Marxism
Terry Eagleton - "Its task is to show the text as it cannot know itself, to manifest those conditions of its making (inscribed in its very letter) about which it is necessarily silent. It is not just that the text knows some things and not others; it is rather that its very self-knowledge is the construction of a self-oblivion." |
Important concepts within Marxism
Hegemony - refers to the pervasive systems of assumptions, meanings, values, web of ideology in other words that shape the way things look, what they mean and therefore what reality is. (Hierarchy of power/ Dominant economic class have hegemony over subordinate classes.
Ideology - shared beliefs and values held in unquestioning manner by culture. It governs what culture deems to be normative. For Marxists, ideology is determined by economics.
Base Vs Superstructure – The term ‘base’ refers to where we stand economically, whilst ‘superstructure’ refers to other factors such as religion, politics, philosophy and art.
Hegemony - refers to the pervasive systems of assumptions, meanings, values, web of ideology in other words that shape the way things look, what they mean and therefore what reality is. (Hierarchy of power/ Dominant economic class have hegemony over subordinate classes.
Ideology - shared beliefs and values held in unquestioning manner by culture. It governs what culture deems to be normative. For Marxists, ideology is determined by economics.
Base Vs Superstructure – The term ‘base’ refers to where we stand economically, whilst ‘superstructure’ refers to other factors such as religion, politics, philosophy and art.
Reification - This is a term used to describe the way in which people are turned into commodities, to be useful in market exchange.
The politics of class: Marxism
- Marxist political parties that were for a long time a serious force in Western Europe have either disappeared or have become politically marginal since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
- One self- proclaimed Marxist regime after the other has been forced to consign itself to oblivion.
- Marxism as an intellectual perspective still provides a wholesome counterbalance to our propensity (behave in a particular way) to see ourselves and the writers as we read completely divorced from socio-economic circumstances.
- It also counterbalances the related tendency to read the books and poems we read as originating in an autonomous mental realm as the free products of free and independent minds.
- Karl Marx noted in the 'foreword' to his 1859 towards a critique of Political economy that the 'mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life'
- Victorian upper class would have been very horrified especially after the conclusion 'it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness'
- Marxism is about how your social circumstances determine your life - this sort of determinism is perfectly compatible with the idea that we are essentially free. Certain politicians would tell you to get an education etc. In other words you have options like everybody else to move up the social ladder.
- Marxist theory argues that the way we think and the way we experience the world around us are either wholly or largely conditioned by the way economy is organised.
- The base of a society determines its superstructure and if the economic base determines the cultural superstructure, then writers do not have much freedom in their creative efforts.
- Instead they will only produce literary works within the standards set by the economic base. This also means that their writing will be very similar to other writers who live in the same economic circumstances.
- Traditional Marxism asserts that thought is subservient to, and follows, the material conditions under which it develops.
- Thus Marxism is an opposition to an idealist perspective (our thinking is free & unaffected by material circumstances) as it instead encompasses a materialistic outlook.
- Marxism tells us that capitalism thrives on exploiting labourers (shareholders are extremely rich because labourers work extremely hard producing goods and receive a lot less than their work is worth).
- Capitalism alienates labourers from themselves as they are seen purely as means of production and not human beings.
- The focus on profit created by a capitalist view, shows all people to be functioning objects, thus we are all alienated from ourselves.
Marxist Literary Criticism: General
- Marx and Engels did not put forward a complicated theory of literacy. Their views were relaxed and did not include rules.
- Good art always had the freedom to convey what the message behind it is.
- Engels wrote to English novelist Margaret Harkness saying he is ‘far from finding fault with you for not writing a point blank socialist novel… the more the opinion of the author are hidden the better the work of art’ – you have to find out what the authors opinions are by reading in between the lines.
- Marx and Engels had access to ‘great’ art (because of their social class).
- They emphasis the difference between art and propaganda.
- Marxist Literary criticisms tell us that the authors writing suggest their beliefs, values and social class as a whole.
- We no longer see them as creative and inspiring geniuses but writers who have merely been influenced by their environment.
- This not only reflects the content of their work but also how they've written it in terms of formality.
- For instance, British Marxist Critic, Terry Eagleton, suggested that in language 'shared definitions and regularities of grammar both reflect and help constitute a well ordered political state'.
- In other words, if their style of writhing is all the same, the social structure of their society must be in order.
- Catherine Belsey is a prominent critic that argued that the form of ‘realist’ (showing things how they really are) novels show that there are social structures as it observes conventions of society without criticising the reality of it.
- Form’ is the same; chronological order, formal endings/beginnings, plot, characterisations, narration’s point of view.
- The broken parts of forms of drama and fiction by twentieth-century writers like Samuel Beckett (black comedy writer) and Franz Kafka (themes and archetypes of alienation, physical and psychological brutality) are a response to the capitalist society.
- Ken Newton (a Professor at the University of Dundee), states that traditional Marxist criticism usually deals with history in a generalised way.
- This includes conflicts between social classes and clashes of large historical forces.
- However, the criticism looks closely at the interpretation of a particular literary texts rather than discussing specific details of a historical situation.
What Marxist Critics Do?
- They make a division between the 'overt' (manifest or surface) and 'covert' (latent or hidden) content of a literary work (much as psychoanalytic critics do) and then relate the covert subject matter of the literary work to basic Marxist themes, such as class struggle, or the progression of society through various historical stages, such as, the transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism. Thus, the conflicts in King Lear might be read as being 'really' about the conflict of class interest between the rising class (the bourgeoisie) and the falling class (the feudal overlords
- Another method used by Marxist critics is to relate the context of a work to the social-class status of the author. In such cases an assumption is made (which again is similar to those mode by psychoanalytic critics) that the author is unaware of precisely what he or she is saying or revealing in the text.
- A third Marxist method is to explain the nature of a whole literary genre in terms of the social period which 'produced' it. For instance, The Rise of the Novel, by Ian Watt, relates the growth of the novel in the eighteen century to the expansion of the middle classes during that period. The novel 'speaks' for this social class, just as, for instance, tragedy 'speaks for' the monarchy and the nobility, and the Ballad 'speaks for' for the rural and semi-urban 'working-class'.
- A fourth Marxist practice is to relate the literary work to the social assumptions of the time in which it is 'consumed', a strategy which is used particularly in the later variant of Marxist criticism known as cultural materialism.
- A fifth Marxist practice is the 'politicisation of literary form', that is, the claim that literary forms are themselves determined by political circumstances. For instance, in the view of some critics, literary realism carries with it an implicit validation of conservative social structures: for others, the formal and metrical intricacies of the sonnet and the iambic pentameter are a counterpart of social stability, decorum, and order.
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