Marxist Literary Criticism - DoubleThink
DoublethinkLITERARY THEORIES: MARXISMMarxist Ways of ReadingThrough Marxist criticism you will see writerslooking at texts from a specific political perspective: one which focuses on the strugglesbetween social classes and the struggles between those who oppress and those who areoppressed and between those who have power and those who do not. This particular way ofreading literature is based on the theories ofKarl Marx who believed that Western capitalisteconomic systems were designed to increasethe wealth of the rich, while oppressing andsuppressing the poor. Marxist critics tend tobelieve that literature is the product of thewriter’s own class and cultural values and thatliterary texts are themselves products of a particular ideology.The Marxist critic is a readerwho keeps in mind issues of power, work, oppression and money, and in focusing on whatthe text reveals of the author’s values and social context, Marxism questions whether thetext supports the prevailing social and economic system or undermines it.THE POLITICS OF CLASS: MARXISMTAKEN FROM LITERARY THEORY: THE BASICS, BY H.BERTENS1:To discuss Marxism in the early twenty-firstcentury may well seem strangely beside thepoint. After all, since the fall of the Berlin Wallin 1989, one self-proclaimed Marxist regimeafter the other has been forced to consign itself to oblivion. And the officially Marxist political parties that for a long time were a seriousforce in Western Europe have either disap1peared or have become politically marginal.However, Marxism as an intellectual perspective still provides a wholesome counterbalanceto our propensity to see ourselves and thewriters that we read as completely divorcedfrom socio-economic circumstances. It alsocounterbalances the related tendency to readthe books and poems we read as originating inan autonomous mental realm, as the freeproducts of free and independent minds.Marxism’s questioning of that freedom is nowa good deal less sensational than it was in the1840s and 1850s when Karl Marx (1818–1883)began to outline what is now called Marxistphilosophy, although it is still controversialenough. When he noted, in the ‘Foreword’ tohis 1859 Towards a Critique of Political Economy, that the ‘mode of production of materiallife conditions the general process of social,political and intellectual life’, the Victorian upper class, if aware of this line of thought, wouldhave been horrified, and certainly by the conclusion that followed: ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence,but their social existence that determines theirconsciousness’.What does it mean that the ‘mode of production’ conditions ‘the general process of social,political, and intellectual life’? If people haveheard about Marxism they usually know rathervaguely that Marxism is about how your socialcircumstances determine much, if not all, ofyour life. This seems reasonable enough. If youwork the night shift in your local McDonald’s,for instance, you are unlikely to fly businessclass to New York City for a week in the Wal-Bertens, H. (2001) Literary Theory: The Basics, Abingdon: Routledge, pp 81–83.MOUNT ASPIRING COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH - FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM - PAGE 1! OF 7!
dorf Astoria or to bid on the next Rembrandtfor sale. But this sort of determinism is perfectly compatible with the idea that we are essentially free. Certain politicians would tell you toget out of the night shift, to get an education,to get rid of your provincial accent, to buy theright outfit, and to start exuding self-confidence. In other words, you have options, likeeverybody else, and all you have to do is tomake the right choices and start moving upthat social ladder.This is not what Marx had in mind. Marxisttheory argues that the way we think and theway we experience the world around us areeither wholly or largely conditioned by the waythe economy is organised. Under a medieval,feudal regime people will have thought and feltdifferent from the way that we think and feelnow, in a capitalist economy – that is, aneconomy in which goods are produced (the‘mode of production’) by large concentrationsof capital (old-style factories, new-style multinationals) and then sold on a free, competitivemarket. The base of a society – the way itseconomy is organised, broadly speaking – determines its superstructure – everything thatwe might classify as belonging to the realm ofculture, again in a broad sense: education, law,but also religion, philosophy, political programmes, and the arts. This implies a view ofliterature that is completely at odds with theAnglo-American view of literature that goesback to Matthew Arnold. If the way we experience reality and the way we think about it (ourreligious, political, and philosophical views) aredetermined by the sort of economy we happento live in, then clearly there is no such thing asan unchanging human condition. On the contrary, with, for instance, the emergence of capitalism some centuries ago we may expect tofind a new experience of reality and new viewsof the world. Since capitalism did not happenovernight we will not find a clean break but wecertainly should find a gradual transition to anew, more or less collective perspective. Theterm ‘collective’ is important here. If the economic ‘base’ indeed determines the cultural‘superstructure’, then writers will not have allthat much freedom in their creative efforts.They will inevitably work within the frameworkdictated by the economic ‘base’ and will havemuch in common with other writers living andwriting under the same economic dispensation. Traditional Marxism, then, asserts thatthought is subservient to, and follows, the material conditions under which it develops. Itsoutlook is materialist, as opposed to the idealist perspective, whose claim that matter is basically subservient to thought is one of thefundamental assumptions of modern Westernculture: we tend to assume that our thinking isfree, unaffected by material circumstances. Inour minds we can always be free. Wrong, saysMarxism, minds aren’t free at all, they onlythink they are.Capitalism, Marxism tells us, thrives on exploiting its labourers. Simply put, capitalistsgrow rich and shareholders do well becausethe labourers that work for them and actuallyproduce goods (including services) get less –and often a good deal less – for their effortsthan their labour is actually worth. Labourershave known this for a long time and have organised themselves in labour unions to getfairer deals. What they do not know, however,is how capitalism alienates them from themselves by seeing them in terms of production –as production units, as objects rather thanhuman beings. Capitalism turns people intothings, it reifies them. Negotiations about better wages, no matter how successful, do notaffect (let alone reverse) that process. Marxsaw it clearly at work in his nineteenth-centuryenvironmentin which men whose grandfathers had stillworked as cobblers, cabinetmakers, yeomanfarmers, and so on – in other words, as members of self-supporting communities who dealtdirectly with clients and buyers – performedmechanical tasks in factories where they weremerely one link in a long chain. However, thisprocess of reification is not limited to labourers. The capitalist mode of production generates a view of the world – focused on profit –MOUNT ASPIRING COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH - FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM - PAGE 2! OF 7!
in which ultimately all of us function as objectsand become alienated from ourselves.MARXIST LITERARY CRITICISM:GENERALIn fact, though, Marx and Engels themselvesdid not put forward any comprehensive theoryof literature. Their views seem relaxed and undogmatic: good art always has a degree offreedom from prevailing economic circumstances, even if these economic facts are its‘ultimate determinant’. Thus, Engels, writing tothe English novelist Margaret Harkness in April1888, tells her that he is ‘far from finding faultwith you for not having written a point-blanksocialist novel. The more the opinions of theauthor remain hidden the better the work ofart’. As cultured and highly educated Germans, Marx and Engels had that reverence for‘great’ art and literature which was typical oftheir class, and there is an obvious desire insuch pronouncements to emphasise the difference between art and propaganda.cial structure, because realism, by its very nature, leaves conventional ways of seeing intact,and hence tends to discourage critical scrutinyof reality. By ‘form’ here is included all theconventional features of the novel – chronological time-schemes, formal beginnings and endings, in-depth psychological characterisation,intricate plotting, and fixed narratorial points ofview. Similarly, the ‘fragmented’, ‘absurdist’forms of drama and fiction used by twentiethcentury writers like Beckett and Kafka are seenas a response to the contradictions and divisions inherent in late capitalist society.However, it is probably true to say (as KenNewton does, p. 244, Theory into Practice)that traditional Marxist criticism tends to dealwith history in a fairly generalised way. It talksabout conflicts between social classes, andclashes of large historical forces, but, contraryto popular belief, it rarely discusses the detailsof a specific historical situation and relates itclosely to the interpretation of a particular literary text.All the same, Marxist literary criticism maintains that a writer’s social class, and its prevailing ‘ideology’ (outlook, values, tacit assumptions, half-realised allegiances, etc.) have amajor bearing on what is written by a memberof that class. So instead of seeing authors asprimarily autonomous ‘inspired’ individualswhose ‘genius’ and creative imagination enables them to bring forth original and timelessworks of art, the Marxist sees them as constantly formed by their social contexts in wayswhich they themselves would usually not admit. This is true not just of the content of theirwork but even of formal aspects of their writingwhich might at first seem to have no possiblepolitical overtones. For instance, the prominentBritish Marxist critic Terry Eagleton suggeststhat in language ‘shared definitions and regularities of grammar both reflect and help constitute, a well-ordered political state’ (WilliamShakespeare, 1986, p.1). Likewise, CatherineBelsey, another prominent British left-wing critic, argues that the form of the ‘realist’ novelcontains implicit validation of the existing so-MOUNT ASPIRING COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH - FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM - PAGE 3! OF 7!
WHAT MARXIST CRITICS DOTAKEN FROM BEGINNING THEORY, BY P. BARRY2:1. They make a division between the‘overt’ (manifest or surface) and ‘covert’ (latentor hidden) content of a literary work (much aspsychoanalytic critics do) and then relate thecovert subject matter of the literary work tobasic Marxist themes, such as class struggle,or the progression of society through varioushistorical stages, such as, the transition fromfeudalism to industrial capitalism. Thus, theconflicts in King Lear might be read as being‘really’ about the conflicts of class interest between the rising class (the bourgeoisie) and thefalling class (the feudal overlords).circumstance. For instance, in the view ofsome critics, literary realism carries with it animplicit 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.2. Another method used by Marxist critics is torelate the context of a work to the social classstatus of the author. In such cases an assumption is made (which again is similar to thosemade by psychoanalytic critics) that the authoris unaware of precisely what he or she is saying or revealing in the text.3. A third Marxist method is to explain the nature of a whole literary genre in terms of thesocial period which ‘produced’ it. For instance,The Rise of the Novel, by Ian Watt, relates thegrowth of the novel in the eighteenth centuryto the expansion of the middle classes duringthat period. The novel ‘speaks’ for this socialclass, just as, for instance, Tragedy ‘speaksfor’ the monarchy and the nobility, and the Ballad ‘speaks for’ the rural and semi-urban‘working class’.4. A fourth Marxist practice is to relate the literary work to the social assumptions of thetime in which it is ‘consumed’, a strategywhich is used particularly in the later variant ofMarxist criticism known as cultural materialism.5. A fifth Marxist practice is the ‘politicisationof literary form’, that is, the claim that literaryforms are themselves determined by political2Barry, P. (2002) Beginning Theory, 2nd ed., Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp 167–168.MOUNT ASPIRING COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH - FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM - PAGE 4! OF 7!
MARXIST CRITICISM: AN EXAMPLETaken from Beginning Theory, by P. Barry3 :As an example of Marxist criticism we will takechapter five, on Twelfth Night, in Elliot Krieger’sA Marxist Study of Shakespeare’s comedies(1979). As it is discussed here, the examplemainly shows the first of the five Marxist critical activities just listed. The play centres on thelove between the Duke Orsino and the LadyOlivia. His love is extravagantly and persistently expressed but she at first rejects him, havingdedicated herself to a period of protractedmourning for her dead father. Subsequentlyshe falls in love with Viola, a young noblewoman who is temporarily disguised as a manand acting as his servant and go-between (under the name Cesario). Olivia is also loved byher steward, the strict and punctilious Malvolio, who is tricked by her uncle, Sir Toby Belch,into believing that his love for her is returned.The essay begins by citing the dominant critical view of the play, which is that it presentsvarious extremes of self-indulgence (such asOrsino’s wallowing in fantasies of romanticlove and Toby Belch’s self-abandonment tophysical appetites) and contrasts these with anextreme puritanism and resistance to pleasure,as seen in Malvolio. The play is seen as recommending a balance and decorum in whichthese extremes are avoided and proper humanfulfilment becomes possible. Krieger points outthat this ignores the question of class in theplay: when ‘order’ is restored at the end, thearistocratic characters suffer no particular illeffects, while Malvolio’s fate is much more severe, yet Malvolio’s self-interest differs fromthe obviously narcissistic pre-occupations ofOrsino and Olivia and the egoistic revelry of SirToby only because decorum forbids one of hisrank to ‘surfeit on himself’. Thus ‘only a privileged social class has access to the morality ofindulgence’. Indeed, by definition, ‘the members of the ruling class find their identitiesthrough excessive indulgence in appetite’.3Each of the members of the aristocratic class,he continues, has a private ‘secondary world’.For Sir Toby it is the unfettered world hereaches by drink, for he ‘forces everyone tocare for him while using the enforced incompetence of drunkenness and the willed oblivion oftime in order to protect himself from the possibility of caring for others’. Likewise, Olivia protects herself from the needs of others by retreating into a private world of bereavement,and Orsino into a wholly subjective world oflove obsession in which everything becomes‘an adjunct of, and accompaniment to, theDuke’s psychological condition’. In these ‘privatised’ ‘second worlds’, each becomes, notpart of a community, but ‘one self king’. Viola,too, attempts to retreat into one of these second worlds, but though she is actually aristocratic, the disguise she adopts enables her tochoose a temporary non-aristocratic status(‘I’ll serve this duke’), and she thus becomes‘an object within the second worlds of Orsino,Olivia and Sir Toby’, someone they assume isavailable for their use or manipulation.Within the world of the servants in the play,there is much emphasis on ‘aspiration’: thenew servant Cesario/Viola displaces Valentineand Curio from their positions of privileged access to Duke Orsino, and in Olivia’s householdthere is a constant struggle for prime positionbetween Maria (another of the servants) andMalvolio. Both, in fact, aim to marry into thefamily, which Maria eventually achieves bymarrying Sir Toby as a reward for her decisivehumiliation of Malvolio. Krieger therefore seesher as a significant element in the play:Maria is hardly a proto-bourgeoise, in that heraspiration supports and confirms rather thanchallenges the continued validity of aristocraticprivilege, but with her abilities to separate selffrom vocation, to express self apart from imposed duty, and to earn by her actions advancement in social degree, only Maria inTwelfth Night indicates the bourgeois and Puri-Barry, P. (2002) Beginning Theory, 2nd ed., Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp 168–170.MOUNT ASPIRING COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH - FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM - PAGE 5! OF 7!
tan emphasis on independence, competition,and the association of stature with merit.In contrast, Malvolio is much less of a representative of any kind of change in the socialorder, since he has an extreme reverence forall the trappings of aristocracy, and attributesthe circumstances which, he thinks, havemade possible his own elevation to the aristocracy to ‘fortune’ and his ‘stars’. Thus, fortune in the play is a force, like ‘nature’ which isoften an alibi or a rationalisation of inheritedaristocratic privilege. For the Marxist critic,then, the play demonstrates the gulf which exists between masters and servants and manifests something of the state of mind that ischaracteristic of each class. The Marxist feature of this essay is the way it introduces thenotion of social class into interpretations of theplay: this is its special ‘intervention’ into thelarge body of critical writing on the play, inwhich the topic is never raised. Very little indeed is said in the essay about the specifics ofthe precise historical moment in which it waswritten: rather, a subtle and original reading iswoven round the generalised notions of socialclass conflict, class privilege, and aspirationstowards what would now be called upwardsocial mobility.MOUNT ASPIRING COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH - FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM - PAGE 6! OF 7!
MARXIST CRITICISMTAKEN FROM LITERARY TERMS AND CRITICISMS, BY J.PECK AND M. COYLE4:What a critic says about a book depends to alarge extent upon the ideas he or she brings tothe text. Sometimes these premises are undeclared or vague, but the Marxist critic is veryclear about the stance from which he or shewrites: the text has to be read in the light of anall-informing philosophy. It has to be seen inrelation to a Marxist view of history, in whichthe idea of class struggle is central; the connections between literature and the economicstructure of society in which it was writtenmust be made evident.This does not, however, produce a uniformcritical response: Marxist criticism is lively andvaried, and, despite the collapse of communism throughout Eastern Europe, still evolving.A crude Marxist might simply dismiss all literature as a bourgeois luxury in which middleclass authors write about their middle-classproblems. Such a response, however, has notbeen widely expressed since the 1930s. Indeed, Marxist critics have often revealed areverence for art, feeling that, through literature, the writer can stand apart and see thefaults of society. The method of much traditional Marxist criticism has been to reconstructa view of the past from historical evidence, andthen to demonstrate how accurate a particulartext is in its representation and understandingof this social reality. Not surprisingly, Marxists,such as the best-known Marxist critic, GeorgeLukács, have always been most interested inthe realistic novel, which presents a suitablyfull picture of society. There is, in fact, nothingparticularly contentious about
MOUNT ASPIRING COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH - FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM - PAGE !3 OF !7. WHAT MARXIST CRITICS DO TAKEN FROM BEGINNING THEORY, BY P. BARRY2: 1. 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 .
Introduction to Literary Criticism. Definition and Use “Literary criticism” is the name given to works written by experts who critique—analyze—an author’s work. It does NOT mean “to criticize” as in complain or disapprove. Literary criticism is often referred to as a “secondary source”. Literary Criticism and Theory Any piece of text can be read with a number of different .
An Introduction to Literary Criticism and Theory Before we begin our examination and study of literary theory, it is important that we define exactly what literary theory is and is not, identify some of the main characteristics of such, as well as identify some of the key differences between traditional “literary criticism” and “literary theory.” While literary criticism since the late .
Marxist philosophy and organization studies: Marxist . of Marxism. Key words Marxism, dialectical materialism, historical materialism, organization form. 3 . My survey is limited to English language publications and focuses on organization studies construed rather narrowly, ignoring Marxist work in contiguous fields of research .
expository guide to literary criticism or literary concepts, nor does it attempt to catalogue the entire body of literary terms in use. It offers instead to clarify those thousand terms that are most likely to cause the student or general reader some doubt or bafflement in the context of literary criticism and other discussion of literary works.
Marxism, Language, and Literature: Rethinking the Early Marxist Literary Criticism 265 dogmatism into which some of Marxist literary theories have bee n lapsed. Besides, if a literary theory of Marxism has been built around the philosophy of language, it is also able to surpass the textual limitations of
Feminist Literary Criticism and Wuthering Heights BISWANATH MAHAPATRA Department of English, Khatra Adibasi Mahavidyalaya, Khatra, West Bengal, India Feminist criticism is the most outstanding discovery in the realm of theory as well as in the world of women. Feminist criticism comes in literary world in many forms and feminist critics have .
Terry Eagleton (T errence Francis Eagleton) is a contemporary literary scholar and a prominent cultural theorist, widely regarded as the one of the foremost Marxist literary critics. With the publication of Marxism and Literary Criticism , and Literary Theory, a popular college text, Eagleton won recognition for producing erudite works of literary
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