interaction of the social and economic factors. Basic question:
What causes the movement
of human history?
1. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel: Human consciousness is the motor of history. Hegel’s Spiritual Dialectics
•Human consciousness is composed of 3 stages of dialectic reasoning: thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
•thesis - proposition/assertion (undertanding of things)
•antithesis - the negation of the thesis
• synthesis - a new idea that resolves the conflict between thesis and antithesis •Changes occur because human consciousness changes.
•The way people deal with others changes because they gain a better understanding.
•Human consciousness determines the material relations. 2. Karl Marx: The motor of history is NOT the human consciousness.
Karl Marx: Class struggle (actual economic relations) is the motor of history. Karl Marx’s Material Dialectics
•The economic relations determine the way people think.
•Human experiences (economic experiences) lead man’s consciousness. Basic economic structure of a society
1. Aristocracy (royalty)
2. Bourgeois (middle class)
3. Proletariat (working class/lowest class)
Economic relations - relations of production
•landlord and tenant
•capitalist and laborer
•These relate each other in
the economic production. The notion of Commodification
• The value of a person is similar to the value of a machine.
Karl Marx - favors the
proletariat MARXISM
•a critique of capitalism
•forwards its egalitarian aspiration of socialism against capitalism
•more concerned with economics and politics Marxist Approach to Literature
•Literature can only be understood if its full context is taken into account.
•Literature is an active agent in its social and cultural world as it can work to expose wrongs in a society. •Literature functions to reproduce the class structure of society by representing class differences in such a way that they seem legitimate and natural.
•Literature is NOT the expression of universal or eternal ideas nor an autonomous realm of aesthetic or formal devices and techniques. •Rather, literature is a social phenomenon, and as such, it CANNOT be studied independently of the social relations, the economic forms, and political realities of the time which it was written. Some questions to consider:
1. Which position does the work take?
2. Whom does the story/work benefit?
3. Does the work serve as a propaganda for status quo or try to undermine it?
4. Which conflicts are ignored?
Marxist critics:
1. Georg Lukacs (1885–1971) - “Reflection”
- A good literary peice must reveal the underlying pattern of contadictions in a social order.
- It must reflect the class struggle. 2. Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) - “Alienation”
-A good literary piece attempts to show up the contradictions in capitalist society as something strange and unnatural, requiring change.
3. Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) -“Art is the negative knowledge of the actual world.”
- Art, including literature, is detached from reality; popular art forms only confirm and conform to the norms of a society but true art takes up a critical stance, distanced from the world which engendered it.
4.Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) - argued that modern means of reproducing works of art, especially photography and film, have changed the special status of a work of art
-In the case of the cinema there exist multiple copies without there being a real original from which the film is derived.
5.Lucien Goldmann (1913–1970) - believed that works of art and literature reflected the “mental structures” of the class which engendered them
6. Louis Althusser (1918–1990) - “Ideology”
- Literature is an expression of the ideology of a particular class.
-Ideology works through the so-called “ideological state apparatuses”: political system, law, education, religion etc.
-People are acting not according to free will but in accordance with the dominant ideology.
7. Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) - “Hegemony” (domination by a ruling ideology)
-It was possible for the individual to resist hegemony through ‘consent’ rather than ‘coercive power’.
- This hegemony does not blind all members of the society to the truth of the situation as it is possible to become aware of the dominance of ‘hegemony’ and resist its effects, even if it is impossible to escape completely its influence.
8. Pierre Macherey - regarded literary texts as being pervaded by ideology and it was the job of the critic to look for the cracks and weaknesses in the surface of the work, caused by its own internal contradictions
-In order to reveal the ideology in a text the critic must focus on what the text represses rather than overtly expresses.
9. Raymond Williams (1921–1988) - culture as a “way of life”
-In any given society there is more than one single culture, each with its own ‘ideas of the nature of social relationship’.
-The coexistence of different cultures does not mean that there cannot also be a common culture: ‘...there is both a constant interaction between these ways of life and an area which can properly be described as common to or underlying both.’
10. Terry Eagleton (1943–)
-It should be the role of the critic to analyse critically accepted notions of what constituted literature and reveal the ideologies behind them.
11. Fredric Jameson
- Ideology represses revolutionary ideas.
- The heterogeneity of society is reflected in the heterogeneity of texts: literature is essentially a mirror of the society in which it is produced.
- All kinds of interpretative methods can be applied to a text, and will reveal something actu- ally present in the text but each method of interpretation applied will also reveal something about the ideologies governing both the author’s and the critic’s worlds.