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MARXISM

Literature and Socio-


economics

•Text is symptomatic of the


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.

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