be paid reverence. 35 As was stated at the outset, I have neither pretended nor aspired to a position for speaking about literature that is immune to these pressures. I have, however, sought ‘co-existence’ with a different set of disciplines—broadly speaking, history and sociology—from that suggested by Lentricchia. This has been largely with a view to establishing some distance from aesthetic conceptions of the literary, and thus refusing what remains the primary condition for being ‘within the truth’ of criticism—that of addressing ‘literature’ as a given and self-subsistent object. My purpose, in advancing an institutional rather than formalist definition of literature, has been to assist in the formation of positions and strategies that will be within literature, so defined, as an ensemble of practices (of classification, commentary and pedagogy) which serve to organise and regulate a particular field of textual uses and effects. What difference, practically speaking, do such arguments make? Barthes, it may be recalled, imposed his own conditions for being ‘within the truth’ of criticism. If literature’s function is to institutionalise subjectivity, he argued, then the critic ‘must lay the fatal bet and talk about Racine in one way and not in another’ and, in so doing, ‘reveal himself as an utterly subjective, utterly historical being’. 36 For Marxists, I have suggested, this wager has taken the form of investing criticism with a political significance as a means of assisting in the formation of a revolutionary subject. Questions of critical politics, in this view, devolve centrally around the hermeneutic mobilisation of literary texts in ways that will aid the production of a collective political subject capable of effecting a transition from one type of society to another

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  Language and Silence

  Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman

  • George Steiner(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Open Road Media

    (Publisher)

  In that thought there has long been an acknowledged gap. Though he intended to do so, Marx never wrote a formal aesthetic. The numerous theoretic and practical observations he and Engels made on art and literature have been gathered by Mikhail Lifschitz in a standard compendium. They amount to an engaging miscellany of dialectical argument and personal taste. In the writings of Mehring, Plekhanov, and Kautsky there is further material toward a philosophy of art. Through the individual, often heretical, speculations of Caudwell, Adorno, and Walter Benjamin, Marxist aesthetics have been related to anthropology, psychology, and certain elements in modern linguistics.

  But as a whole—and this is true of much of Lukács’ best work—the Marxist critic has operated with the tools of nineteenth-century historicism. Where he has not been mouthing party propaganda or merely dividing art into progressive and decadent in a parody of last judgment, he has applied, with more or less talent and finesse, those criteria of historical condition and cause already implicit in Herder, Sainte-Beuve, and Taine. In so far as it locates the artist and his achievement in a material setting of economic and social forces, in so far as it insists on the essentially social and historically determined character of artistic perception and public response (an insistence vital also to the argument of such historians of art as Panofsky and Gombrich), Marxist criticism is part of a larger Historismus.

  To this tradition it has brought important refinements: Lukács’ discrimination between realism and naturalism; Benjamin’s insight into the influence of technology and mass-reproduction on the individual work of art; the application of the concepts of alienation and dehumanization to twentieth-century literature and painting. But in essence Marxism has contributed to aesthetics a disciplined historical awareness and a general radical optimism—witness Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution—rather than a coherent epistemology. There has been no Marxist Longinus, no Laokoon setting out a complete theory of aesthetic form in the framework of dialectical materialism.

  The difficulties are obvious. Concepts of spontaneity, of irrational or subconscious formulation, of despair and “reaction,” which are relevant to art, fit awkwardly into “scientific materialism.” There is the puzzle of anachronism with which Marx wrestled: why is it that some of the most mature, definitive art forms spring from societies whose economic and class structure is archaic or morally inadmissible? How does Sophocles, whose Antigone

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  Practising Theory and Reading Literature

  An Introduction

  • Raman Selden(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 1971, pp. 123-73). So, ideology does not refer to 'theories', or 'political ideas', or any kind of consciously formulated propositions about society. Althusser believes that ideology is like the air we breathe and is the seemingly natural discourse which makes possible our sense of existence as human 'subjects' (socially and psychologically). Ideology is closely related to what we call 'common sense'. Althusser's views differ from earlier Marxist thinkers, who believed that ideology was a kind of 'false consciousness' produced by capitalism, which could be dispelled by scientific knowledge. Althusser, who also believes that only Marxism possesses a 'scientific' knowledge of ideology, nevertheless shows that we cannot avoid working with some imaginary representations which help us to make sense of social experience. The State Apparatuses (religious, cultural, educational, judicial, and so on) help to sustain the dominant ideology and to reproduce it by situating human subjects as 'subjects of ideology'. This is done by a process Althusser calls 'interpellation' (hailing). All subjects are greeted by the discourse of a particular State Apparatus: it summons them into their places (as occurs, for example, when believers hear Christ calling them to follow Him). This account of how dominant ideologies reproduce their dominance leaves out the dimension of resistance: we also need to know how emergent classes and ideologies become dominant. However, a newly emergent ideology works in the same manner (through interpellation) as the ideological discourses it supplants.

  How does the Marxist theory of ideology account for literature? First, it is important to note that some Marxist explanations of literature's relationship with ideology are highly 'reductive': they treat literary texts as the direct expression of the writer's ideology or of the class whom the writer represents. Engels' discussion of Balzac's realism, in a letter to Margaret Harkness (April 1888, in Marx and Engels, On Literature and Art, ed. Baxandall and Morawski, 1974, pp. 115-17), rejects such reductivism. He shows that Balzac's novels give a remarkably accurate and dispassionate account of the rise of the bourgeoisie in French society, despite the fact that he was a deeply-committed royalist. It seems that ideology may be represented in literature at a 'subconscious' level. Althusser developed this insight by showing that major literature gives us a sense of what it is like to exist within a particular ideology, and produces this sense of 'lived' ideology because literary form is capable of showing us the nature of ideology with a sort of aesthetic detachment. Subsequently, critics of Althusser have suggested that in making literature superior to ideology he destroys the fundamental Marxist subordination of culture to social structure. Taking a larger historical view, Marxist critics often argue that literary forms (as opposed to writers or even specific works) are themselves expressions of class ideologies. For example, the novel can be seen to have revealed in its very form

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