Literary Theory

Series II; Handout #2

“Postage will be free after the revolution.”

Karl Marx (1818-1883): German, probably the most influential figure in the whole course; just about everyone after 1850 has to deal with him, along with Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud, each slightly later. Again, recall that his methods are

Dialectical Materialism

Economic Determinism (base and superstructure)

Revolutionary

Communist Manifesto (1848): recent history (industrial revolution) is the struggle between two classes: the bourgeois and proletarian, the manufacturing class, who own the means of production (capitalists) and the laboring/working class. Both of these classes emerged after feudalism during the industrial revolution (c. 1750-1850—and up to the present in different locations). Since then, natural human relations have been replaced by the cash nexus, which means that everything has become reduced to exchange value (“how much can you get for it?”). Capitalism leads directly to imperialism in its search for new markets and commodities. Capitalism also requires a constant state of social transformation in order to displace all traditional values with marketplace ones. Capitalism is a recent (post-17^th-century), radical belief system incompatible with traditional, conservative cultures. Ultimately, according to Marx, capitalism concentrates power/wealth in fewer and fewer hands, impoverishing the rest, thus creating an increasingly unstable social structure that, inevitably, will lead to a revolution or a dialectical shift in the dominant cultural values.

Grundrisse (1857-58): literature and other arts emerge from the material conditions of society. The classical epic is not possible after the printing press (and the machine gun); it has no correlation to the conditions of modern society; however we can still take pleasure in it the same way we are pleased by the innocence of a child. But, if we are not children or slaves, we must grow up and recognize how literature is a tool of power (more on this later, especially in Bourdieu).

Capital (1867): Ch. 1: commodity fetishism is placing a value on a good to be bought and sold that is greater than its material use as an object: how much labor went into it and its relative scarcity. Fetishized commodities take on a meaning of their own and relation to each other that is comparable to religious mysticism (Walter Benjamin will call this “the aura”). Objects—paintings (educational degrees and knowledge of literature) become symbolic of social prestige within bourgeois culture, even though things may have no practical value (e.g., understanding literature—with enormous class-based sub-variations—is a signifier of middle-class status: e.g., it’s snootier to prefer Joyce to Steinbeck).

Ch. 10: Under capitalism, the laborer is nothing but a means by which capital can be expanded; and capitalists seek, above all, to extract the maximum amount of labor for the lowest possible compensation (Modern Times and The Grapes of Wrath dramatize this very passage in an effort to radicalize the viewer). There is a constant excess of population, which can, in effect, be worked to death to maximize profits (local urban populations are swelled by immigration from country districts where the land is being enclosed, immigrants also stream in from abroad as a result of famine, war, and oppression; all can be worked longer hours at lower and lower wages as a result of there being a “reserve army of the unemployed.”

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937): Italian Marxist; imprisoned by the Fascists, writes his Prison Notebooks; becomes a major figure at the origin of “Cultural Studies”: the role of literature and art is the manipulation of political power (i.e., the creation of hegemony or “Manufactured Consent”—also the title of the film about Noam Chomsky), in other words, art persuades people to believe things that are against their interests; he coins the term historic bloc to describe groups motivated by factors other than social class. This is a complexification of Marx’s economic-determinist model (“your views reflect your class”). Interestingly, before Gramsci, around 1914, American public relations created the concept of “Engineering Consent” to describe the means by which people can be persuaded to support corporations and politicians who are not really interested in the common good (see video on Ivy Lee and the Rockefeller Corporation).

The Formation of Intellectuals (1948-51): Describes a sociology of the intellectual class and shows how they function as subalterns of the dominant groups hegemonic power. Hegemony consists of the “spontaneous” consent given by the majority to the dominant group because of historical prestige and confidence they possess combined with the state’s coercive power against those who do not consent. (e.g., The strongest belief in the value of education is at the lower levels of the society; for the lower class, education is the means of coming to believe in the justice of the power of the dominant group; whereas the dominant groups see education as a means of control and place little other value in it because they do not need to submit to advance.)