Literary Theory
Series II: Handout #1
“Workers of the
world unite!”
Carla Gulag’s Parodic Marxism: What are the characteristics of the caricatured version of academic Marxism?
Barry on Marxism: Marx and Engels are the founders—both German, they were exiled to England in the 1840s; the Communist Manifesto (1848) called for state ownership of the means of production or Communism; Communism is materialist (it does not believe in the spiritual); it defines history as class struggle as groups contend for scarce resources; in a capitalist economic system capitalists expropriate the surplus value produced by labor, in other words, owners exploit workers for their own benefit; managers work for the owners and form a middle class; workers become alienated from their own labor over which they have no control, and people are reified, that is, they are only tools rather than human beings who need to treated with respect. Marxism is economic determinist; it seems economic relations as the base of society and culture is the superstructure. Literature reflects the economic base of the society; in that sense it is ideological; it has a political position with respect to the economic basis of society. This ideology affects not only the content (romantic vs. realist) but the form such as free verse vs. iambic pentameter. Vladimir Lenin argued that all art must serve the party, typically in the form of socialist realism (see Stalinist Art, Modern Times, and The Grapes of Wrath); this sometimes produced a form of class essentialism in which people were regarded as authentically working-class or bourgeois based on their work; Russian Formalists, mostly in the 1920s, presented some ideas that remain in circulation Victor Shklovsky argued that literature functions be making the ordinary strange—defamiliarization; Mikhail Bahkhtin argues for the multivocality or heteroglossia of the literary; the Frankfurt School in Germany in the 1920s would produce Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno, all of whom were influenced by the Russian Formalists, Marx, and Freud. More recently, the French Marxist Louis Althusser (1918-1990) has added concepts such as overdeterminism to describe effect that emerge from multiple causes rather than just one (i.e., the economic), and he has argued for relative autonomy of art in relation to the economic base; he also argues that democratic consent is an illusion created by ideological state apparatuses (see Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent); Antonio Gramsci (1891-1934) develops a similar idea via the term hegemony, the means by which beliefs are organized by dominant values that make these beliefs seem “natural” rather than constructed—we only feel like free agents; hegemony makes it possible for a few people to control wealth and power without having to use destabilizing and costly violence to do it. Frederic Jameson (who we already considered) attempted to unify the perceived tensions between Marxism and psychoanalysis (which focuses on the individual instead of society), arguing for a political unconscious, the repressed history that can be excavated from literature by the analyst.
Q. What is the difference between
Marxism/Communism as a political system (e.g. in
Q. What are the
strengths and weakness of a class-based social criticism?
Q. What are some
limitations of the theory of economic determinism? How do the ideas of hegemony and ideological
state apparatuses correct these limitations?
Q. What are some
events that are overdetermined, that is, having
multiple causes, rather than a single one?
Q. To what extent are
political options controlled in the