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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  Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed

  • Mary Klages(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  Subsequent Marxist critics have argued that literature does some-thing more complicated than simply ‘reflecting’ the values that support capitalism. According to Pierre Macheray, literature doesn’t reflect either the economic base or other ideology, but rather it works on existing ideologies and transforms them, giving these ideologies new shape and structure; literature in Macheray’s view is distinct from, and distant from, other forms of ideology and can provide insights into how ideologies are structured, and what their limits are. This view is also followed by Georg Lukacs, who argues that Marxist literary criticism should look at a work of literature in terms of the ideological structure(s) of which it is a part, but which it transforms in its art. For other Marxists, including Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Louis Althusser, literature works the way any ideology does, by signifying the imaginary ways in which people perceive the real world; literature uses language to signify what it feels like to live in particular conditions, rather than using language to give a rational analysis of those conditions. Thus literature helps to create experi-ence, not just reflect it. As a kind of ideology, literature for these LITERARY THEORY: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED 130 critics is relatively autonomous, both of other ideological forms and of the economic base. LOUIS ALTHUSSER AND IDEOLOGY Althusser is a structuralist Marxist. This should make you ask: How can that be? How can you combine Marxism, which relies on social/historical analysis, with structuralism, which relies on ahistorical/asocial analysis? Althusser answers that initially with distinction between ideologies (historical/social) and ideology (structural). Althusser makes this distinction in his essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,’ which discusses the relation between the state and its subjects.

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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)

  Marxist criticism was an important development in literary analysis that led the way to the theories I’ve explored here that question and challenge the canon, and its privileging of the male gender, the upper class, and whiteness. Karl Marx (1818–1883), a German philosopher, and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), a German sociologist, founded this school of thought. Barry explains Marxism in a clear and concise manner (and it is a school of thought that is not always easy to comprehend and is often misinterpreted or expressed in a convoluted fashion) when he writes:

  The aim of Marxism is to bring about a classless society, based on the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Marxism is a materialist philosophy: that is, it tries to explain things without assuming the existence of a world, or of forces, beyond the natural world around us, and the society we live in. It looks for concrete, scientific, logical explanations of the world of observable fact. (Its opposite is idealist philosophy, which does believe in the existence of a spiritual “world elsewhere” and would offer, for instance, religious explanations of life and conduct.) (150)

  Marxism is most different from other philosophies in that it doesn’t only seek to understand the world, it also seeks to change it.

  Marxist literary criticism obviously has its roots in Marxist philosophy, and “maintains that a writer’s social class and its prevailing ‘ideology’ (outlook, values, tacit assumptions, half-realized allegiances, etc.) have a major bearing on what is written by a member of that class” (152). The Marxist view of authors then is that they are influenced by their place in society, and they cannot escape this fact as they write, so their writing reflects it. And, it isn’t only the content of their work that is affected but also the form in which it’s written. More recent developments in Marxist criticism have been influenced by the work of French Marxist Louis Althusser (1918–1990). His influential essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” argued that power is maintained in a society through the acceptance of that power by the members of that society, often through internal resignation to that power, whether conscious or unconscious. Althusser referred to the ideological structures in society which achieve this consent to power:

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  Towards a Semiotics of Ideology

  • Carlos Reis(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Chapter II Marxism and literary representation 1. Representation and social art 1.1. The vigour with which sociologically inspired methodologies assert the conviction that the literary creation transcends the individual sphere and extends itself into the domain of the collective is well known. So think those who choose to analyze the social, economic, political and cultural factors that determined, through the sieve of a creative individua-lity, the emergence of a literary work. In a way that's also how those who, restricting the field of research a bit more, view a literary generation as a micro-collectivity (in Ortega y Gasset's canonized expression: a compromise between the masses and the individual), vested with a certain unity of action. Even those methodologies which extend to the proble-matic of literary communication, from a socio-cultural point of view, nearly always favour collective and social elements: reading motivations, the influence of the mass media on literary production and consumption, the role of the so-called sub-literatures, the power of the reader over the writer, etc. All this (recalled here only as a sort of preamble) has to do directly with the notion that literature constitutes a kind of social awareness, not remote from the context in which it is integrated, but rather maintaining intense connections with other forms of social awareness such as politics, ideological systems, axiological codes, etc. Besides, if we remember that verbal components are inherent to literary creation, we can readily accept the emphasis enjoyed by factors of a social origin: V. N. Voloshinov, one of Bakhtine's disciples, stressed this idea when he stated the impossibility of understanding how any statement can be enunciated, even if it seems autonomous and achieved, if one cannot view it as a moment, as a single drop in the stream of verbal communication, whose incessant movement is the same as social life and History.

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  A Weapon in the Struggle

  The Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain

  • Andy Croft(Author)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • Pluto Press

    (Publisher)

  Humanity is not alienated from itself. And the only reality of humanity is its activity. Social change 114 A WEAPON IN THE STRUGGLE results from the exercise by social groups of the energy of the human species ... and that energy is inseparable from the specific human powers of thought, language and the possibility of choice ... powers which have developed through an active relationship of men with nature, and between men themselves, of which the consciousness of death has been an essential part. Literature has the power to make this process of change conscious. The purpose of literary criticism must be to make explicit what in literature is implicit. 24 T.A. Jackson Tommy Jackson’s enthusiasms were probably the most catholic of all the writers discussed here. His literary critical work reveals a passionate devotion to imaginative writing, a fine discernment of literary value and an unorthodox application of Marxism to his reading. This working-class autodidact, agitator, lecturer, propagandist, reviewer and collector of books produced remarkable works on a wide range of subjects, including Charles Dickens: the Progress of a Radical (1937), Ireland Her Own: An Outline of the Irish Struggle (1947), an autobiography Solo Trumpet (1953) and Dialectics: the Logic of Marxism and Its Critics (1936). In the last mentioned philosophical compendium he replied to those who criticised Marxism for being deterministic and then flourished their own determinism to ‘prove’ that Marxism was ‘out of date’: Marx said that ‘ideas’ individually and in their historical development were reflections of men’s historically conditioned social relations [but] there are other material and social circumstances than ‘economic’ ones ... among other things ... the influence upon men of subjective activity – of theory and tradition ...

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  Tintinnabulation of Literary Theory

  Traversing Genres to Contemporary Experience

  • Andrew Nyongesa(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Mwanaka Media and Publishing Pvt Ltd

    (Publisher)

  In November 1917, Lenin overthrew the Kerensky capitalist Russian regime and imposed communism (Walsh, 114). He established what he called “a dictatorship of the proletariat”. Lois Tyson observes that Marxist criticism looks at the relationship among socio-economic classes within and among societies and explains human activities in dynamics of economic power. Tyson asserts that “the theory holds that getting and keeping economic power is the motive behind all social and political activities including education, philosophy, religion, government, arts, science, technology and media” (54). She states other tenets as follows: First, differences in socioeconomic class divide people in ways that are more significant than differences in religion, race ethnicity and gender. For Max, real battle lines are drawn between the rich and the poor rather than basic diversities like sex, race, ethnicity and religion. Secondly, the proletariat (peasants and poor workers) will one day spontaneously develop the class consciousness needed to rise up in violent revolution against their oppressors and create a classless society. This is the socialist revolution, the ultimate goal of socialism that is geared at creating a classless society. Thirdly, ideology is an essential feature of the Marxist theory. Ideology refers to the belief systems of a people such as religion or political philosophies like democracy, aristocracy, autocracy and economic beliefs like capitalism and communism. These ideologies have a role of maintaining those in power. Religion, according to Marx, helps to keep the laity poor and satisfied with their lot in life. 2:2 Marxism Vis-a-Vis the Novel and the Play As the latest genre of literature, literary writers in Africa and beyond used the novel to convey the need to create a Marxist society. Drama 6 was not left behind; playwrights wrote plays and had them directed and staged to sell Marxist ideals.

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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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