marxist criticism meaning essay

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Marxist Criticism refers to a method you'll encounter in literary and cultural analysis. It breaks down texts and societal structures using foundational concepts like class, alienation, base, and superstructure. By understanding this, you'll gain insights into how power dynamics and socio-economic factors influence narratives and cultural perspectives

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Table of Contents

What is Marxist Criticism?

Marxist Criticism refers to both

an interpretive framework
a genre of discourse .

Marxist Criticism as both a theoretical approach and a conversational genre within academic discourse . Critics using this framework analyze literature and other cultural forms through the lens of Marxist theory, which includes an exploration of how economic and social structures influence ideology and culture. For example, a Marxist reading of a novel might explore how the narrative reinforces or challenges the existing social hierarchy and economic inequalities.

Marxist Criticism prioritizes four foundational Marxist concepts:

class struggle
the alienation of the individual under capitalism
the relationship between a society’s economic base and
its cultural superstructure.

Related Concepts

Dialectic ; Hermeneutics ; Literary Criticism ; Semiotics ; Textual Research Methods

Why Does Marxist Criticism Matter?

Marxist criticism thus emphasizes class, socioeconomic status, power relations among various segments of society, and the representation of those segments. Marxist literary criticism is valuable because it enables readers to see the role that class plays in the plot of a text.

What Are the Four Primary Perspectives of Marxism?

Did karl marx create marxist criticism.

Karl Marx himself did not create Marxist criticism as a literary or cultural methodology . He was a philosopher, economist, and sociologist, and his works laid the foundation for Marxist theory in the context of social and economic analysis. The key concepts that Marx developed—such as class struggle, the theory of surplus value, and historical materialism—are central to understanding the mechanisms of capitalism and class relations.

Marxist criticism as a distinct approach to literature and culture developed later, as thinkers in the 20th century began to apply Marx’s ideas to the arts and humanities. It is a product of various scholars and theorists who found Marx’s social theories to be useful tools for analyzing and critiquing literature and culture. These include figures such as György Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, and later the Frankfurt School, among others, who expanded Marxist theory into the realms of ideology, consciousness, and cultural production.

So, while Marx provided the ideological framework, it was later theorists who adapted his ideas into what is now known as Marxist criticism.

Who Are the Key Figures in Marxist Theory?

Bressler notes that “Marxist theory has its roots in the nineteenth-century writings of Karl Heinrich Marx, though his ideas did not fully develop until the twentieth century” (183).

Key figures in Marxist theory include Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukács, and Louis Althusser. Although these figures have shaped the concepts and path of Marxist theory, Marxist literary criticism did not specifically develop from Marxism itself. One who approaches a literary text from a Marxist perspective may not necessarily support Marxist ideology.

For example, a Marxist approach to Langston Hughes’s poem “Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria” might examine how the socioeconomic status of the speaker and other citizens of New York City affect the speaker’s perspective. The Waldorf Astoria opened during the midst of the Great Depression. Thus, the poem’s speaker uses sarcasm to declare, “Fine living . . . a la carte? / Come to the Waldorf-Astoria! / LISTEN HUNGRY ONES! / Look! See what Vanity Fair says about the / new Waldorf-Astoria” (lines 1-5). The speaker further expresses how class contributes to the conflict described in the poem by contrasting the targeted audience of the hotel with the citizens of its surrounding area: “So when you’ve no place else to go, homeless and hungry / ones, choose the Waldorf as a background for your rags” (lines 15-16). Hughes’s poem invites readers to consider how class restricts particular segments of society.

What are the Foundational Questions of Marxist Criticism?

What classes, or socioeconomic statuses, are represented in the text?
Are all the segments of society accounted for, or does the text exclude a particular class?
Does class restrict or empower the characters in the text?
How does the text depict a struggle between classes, or how does class contribute to the conflict of the text?
How does the text depict the relationship between the individual and the state? Does the state view individuals as a means of production, or as ends in themselves?

Example of Marxist Criticism

The Working Class Beats: a Marxist analysis of Beat Writing and (studylib.net)

Discussion Questions and Activities: Marxist Criticism

Define class, alienation, base, and superstructure in your own words.
Explain why a base determines its superstructure.
Choose the lines or stanzas that you think most markedly represent a struggle between classes in Langston Hughes’s “Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria.” Hughes’s poem also addresses racial issues; consider referring to the relationship between race and class in your written response.
Contrast the lines that appear in quotation marks and parentheses in Hughes’s poem. How do these lines differ? Does it seem like the lines in parentheses respond to the lines in quotation marks, the latter of which represent excerpts from an advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria published in Vanity Fair? How does this contrast illustrate a struggle between classes?
What is Hughes’s purpose for writing “Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria?” Defend your interpretation with evidence from the poem.

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33 Student Example: Marxist Criticism

The following student essay example of Marxist Criticism is taken from Beginnings and Endings: A Critical Edition . This is the publication created by students in English 211. This essay discusses Raymond Carver’s short story, “A Small, Good Thing.”

“A Small, Good Thing” by Raymond Carver and the 1980s AIDS Epidemic

By Jasper Chappel

Raymond Carver’s short story “A Small, Good Thing” was published in 1983, in his collection Cathedral. In 1983 in the United States, the AIDS epidemic was barely beginning to be understood by the CDC and the general public. Under President Ronald Reagan since 1981, anti-communist and pro-capitalist sentiment was expected of Americans because of tense relations with the USSR. This political climate informed Carver’s writing of “A Small, Good Thing,” and the previous version of the same story published in 1981, titled “The Bath;” Carver’s personal life partially influenced the drastic changes between each story, and so did the emerging political tensions caused by the AIDS epidemic and relations with the USSR. “A Small, Good Thing,” despite being written in a turbulent time, encourages people to value each other, put less trust in institutions such as government and healthcare, and ultimately come together in times of hardship.

The baker is a criticism of capitalism and excessive labor with unfair pay. He has lost part of his humanity to his work, because maintaining financial security is a more immediate concern than forming relationships; he and other unnamed employees represent the proletariat. His behavior throughout the story shows his lack of feeling towards other people, and at the end, he admits as much, saying, “I’m just a baker. I don’t claim to be anything else… [M]aybe years ago I was a different kind of human being” (page 26). Industry has forced the characters to lose their individuality – none of the nurses are named or physically distinguishable from each other, and they do not offer Ann and Howard comfort or answers. When asked questions about Scotty’s condition, they simply say, “Doctor Francis will be here in a few minutes,” (page 6). Doctor Francis has reached a high enough class that he can retain some humanity while still doing his job, which is why he is afforded a name. However, he is nearing the status of the bourgeoisie, which is ultimately why he fails to give Scotty the correct diagnosis and treatment. He and Howard are somewhat similar in this regard; because Howard has the privilege to leave his job in the middle of a work day, and for an indefinite amount of time when Scotty is hospitalized, the audience can assume Howard is nearing a high-class position. He is not expendable, like a nurse or a baker would be.

Ann appears to be a full-time mom, and while this is unpaid labor, the reader is led to understand her emotions the most because she retains the most humanity in her job; she simply has the privilege to not work for a company. Her trade is motherhood, and when this is stripped from her, she feels more aimless than the others; just like if the nurse or the baker lost their positions, Ann forms her identity around the job of being a mom. The difference is that it is her job to empathize with others, to care for others, and she can find another niche to fill without sending in an application first. Her grief manifests in being unable to care for her son, despite her skills; she knows Scotty is in a coma and that something has gone horribly wrong, but because the bourgeoisie does not value self-employed, unpaid labor, her concerns are brushed aside.

From one perspective, Ann benefits from being a mother. From another, her characterization has reduced her to being only a mother. The only outside information we have for another main character is what Howard and the baker tell us about their lives. While Howard is driving home from the hospital, he reflects on his life and his good fortune, or his privilege. Ann does not do the same – the audience is unsure of whether Ann thinks the marriage is successful, if she went to college, or if she gave anything up to become a mother. She is only a mother and wife – a loving one, but a one-dimensional character. It seems that Ann is defined only by the fact she has a son. Ann’s designated role to help the men in the story remember their humanity is a stereotypically feminine role that is largely informed by Raymond Carver’s identity and life experiences, but is also in line with the idea that motherhood is a full-time job unrecognized by capitalism.

The bourgeoisie in this story are best represented by the hospital and doctor, and the situation with Scotty exposes the flawed system the proletariat have to live under. Scotty represents its most vulnerable victims, and the family Ann meets in the lobby of the hospital represents how tragedy can touch all our lives regardless of class or race. Ann and Howard learn through the events of the story, despite being middle-class and white, that certain tragedies touch all lives; this is a translation of the AIDS epidemic into literature. Disease does not discriminate based off class, sexuality, or race, but institutions and governments do.

Scotty has no speaking lines–the narrator only supplies information on what he saying, so the audience doesn’t have access to his exact words. All we know about him is that he probably likes aliens, has one friend he used to walk to school with, and “howls” before he dies, a very inhuman noise. Even though the story revolves around his injury, he only serves as a character who affects other characters. His injury allows the audience to see the contrast between employees who take care of people as a job, and people who take care of others free from industry interference. He also serves to bring the baker and Ann together; the baker needed to be reminded of his humanity and have a reason to turn his back on the capitalist system for a while. Ann is the most likely character to help him reconnect with his humanity, and in her grief she is more human than any other character. Although Howard also shows his humanity in his grief, it is Ann who helps him along, “’There, there,’ she said tenderly. ‘Howard, he’s gone. He’s gone now and we’ll have to get used to that. To being alone” (page 22). When Scotty’s death makes his parents feel alienated, just as capitalism alienates people from each other to prevent an uprising, they start to accept this; then the baker calls again, and Ann’s anger at his behavior pushes them into action, and eventually reconciliation and comfort.

When Ann encounters the black family in the waiting room, they serve as a mirror for her situation, and represent understanding each other’s humanity despite differences. There is a previous version of this short story called “The Bath,” which does not specify the race of the family, does not include the two dark-skinned orderlies, and lacks the reconciliation with the baker. Part of the fear around AIDS was due to the uncertainty about how it spread, but there was also an element of stigma around African-American populations and their inaccurate image in the media as drug users (therefore, re-use needles and spread AIDS). Early on, it became clear that AIDS was spreading through bodily fluids, but more information than that tended to be conflicting.

In 1985, according to the article “Save Our Kids, Keep AIDS Out” by Jennifer Brier, black and white families would unite in Queens to protest the CDC regulations stating that children diagnosed with AIDS should be allowed in public schools. We can see this sentiment represented before this occurrence in Ann’s desire to connect with the black family in the waiting room. Just like the mothers in the article fear their children being exposed to AIDS at school, a hospital must have been a nightmare for a mother in this time period. Seeing Scotty have his blood drawn, and other needles inserted into his veins, probably caused her panic each time; not only because his condition was not improving, but also for the risk of contracting AIDS the longer he stayed in the hospital. Scotty’s hospital stay can be considered a metaphor for how AIDS was considered during the time of publication. It comes out of nowhere, just like the car that hit Scotty, then disappeared without a trace. Those who are hit seem fine at first, but progressively, their condition declines. The doctors and nurses do not know enough about the disease, and sometimes, their intuition is wrong, causing tragic deaths. The message the audience is left with is this: a mother knows best for her child. This is echoed in the later movement in Queens, “Thus, parents and local communities, not a dishonest city bureaucracy or out-of-touch scientific establishment, were better able to make decisions about local children” (Brier 4).

In “A Small, Good Thing,” instead of exploiting the fear people had around the AIDS epidemic, Carver encourages people to find common ground and come together. Doctor Francis expresses his regrets in not being able to save Scotty, the family in the waiting room symbolizes connecting with each other despite differences, and the baker is able to acknowledge his loss of humanity over the years after witnessing Ann and Howard’s grief. This short story is a touching addition to the literary time period, and handles each political undertone with care and empathy.

Works Cited

Brier, Jennifer. “‘Save Our Kids, Keep AIDS out:” Anti-AIDS Activism and the Legacy of Community Control in Queens, New York.” Journal of Social History, vol. 39, no. 4, 2006, pp. 965–987. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3790237 . Accessed 14 May 2021.

Carver, Raymond. “A Small, Good Thing.” Ploughshares, vol. 8, no. 2/3, 1982, pp. 213–240. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40348924 . Accessed 14 May 2021.

Carver, Raymond. “The Bath.” Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, no. 6, 1981, pp. 32–41. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42744338 . Accessed 14 May 2021.

McCaffery, Larry, et al. “An Interview with Raymond Carver.” Mississippi Review, vol. 14, no. 1/2, 1985, pp. 62–82. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20115387 . Accessed 14 May 2021.

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Marxism: Examples, Concepts, Ideology, Criticisms

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

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Marxism is a political, cultural, and economic philosophy that theorizes that social conflict exists due to constant power struggles between capitalists and workers.

Examples of marxism that demonstrate its powerful ability to critique capitalism include: the evidence of continual social inequality , cyclical economic crises that Marx predicted, and the predominance of monopolies in capitalism (that Marx also predicted).

Although heavily (and, for many reasons, rightly) criticized, Marxism remains one of the most influential sociological paradigms . That’s because it touches upon many aspects of social life: economics, politics, and culture.

Marxism Key Concepts

1. the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat.

The founder of Marxism, Carl Marx, saw capitalist society as clearly divided into two classes. Each of them has a different relationship to private property.

Marx argued that the Bourgeois exploit the labor offered by the workers to make profit. This is their main source of income.

2. Surplus value

Marx understood goods’ value in terms of the amount of labor required to produce it.

But the money paid to the worker by the employer is less than the total value of goods produced by the worker. Surplus value is the difference between the two.

According to Marx, the bourgeoisie extracts surplus value from the worker. Profit is essentially the exploitation of workers in capitalist society.

3. Controlling the Economic Base means controlling the Superstructure

We saw that the bourgeoisie has complete control over the means of production and the economy. Those with economic power, according to Marx, control all social institutions. The term “ superstructure ” describes structures like education, family, religion, government etc.

To an important extent, this was true during Marx’s time (the mid-19 th century):

voting was restricted to men with property
press barons used their papers to spread propaganda
only the children of the wealthy could attend university.

4. Capitalism leads to alienation

The capitalist system makes the worker feel alien to/estranged from:

the production process
his co-workers
the final products produced.

That’s because workers lose control of their work and become a ‘machine’.

5. The Bourgeois Holds Ideological Control

The Bourgeois use their economic power in society to keep the masses unaware of their exploitation ( ideological control ) . They can do it because they control the superstructure, e.g., religion, education, and mass media.

Ideological control leads to False Consciousness . This means that individuals are not conscious (do not understand) of their class position and are being exploited by the bourgeoisie (the ruling class).

6. Inevitability of Communist Revolution

Marx assumed that a revolution would happen and capitalism would be eliminated when the proletariat recognized its social position.

The workers would then take down the bourgeoisie. They would establish an egalitarian society in which there would be no incentive to profit or exploit others. There would be no private property; the means of production would be collectively owned.

This society would take from “each would give according to their ability” and give “to each according to their needs’, as Marx famously wrote in 1875.

Examples of Marxist Theory

1. capitalism and the creation of false needs.

Marx warned us early on of capitalism’s ability to create false needs among people of all ages.

In 1844, he wrote: “The extension of products and needs becomes a contriving and ever-calculating subservience to inhuman, sophisticated, unnatural and imaginary appetites.”

This is reflective of the consumer culture that emerged in the twentieth century and is very prominent today.

Commercial advertising—first on the press, then TV/radio, and now targeted ads on digital media—makes us feel we need more goods even when we have almost everything.

Consider cell phones, for example, they become outdated in just a few months. People want to buy the latest model even if theirs is still perfectly functional.

2. Cyclical systemic financial crises

Marx recognized early on that economic crises were an inherent feature of the capitalist system. (This was what would lead to revolution).

The economic history of the twentieth century has been marked by a shift between

periods of tranquillity with economic development and prospering financial markets
and periods of financial crises, coupled with the collapse of asset prices, rises in interest rates, bankruptcies among nation states and business firms

Take, for example,

the stock market crash of 1929 (known as the Great Crash)
the subsequent Great Depression (1929–1939)
the 2007-2008 financial crisis, felt as a mortgage crisis in the US and a banking crisis in many European countries (e.g., Iceland, Ireland etc.)

3. The class divides

According to Marx, the bourgeoisie keep salaries low to maximize profits. This is only possible as long as another worker willingly replaces the one who refuses to accept the conditions.

An example of this in today’s world is the move of large manufacturing companies from Europe and the United States to Asian and African countries in the twentieth century. They relocated to low-cost labor countries to maximize profit and maintain high growth rates.

Research has also shown that workers’ pay has frozen in many countries, while top executives make even more (Fryer, 2007).

Many European countries face the so-called cost-of-living crisis . The prices of essential goods have been rising faster than household incomes. While many people struggle to make ends meet, the super-rich are making even more profit.

4. The predominance of monopolies

This trend is paired with the formation of international monopolies.

Traditional liberal economic theory believed that competition would keep ownership diverse. But Marx rightly claimed that capitalist markets tend to merge according to the law of the strongest.

Some of the most famous monopolies in the world exemplify Marx’s process. These include Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Meta (formerly known as Facebook).

Marxism vs Communism

Note that when speaking of Marxism , we refer to a social and philosophical theory. When speaking of communism, we refer to a social, political, and economic regime.

Many countries are considered to have established communism in the twentieth century. An example is the Eastern European bloc and the Soviet Union, which were under communist leadership until the 1990s.

But these communist regimes—although ideologically founded upon Marxist ideas—were far from what Marx envisioned for society. So Marxism and Communism should not be confused .

Criticisms of Marxism

Marxism has been heavily criticized not only by liberal sociologists, economists, and political theorists. Let’s look at the key criticisms.

1. Control of the economic base does not involve control of the superstructure

Many of our institutions today are relatively independent of bourgeois or political control. For example, many written and online press is critical of the economic elites. The same goes for artists who criticize financial exploitation in capitalist societies.

2. Class division doesn’t reflect contemporary social structures

In many western countries , there is a sizeable middle class that generates enough income to own property and even invest their surplus income. These could not be identified as Marx’s “capitalist class”. They’re a form of petit-capitalists.

3. Capitalism hasn’t declined

As we saw, Marx believed that greater competition would lead to capitalist bankruptcy and the emergence of monopolies (as fewer and fewer people controlled production).

Former capitalists who had gone bankrupt would join the proletariat. This would ultimately lead to capitalism’s downfall and a harmonious socialist society.

However, capitalism hasn’t been overturned by the workers’ revolution.

Markets and the capitalist system have evolved over time. Wages have increased, and people now have access to a wide range of goods and private property. In many capitalist societies, however, economic inequality has increased.

4. Worker’s alienation is less relevant today

Modern structures of production (e.g., companies) have changed and have much less alienation.

First, workers can voice their opinions more easily through the positive power of unions . Second, many self-employed people can work and live on their own terms.

Third, when writing about alienation, Marx had in mind factory workers who were contributing to a tiny part of the product (e.g., drilling a hole and fitting a screw) and therefore felt foreign to the final products of their labor (e.g., a car).

In today’s service-oriented economy, professionals (e.g., teachers, digital marketer, developer, pharmacists) have a better feeling about what they produce.

5. Traditional Marxism was a grand narrative

Contemporary scholars argue that Marx’s grand or macro-narrative about the way the world works (and is destined to work) is no longer relevant.

Rather than trying to explain large-scale phenomena, they claim, that theorists should focus on much more specific and localized social issues (‌Lafferty, 2016).

6. Marxism is too deterministic

We saw that Marx thought that economic laws determined the workings of society and the direction of history. But there are many factors that shape history.

Societies have reacted differently to the global capitalist spread. For example

The United States and Europe have embraced neo-liberalism.
Cuba has a socialist dictatorship.
China also has a totalitarian regime . It is governed by the Chinese Communist Party which bears no resemblance to communism as envisioned by Marx.

Karl Marx developed the social, political, and economic theory known as Marxism . A conflict theory used in macrosociology , Marxism focuses on the struggles between the ‘bourgeoisie’ (ruling capitalist class) and the ‘proletariat’ (working class).

Marx argued that the power dynamics between capitalists and workers were inherently exploitative, resulting in class conflict. This conflict would eventually result in a global workers’ revolution that would overthrow the capitalist class and lead to a socialist society.

More than 150 years on, Marxism still informs sociological analyses and has been one of the most influential and controversial theoretical paradigms .

Eagleton, T. (2011). Why Marx was right. New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press.

Fryer, J. (2007). Rich man, poor man . The Economist . Available at: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2007/01/18/rich-man-poor-man.

‌Lafferty, G. (2016). From grand narrative to pluralist alternatives: New perspectives on Marx and Marxism. Australian Journal of Political Science , 51(3), pp. 583-597.

Marx, K. ([1864]1969). Theories of surplus value . 3 Volumes. Translated Emile Burns. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Marx, K., & Engels, F. ([1867-1894]1976). Capital: A critique of political economy . 3 Volumes. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Radke, M. (2005). Explaining financial crises: A cyclical approach. Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang.

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Marxist Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reading Guide

Daniel Hartley

(First published in French at: http://revueperiode.net/guide-de-lecture-critique-litteraire-marxiste/ )

Marxist literary criticism investigates literature’s role in the class struggle. The best general introductions in English remain Terry Eagleton’s Marxism and Literary Criticism (Routledge, 2002 [1976]) and, a more difficult but foundational book, Fredric Jameson’s Marxism and Form (Princeton UP, 1971). The best anthology in English remains Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne’s Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (Blackwell, 1996). The bibliographic essay that follows does not aim to be exhaustive; because it is quite long, I have indicated what I take to be the major texts of the tradition with a double asterisk and bold font: ** .

From Marx to Stalinist Russia

It is well-known that Marx himself was a voracious reader across multiple languages and that, as a young man, he composed poetry as well as an unfinished novel and fragments of a play. S.S. Prawer’s Karl Marx and World Literature (Verso, 2011 [1976]) is the definitive guide to all literary aspects of Marx’s writings. Marx and Engels also expressed views on specific literary works or authors in various contexts. Three in particular are well known: in The Holy Family (1845), Marx and Engels submit Eugène Sue’s global bestseller The Mysteries of Paris to a rigorous literary and ideological critique, which became important for Louis Althusser’s theory of melodrama (see ‘The “Piccolo Teatro”: Bertolazzi and Brecht’ in For Marx (Verso, 2005 [1965])); both Marx and Engels sent letters to Ferdinand Lassalle, a German lawyer and socialist, expressing reservations about his play Franz von Sickingen (1858-9), which they felt had downplayed the historical role of plebeian and peasant elements in the 1522-3 uprising of the Swabian and Rheinland nobility, thereby diminishing the tragic scope of his drama and causing his characters to be two-dimensional mouthpieces of history; finally, Marx planned but never actually wrote a whole volume on Balzac’s La Comédie humaine , of which Engels said that he had ‘learned more [from it] than from all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period together.’ Marx and Engels’ interest in Balzac is particularly important since it suggests that literary prowess and a capacity to represent the fundamental social dynamics of a given historical period are not dependent upon an author’s self-avowed political positions (Balzac was a royalist). This point would become important for theories of realism developed by György Lukács [1] and Fredric Jameson. Various fragments of Marx and Engels’ writings on art and literature have been collected by Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski in Marx and Engels on Literature and Art: A Selection of Writings (Telos Press, 1973). Marx and Engels’ ultimate influence on what became ‘Marxist literary criticism’ is less a result of these isolated fragments than the historical materialist method as such.

A useful, if overly simplistic, periodisation of Marxist literary criticism has been proposed by Terry Eagleton in the introduction to his and Drew Milne’s Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (Blackwell, 1996). Eagleton divides Marxist criticism into four kinds: anthropological, political, ideological, and economic (I shall focus on the first three). ‘Anthropological’ criticism, which he claims predominated during the period of the Second International (1889-1916), asks such fundamental questions as: what is the function of art within social evolution? What are the relations between art and human labour? What are the social functions of art and what is its relation to myth? This approach obtained (partially) in such works as G.V. Plekhanov’s Art and Social Life (Foreign Languages Press, 1957 [1912]) and Christopher Caudwell’s Illusion and Reality (Macmillan, 1937). ‘Political’ criticism dates to the Bolsheviks and their preparation for – and defence of – the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and, especially, 1917. Lenin’s essays on Tolstoy from 1908-11, collected in On Literature and Art (Progress Publishers, 1970), argue that the contradictions in Tolstoy’s work between advanced anti-capitalist critique and patriarchal, moralistic Christianity are a ‘mirror’ of late nineteenth-century Russian life and the weakness of residually feudal peasant elements of the 1905 revolution. (This argument was famously revisited by Pierre Macherey in his major Althusserian work of literary theory, Towards a Theory of Literary Production (Routledge Classics, 2006 [1966])). The most important text of this period, however, is almost certainly Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution** (Haymarket, 2005 [1925]). A landmark survey of the entire Russian literary terrain, it provides a unique record of the literary and stylistic upheavals brought about by social revolution. The book locates in literary forms and styles the ambiguous political tendencies of their authors, and is driven by the ultimate goal of producing a culture and collective subjectivity adequate to the construction of socialism.

This period of revolutionary ferment also gave rise to one of the most powerful and sophisticated intellectual schools in the history of Marxist literary criticism: the Bakhtin Circle. Led by Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (whose own relation to the Marxist tradition is ambiguous), the Circle produced subtle philosophical analyses of the social and cultural issues posed by the Russian Revolution and its degeneration into Stalinist dictatorship. Centred around the key idea of dialogism , which holds that language and literature are formed in a dynamic, conflictual process of social interaction, the Circle distinguished between monologic forms such as epic and poetry (associated with the monologism of Stalinism itself), and the novel whose heteroglossia (a polyphonic combination of social and literary idioms) and dialogism imbue it with a critical, popular resistance. Key works include Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (University of Minnesota Press, 1984 [1929/ 2 nd revised edition 1963]), his four key articles on the novel (anthologised in English as The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays** (University of Texas Press, 1981 [1934-41])), and Rabelais and His World (MIT Press, 1968 [1965]). Often overshadowed by Bakhtin, but of equal importance, are P.N. Medvedev’s masterly book-length Marxist critique of Russian formalism (which is also a social theory of literature in its own right), The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship** (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978 [1928]), and V.N. Voloshinov’s Marxist theory of language: Marxism and the Philosophy of Language** (Harvard UP, 1986 [1929]). The latter was important to Raymond Williams’ later work (he discovered it by chance on a library shelf at Cambridge) and has informed Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s seminal A Marxist Philosophy of Language (Haymarket, 2004).

‘Western Marxism’ and Beyond

Eagleton dates his third category, ‘ideological criticism,’ to the period of ‘Western Marxism.’ The latter is a much-contested notion that became influential in the Anglophone world following the publication of Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism (Verso, 1976), a study of intellectuals including György Lukács, Karl Korsch, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, Galvano Della Volpe, and Lucio Colletti. Anderson claims that, in contradistinction to previous generations of Marxists, Western Marxism is characterised by a period of political defeat (to fascism in the 1930s), a structural divorce of Marxist intellectuals from the masses, and – consequently – a written style that is often complex, obscure or antithetical to practical political action. Whether or not one endorses Anderson’s account, it is a useful periodising category.

If Lenin and Trotsky were concerned with literature primarily as an extension of immediate political struggles, critics of the mid-century were far closer to the preoccupations of the Bakhtin Circle, understanding literature as indirectly political – not least through the ideology of form . If Soviet socialist realism, the definitive study of which is Régine Robin’s Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic (Stanford UP, 1992 [1986]), was largely indifferent to form and style and fixated on ‘transparent’ heroic-proletarian content, critics such as Adorno and Lukács focused far more on literary form and the manner in which it crystallises ideologies. In many works, this attention to form is coextensive with a dialectical approach to criticism, partly inspired by the Hegelianised Marxism of Lukács and Korsch. Such an approach is characterised by an emphasis on reflexivity and totality: it stresses the way in which ‘the [critic’s] mind must deal with its own thought process just as much as with the material it works on’ (Fredric Jameson); it holds that literary works internalise social forms, situations and structures, yet simultaneously refuse them (thereby generating a critical negativity that resists vulgar economic or political reductionism); and it takes the mediated (not external or abstract) social totality as its ultimate critical purview. As Adorno put it in an introductory lecture on the dialectic in 1958:

on the one hand, we should not be content, as rigid specialists, to concentrate exclusively on the given individual phenomena but strive to understand these phenomena in the totality within which they function in the first place and receive their meaning; and, on the other hand, we should not hypostatize this totality, this whole, in which we stand, should not introduce the whole dogmatically from without, but always attempt to effect this transition from the individual phenomenon to the whole with constant reference to the matter itself.

The pinnacle of such dialectical criticism is to be found in the work of Adorno himself. See especially: Prisms (MIT Press, 1955) and Notes to Literature I & II** (Columbia UP, 1991 & 1992 [1958 & 1961]), which contain a range of extraordinary essays, as well as the posthumously published Aesthetic Theory (Continuum, 1997 [1970]) – the definitive philosophical statement on art and the aesthetic in the immediate postwar period.

Adorno was profoundly influenced by Walter Benjamin, eleven years his senior. The pair first met in Vienna in 1923 and continued a lifelong friendship of lively intellectual debate (thoroughly analysed by Susan Buck-Morss in The Origin of Negative Dialectics (Free Press, 1977)). Benjamin’s profoundly original and essayistic work, which combines historical materialism with Jewish mysticism, ranges across a multitude of topics, with highlights including: a Kantian yet Kabbalist-influenced theory of cognition, Baroque drama and allegory, Baudelaire (a pivotal figure in Benjamin’s lifelong obsession with Paris as ‘Capital of the Nineteenth Century’), Kafka, Proust (whose mémoire involontaire he associates with surrealist shocks), Brecht (with whom he also shared a lifelong friendship), surrealism, language, and translation. In English, readers new to Benjamin might wish to consult the relevant essays in Illuminations** (Fontana, 1970) and Reflections (Schocken, 1978) as well as the theory of Baroque drama and allegory in The Origins of German Tragic Drama (Verso, 1998 [1928]). Those with a taste for completism may also wish to take on Benjamin’s enormous study of nineteenth-century Paris, consisting solely of fragments: The Arcades Project (Harvard UP, 2002 [1982]). Harvard University Press have published 4 volumes of Benjamin’s Selected Writings (2004-6).

Another towering figure of twentieth-century Marxist criticism is the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács. His 1923 work History and Class Consciousness (Merlin Press, 1971 [1923]) was hugely influential: it broke with the Second International emphasis on Marxism as a doctrine, stressing instead that Marxism is a dialectical method premised upon the category of totality, and made ‘reification’ a fundamental Marxist concept. Prior to his Marxist radicalisation, Lukács wrote two major works of literary criticism: the first, Soul and Form (Columbia UP, 2010 [1910]), is a (criminally) neglected set of passionate, tormented essays on the relation between art and life, the perfect abstractions of form versus the myriad imperfect minutiae of the human soul. These oppositions become connected to larger social contradictions between life and work, concrete and abstract, artistic fulfilment and bourgeois vocation; what Lukács is clearly seeking is a way of mediating or overcoming these oppositions, yet the tormented style is a sign that he has not yet located it. He continued these reflections in one of the truly great literary-critical works of the twentieth century: The Theory of the Novel** (MIT Press, 1971 [1920]). Contrasting the novel with the epic, Lukács argues that where the latter is the form that organically corresponds to an ‘integrated’ (i.e., non-alienated, non-reified) civilisation in which the social totality is immanently reconciled and sensually present, the novel is ‘the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.’ The second half of the book expounds a typology of the novel, concluding with a vaguely hopeful sign that Dostoevsky may offer a way out of the impasses of bourgeois modernity.

Through the experience of World War I and the Russian Revolution, Lukács ultimately arrived at the Marxist positions of History and Class Consciousness . Crucially, his later highly influential theory of realism should be read in the context of this book’s central essay on reification, since realism for Lukács is in many ways the narrative equivalent of the de-reified (and potentially dereifying) standpoint of the proletariat. In Studies in European Realism ** (Merlin Press, 1972) and Writer and Critic (Merlin Press, 1978) (see especially the essay ‘Narrate or Describe?’), Lukács argues that the great realists (Balzac, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann) penetrate beneath the epiphenomena of daily life to reveal the hidden objective laws at work which constitute society as such. In other works, however, this attachment to realism descends into anti-modernist literary-critical dogmatism (see, e.g., The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (Merlin Press, 1963 [1958])). The other major critical work by Lukács is The Historical Novel ** (Penguin, 1969 [1937/1954]), a foundational study of the genre of the historical novel from its explosion in Walter Scott to its twentieth-century inheritors such as Heinrich Mann.

In France, the work of Sartre on committed literature is well-known. Situations I (Gallimard, 1947) collects his early texts on Faulkner, Dos Passos, Nabokov and others (recently translated as Critical Essays: Situations 1 (University of Chicago Press, 2017)). Notable here is the manner in which Sartre deduces an entire personal metaphysics from the styles and forms of these works, which he then judges against his own existentialist phenomenology of freedom and what Fredric Jameson has called his ‘linguistic optimism’ (for Sartre, everything is sayable – a position the French philosopher Alain Badiou would radicalise and mathematise). Styles like Faulkner’s, which implicitly deny this freedom, are held up for censure. The masterpiece of this period and approach is What Is Literature?** (Routledge Classics 2001, [1947]), which includes not only the well-known (and much criticised) passages on the supposed transparency of prose versus the potentially apolitical opaqueness of poetry, but also a rich and subtle history of French writers’ relations to their (virtual or actual) publics: a relation which, after the failed revolution of 1848, becomes one of denial. It concludes with a rallying cry for a ‘actual literature’ [ littérature en acte ] that would strive for a classless society in which ‘there is no difference of any kind between [a writer’s] subject and his public .’ Sartre’s work came under criticism in Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero (Hill & Wang, 2012 [1953]); for Barthes, commitment occurs not at the level of content but at that of ‘writing’ [ écriture ] (or form) – though one might contest the simplistic understanding of Sartre’s argument on which this is based. More recently, these problematics have been resurrected – and challenged – by Jacques Rancière in The Politics of Literature (Polity, 2010 [2007]), which argues that the politics of literature has nothing to do with the personal political proclivities of the author; rather, literature is political because as literature it ‘intervenes into this relationship between practices and forms of visibility and modes of saying that carves up one or more common worlds .’ Readers might also consult Sartre’s major studies of individual writers, including Baudelaire (Gallimard, 1946), Saint Genet (Gallimard, 1952), and – a three-tome magnum opus – L’Idiot de la Famille (Gallimard, 1971-2).

Lucien Goldmann, a Romanian-born French critic, developed an approach that became known as ‘genetic structuralism.’ He examined the structure of literary texts to discover the degree to which it embodied the ‘world vision’ of the class to which the writer belonged. For Goldmann literary works are the product, not of individuals, but of the ‘transindividual mental structures’ of specific social groups. These ‘mental structures’ or ‘world visions’ are themselves understood as ideological constructions produced by specific historical conjunctures. In his best-known work, The Hidden God (Verso, 2016 [1955]), he connects recurring categories in the plays of Racine (God, World, Man) to the religious movement known as Jansenism, which is itself understood as the world vision of the noblesse de robe , a class fraction who find themselves dependent upon the monarchy (the ‘robe’) but, since they are recruited from the bourgeoisie, politically opposed to it. The danger of Goldmann’s work is that the ‘homologies’ he draws between work, world vision and class, are premised upon a simplistic ‘expressive causality’.

Such expressive theories of causality were, famously, one of Louis Althusser’s philosophical and political targets. Proposing a theory of the social totality as decentred, consisting of multiple discontinuous practices and temporalities (in For Marx (Verso, 2005 [1965]) and Reading Capital (Verso, 2016 [1965])), Althusser’s fragmentary writings on art and literature unsurprisingly emphasise art’s discontinuous relation to ideology and the social totality. In his 1966 ‘Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre,’ Althusser argues that art is not simply an ideology like any other but neither is it a theoretical science: it makes us see ideology, makes it perceivable, thereby performing an ‘internal distanciation’ on ideology itself. Pierre Macherey developed this insight into an entire, extremely sophisticated theory of literary production in Towards a Theory of Literary Production** (Routledge, 2006 [1966]). For Macherey, ideology is both inscribed in and ‘redoubled’ or ‘made visible’ by literary texts just as much by what they do not say as by what they overtly proclaim: they are structured by eloquent silences . As Warren Montag has written of Macherey and Étienne Balibar’s work of this time: ‘these texts are intelligible, that is, become the objects of an adequate knowledge, only on the basis of contradictions that may be understood as their immanent cause.’ Alain Badiou published an important critique and further development of Macherey’s argument in ‘The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process’ (1966) (appears in Badiou’s The Age of Poets (Verso, 2014)), and Terry Eagleton’s Criticism and Ideology (New Left Books, 1976) – a major Althusserian intervention in the British literary critical scene – was strongly influenced by Macherey’s work. For Badiou’s later writings on literature, see Handbook of Inaesthetics (Stanford UP, 2004 [1998]), On Beckett (Clinamen Press, 2002), and The Age of the Poets (Verso, 2014); Jean-Jacques Lecercle has traced these developments in Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature (Edinburgh UP, 2012). Macherey continued his own literary critical trajectory in À quoi pense la littérature? (PUF, 1990), Proust. Entre littérature et philosophie (Éditions Amsterdam, 2013), and Études de philosophie littéraire (De l’incidence éditeur, 2014).

British and US-American Marxist Literary Criticism: Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson

Raymond Williams was perhaps the most important British literary critic of the twentieth century. For a sense of his entire career, see the book-length interviews conducted by the editorial board of the New Left Review in Politics and Letters (Verso, 2015 [1979]). Of the vast range of his writings on literature, Marxism and Literature** (Oxford UP, 1977) is the most important from the perspective of literary criticism. It is the culmination of Williams’ increasing engagement, through the rise of the New Left from the mid-1950s, with the whole range of ‘Western Marxist’ texts discussed above, many of which were slowly being translated into English throughout the 1960s and 70s. Williams’ consistent manoeuvre in this book is to suggest the ways in which traditionally ‘Marxist’ theories of culture and literature remain residually idealist. Williams here formulates his mature positions on several of his key conceptual innovations: selective tradition, ‘dominant, residual and emergent’ (the three-fold temporality of the historical present), structure of feeling, and alignment. Yet the book must also be read in the context of the previous ground-breaking literary critical works that made it possible: The Long Revolution (Chatto & Windus, 1961), a theory of modernity as viewed from the perspective of the sociology of literature and artistic production; Modern Tragedy (Verso, 1979 [1966]), which combines a Marxist theory of tragedy with a powerful justification of revolution as our modern tragic horizon; Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (Penguin, 1973 [1952/ 1964]), a materialist theory of modern drama; The English Novel From Dickens to Lawrence (Chatto & Windus, 1970), a social history of the English novel (designed, in part, to challenge the hegemony of F. R. Leavis’ The Great Tradition (Chatto & Windus, 1948)); and – most importantly – The Country and the City ** (Oxford UP, 1973), a majestic literary and social history of urbanisation and the capitalist development of town and country relations. In his later work, Williams also wrote much to challenge prevailing idealist theories of modernism: see The Politics of Modernism (Verso, 1989).

Terry Eagleton was Williams’ student at Cambridge. Coming from a working-class Catholic background, Eagleton’s early writings were primarily concerned with Catholic theories of the body and language. A turning point came with the publication of Criticism and Ideology** (New Left Books, 1976), which signalled Eagleton’s conversion to Althusserianism and his intellectual break with Williams (it contains a now notorious chapter in which he accuses Williams of being a romantic, idealist, empiricist, populist!), though it had been preceded by the Goldmannian Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (Palgrave, 2005 [1975]). In the 1980s, Eagleton became increasingly interested in the revolutionary potential of criticism itself, partly by way of Walter Benjamin’s readings of Brecht (see Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (Verso, 1981)), and partly via feminism ( The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality, and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Blackwell, 1982)). He has written a wide-ranging trilogy on Irish cultural history, but his most important mid-to-late works are arguably The Ideology of the Aesthetic ** (Blackwell, 1990), a detailed critical history of the entire aesthetic tradition, and Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Blackwell, 2002), a major Marxist reconceptualisation of tragic theory and literature. An overview of his life and work can be found in the book-length interview The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (Verso, 2009).

Fredric Jameson, perhaps best-known for his theory of postmodernism ( Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham UP, 1991), was integral in the dissemination of ‘Western Marxist’ ideas in the Anglophone world. As mentioned at the outset, Marxism and Form** (Princeton UP, 1971) is a key introduction to many of these ideas. It includes detailed chapters on Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Lukács, and Sartre, as well as a major methodological essay on ‘dialectical criticism’. Jameson tested many of these ideas in a highly unusual work of ideological recuperation: Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (University of California Press, 1979). Perhaps Jameson’s most enduring work, however, is The Political Unconscious** (Cornell UP, 1981). Based on a modernised version of the medieval system of allegory, it develops a model of reading based on three levels: the text as symbolic act, the text as ‘ideologeme’ (‘the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes’) and the text as ‘ideology of form’. Its ultimate claim is that every literary text, via a system of (non-expressive) allegorical mediations, can be linked back to the non-transcendable horizon of History as class struggle. Jameson is also an important theorist of modernism, as witness his major work A Singular Modernity** (Verso, 2002) and the essay collection The Modernist Papers (Verso, 2007). His most important recent literary critical work is The Antinomies of Realism (Verso, 2013). Jameson also published a highly controversial article, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ ( Social Text , 1986), which alone has given rise to a vast secondary literature (the best-known critique of it being Aijaz Ahmad’s in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (Verso, 1992)). Jameson is undoubtedly the most important cultural critic of the late twentieth century.

Contemporary Criticism

It is impossible to do justice to the range and richness of contemporary Marxist criticism, so I can only hope to indicate a few important works. Franco Moretti has been an influential figure in the field. His work on the Bildungsroman foregrounded the way in which the symbolic form of ‘youth’ mediated the contradictions of modernity and effected the transition from the heroic subjectivities of the Age of Revolution to the mundane and unheroic normality of everyday bourgeois life ( The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture** (Verso, 1987)). His study of the ‘modern epic,’ meanwhile, focused on such texts as Goethe’s Faust , Melville’s Moby Dick and Gabriel García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude , arguing that they are ‘ world texts, whose geographical frame of reference is no longer the nation-state, but a broader entity – a continent, or the world-system as a whole’ ( The Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez (Verso, 1996)). In a move that would prove influential for materialist theories of ‘world literature’ (including his own), Moretti employs the categories of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis to suggest that such ‘world texts’ or ‘modern epics,’ whilst unknown to the relatively homogeneous states of the core are typical of the semi-periphery where combined development prevails. [2] Moretti has since extended this ‘geography of literary forms’ in ‘Conjectures on World Literature’** ( New Left Review , 2000). Taking its cue from Goethe and Marx’s remarks on Weltliteratur , and combining these with insights drawn from the Brazilian Marxist critic Roberto Schwarz, ‘Conjectures’ holds that world literature is ‘[o]ne, and unequal: one literature … or perhaps, better, one world literary system (of inter-related literatures); but a system which is different from what Goethe and Marx had hoped for, because it’s profoundly unequal.’ Moretti’s most important work, though, is arguably his most recent publication: The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature** (Verso, 2013), a socio-literary study of the figure of the bourgeois, whose true ‘hero’ is the rise of literary prose.

The most significant of Moretti’s inheritors is the Warwick Research Collective (WReC), whose book Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool UP, 2015) aims to ‘resituate the problem of “world literature,” considered as a revived category of theoretical enquiry, by pursuing the literary-cultural implications of the theory of combined and uneven development.’ Fusing Fredric Jameson’s ‘singular modernity’ thesis with a Moretti-inflected world-systems analysis and Trotsky’s theory of combined and uneven development, the Warwick Research Collective defines world-literature as ‘ the literature of the world-system ’. World-literature (with a hyphen to show its fidelity to Wallersteinian world-systems analysis) is that literature which ‘registers’ in form and content the modern capitalist world-system. The book is also an intervention into debates on the definition of modernism. If ‘modernisation’ is understood as the ‘imposition’ of capitalist social relations on ‘cultures and societies hitherto un- or only sectorally capitalised’, and ‘modernity’ names ‘the way in which capitalist social relations are “lived”’, then ‘modernism’ is that literature which ‘encodes’ the lived experience of the ‘capitalisation of the world’ produced by modernisation.

Individual members of the Warwick Research Collective have also made important contributions to what might (problematically) be termed ‘Marxist postcolonial theory’. Benita Parry’s Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (Routledge, 2004) brings together a series of sophisticated essays which, whilst recognising the significance of much work done under the emblem of postcolonial studies, suggest that the material impulses of colonialism – its appropriation of physical resources, exploitation of human labour and institutional repression – have been omitted from mainstream postcolonial work (by Subaltern Studies, Edward Saïd, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakracorty Spivak). Neil Lazarus’ The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge UP, 2011) not only extends this critique but attempts to reconstruct the entire field of postcolonial studies by developing new Marxist concepts attentive to the insights of postcolonial theory. Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee has likewise charted new terrain for Marxist postcolonial studies, but has done so with increased sensitivity to ecology (see Postcolonial Environments Nature: Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English (Palgrave, 2010)). This approach has been strengthened by Sharae Deckard’s ambitious research project on ‘world-ecological literature’ (for a programmatic summary, see her forthcoming ‘Mapping Planetary Nature: Conjectures on World-Ecological Fiction’).

In other recent work:

Alex Woloch has developed a theory of minor characters and protagonists in the realist novel that connects the ‘asymmetric structure of characterization – in which many are represented but attention flows to a delimited center’ to the ‘competing pull of inequality and democracy within the nineteenth-century bourgeois imagination’ ( The One vs. the Many , Princeton UP, 2003).
Anna Kornbluh has offered a nuanced materialist account of realism’s formal mediations and ‘realisations’ of finance in Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (Fordham University Press, 2014).
Joshua Clover has argued that the period from the 1970s to the economic crisis of 2007-8 should be understood as the (Braudelian) ‘Autumn of the system.’ His fundamental thesis is ‘that an organizing trope of Autumnal literature is the conversion of the temporal to the spatial ’. It is this conversion that non -narrative forms such as poetry are better able to grasp and figure forth’ (‘Autumn of the System: Poetry and Financial Capital.’ JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory , 2011).
In The Matter of Capital (Harvard UP, 2011) Christopher Nealon emphasises the ubiquity and variety of thematic, formal and intertextual poetic reflections upon capitalism across poetry of the ‘American century.’ He shows that poets as diverse as Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, John Ashbery, Jack Spicer, the Language poets, Claudia Rankine and Kevin Davies ‘have at the center of their literary projects an attempt to understand the relationship between poetry and capitalism, most often worked out as an attempt to understand the relationship of texts to historical crisis’.
Ruth Jennison’s The Zukofsky Era (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012), argues that ‘the Objectivists of the Zukofsky Era inherit the first [modernist] generation’s experimentalist break with prior systems of representation, and … strive to adequate this break to a futurally pointed content of revolutionary politics.’
Sarah Brouillette has published a range of important work on the history of the book market and creative industries. See especially, Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford UP, 2014).
My own book, The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics (Brill/ Haymarket, 2017), develops a materialist theory of style through an immanent critique of the work of Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson.

[1] Sometimes rendered in English as ‘Georg Lukács’.

[2] For explanations of these complex terms (world-systems analysis, core, semi-periphery), see Wallerstein’s World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Duke UP, 2004).

Image derived from “Marxism” by rdesign812 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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Historical Materialism is a Marxist journal, appearing four times a year, based in London. Founded in 1997 it asserts that, not withstanding the variety of its practical and theoretical articulations, Marxism constitutes the most fertile conceptual framework for analysing social phenomena, with an eye to their overhaul. In our selection of material we do not favour any one tendency, tradition or variant. Marx demanded the ‘Merciless criticism of everything that exists’: for us that includes Marxism itself.

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Marxist criticism

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A form of cultural criticism that applies Marxist theory to the interpretation of cultural texts. Since neither Karl Marx nor his collaborator Friedrich Engels ever developed a specific form of cultural criticism themselves, Marxist Criticism has been extrapolated from their writings. As there is no one form of Marxism, so there is no one form of Marxist Criticism. This is not to say that the different variants of Marxist Criticism do not have certain features in common, but it is nevertheless also true that there is considerable debate within the field concerning those differences. In common, then, all forms of Marxist Criticism assume the following: (i) that no artistic object can be understood in isolation from the social, cultural, and historical conditions in which it was produced; (ii) that all categories by which artistic objects might be measured are themselves constructions that need to be evaluated from the perspective of the social, cultural, and historical conditions that gave rise to them; (iii) that all artistic productions are commodities that can and must be understood in terms of the production of surplus value; (iv) that art is a site for the playing out of a symbolic form of class struggle. The principle area of difference in Marxist Criticism is the issue of whether or not it should be prescriptive or not: in other words, is it the job of Marxist Criticism to determine what art should be like? There have been powerful movements in favour of this position—the most noted is of course socialist realism. This position has also been championed very strongly by such critics as György Lukács. But there is a similarly powerful movement against it and in recent years it has generally been agreed that it is neither possible nor desirable to prescribe what art should be like. But if that isn't the task of Marxist Criticism, then what is? As is the case with psychoanalysis, the response to this question is twofold: there is an attempt to understand the nature of the object (i.e. what makes it art and why) and alongside it there is the attempt to understand the subject's response to particular art objects. In both cases, the primary conceptual tool is the notion of ideology. Some of the major Marxist critics are: Terry Eagleton, his Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976) was immensely influential; Fredric Jameson, his Marxism and Form (1971), and more particularly The Political Unconscious (1981), are perhaps the most sophisticated attempts to synthesize the critical methodologies from a broad spectrum of approaches; Lukács, although a troubled figure, his History and Class Consciousness (1923) continues to be studied today and it is in many ways a foundational text for the field; Pierre Macherey, whose Pour une théorie de la production littéraire, translated as A Theory of Literary Production (1978), is generally regarded as the definitive application of Althusser's work to literature; and Raymond Williams, a hugely influential figure, particularly in the nascent field of Cultural Studies.

(i) that no artistic object can be understood in isolation from the social, cultural, and historical conditions in which it was produced; (ii) that all categories by which artistic objects might be measured are themselves constructions that need to be evaluated from the perspective of the social, cultural, and historical conditions that gave rise to them; (iii) that all artistic productions are commodities that can and must be understood in terms of the production of surplus value; (iv) that art is a site for the playing out of a symbolic form of class struggle.

From: Marxist Criticism in A Dictionary of Critical Theory »

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Literary Theory and Criticism

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Marxism and Literary Theory

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 12, 2016 • ( 27 )

Marxism is a materialist philosophy which tried to interpret the world based on the concrete, natural world around us and the society we live in. It is opposed to idealist philosophy which conceptualizes a spiritual world elsewhere that influences and controls the material world. In one sense it tried to put people’s thought into reverse gear as it was a total deviation from the philosophies that came before it. Karl Marx himself has commented on this revolutionary nature of Marxism, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” It is true that while other philosophies tried to understand the world, Marxism tried to change it.

Classical Marxism: Basic Principles

According to Marxism, society progresses through the struggle between opposing forces. It is this struggle between opposing classes that result in social transformation. History progresses through this class struggle. Class struggle originates out of the exploitation of one class by another throughout history. During the feudal period the tension was between the feudal lords and the peasants, and in the Industrial age the struggle was between the capitalist class (the bourgeoisie) and the industrial working class (the proletariat). Classes have common interests. In a capitalist system the proletariat is always in conflict with the capitalist class. This confrontation, according to Marx, will finally result in replacing the system by socialism.

Take the case of the novels of Mulk Raj Anand which address the life of the untouchables, coolies and ordinary workers struggling for their rights and self esteem. It is true that they can be traced back to the class conflict prevalent in the Indian society M.T. Vasudevan Nair , a noted Malayalam novelist wrote about the breaking up of the feudal tharavads in Kerala. But in the final analysis his stories reveal the filtering of the bourgeois modernity in Kerala society and how it enters into a conflictual relationship with the values of feudalism. Thus traces of this connection can be identified in various forms of cultural production.

Socialist Realism

Socialist Realism took shape as the official aesthetic principle of the new communist society. It was mainly informed by the 19th century aesthetics and revolutionary politics. Raymond Williams identifies three principles as the founding principles of Socialist realism. They are Partinost or commitment to the working class cause of the party, Narodnost of popularity and Klassovost or writer’s commitment to the class interests. The idea of Partinost is based on Vladmir Lenin ‘s essay, Party Organisation and Party Literature (1905) which reiterates the commitment of the writer to the aim of the party to liberate the working class from exploitation. Narodnost refers to the popular simplicity of the work of art. Marx, in Paris Manuscripts , refers to the alienation that originates out of the separation of the mental and manual in the capitalist society. Earlier under feudalism the workers engaged in cottage industries produced various items on their own, all activities related to the production happening at the same place under the supervision of the same people. But under capitalism the workers lost control over their products they were engaged in the production of various parts and were alienated from their own work. So, only folk art survived as people’s art. The concept Narodnost reiterates this quality of popular art which is accessible to the masses and wanted to restore their lost wholeness of being. Klassovost refers to the commitment of the writer to the interests of the working class. It is not related to the explicit allegiance of a writer to a particular class but the writer’s inherent ability to portray the social transformation.

For example, Balzac , a supporter of Bourbon dynasty, provides a penetrating account of the French society than all the historians. Though Tolstoy , the Russian novelist, was an aristocrat by birth and had no affiliation to the revolutionary movements in Russia, Lenin called Tolstoy the “mirror of Russian revolution” as he was successful in revealing the transformation in Russian society that led to the revolution through his novels. Lenin’s position regarding art and literature was harder than that of Marx and Friedrich Engels . He argued that literature must become an instrument of the party. In the 1934 congress of Soviet Writers , Socialist Realism was accepted as the official aesthetic principle of Soviet Union. It was accepted as a dogma by communists all over the world.

Thus with the declaration of official literary policy by Soviet Union the “Moscow Line” was popularized and got international acceptance among communists. As a result, a direct cause-effect relationship between literature and economics was assumed, with all writers seen as trapped within the intellectual limit of their class position. One of the examples of this rigid Marxist literary criticism is Illusion and Reality by Christopher Caudwell . However establishing a one to one relationship between base and superstructure as some “vulgar Marxists” may attempt, is opposed by the Marxist critic, Terry Eagleton . According to him, “each element of a society’s superstructure, art, law, politics, and religion has its own tempo of development, its own internal evolution, which is not reducible to a mere expression of the class struggle or the state of the economy.” Yet classical Marxists claim that in the last analysis the superstructure is determined by that mode of production. The Hungarian Marxist critic Georg Lukacs represented this type of political orthodoxy. Lukacs considered the 19th century realist fiction as a model and believed that a realist work must reveal the underlying pattern of contradictions in a social order. His debate with Bertolt Brecht on the whole questions of realism and expressionism discussed in detail the importance of form and the concept of form in Marxisi criticism. The debate was handed over to the Formalists who developed new directions in the development of Marxist criticism.

Further developments in Marxist Aesthetics

Marxist criticism flourished outside the official line in various European countries. Russian Formalism emerged as a new perspective informed by Marxism in the 1920s. It was disbanded by the Communist party as it did not conform to the official theoretical perspective of the party. The prominent members of this group were Victor Shklovsky, Boris Tomashevsky and Boris Eichenbaum, who published their ideas originally in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays , edited by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J Reis.

Though suppressed in Soviet Union, the Formalists emerged in various forms in the USA, Germany and Prague. One of the members of this group, Mikhail Bakhtin remained in Soviet Union and continued his critical practice. His concept of Dialogism affirmed plurality and variety. It was an argument against the hegemony of absolute authorial control. He affirmed the need to take others and otherness into account. In one sense, it was an argument against the increasing homogenization of cultural and political life in Soviet Union.

Many others belonging to the same perspective went into exile and continued their work abroad. It was the beginning of a new form of Marxist criticism. Roman Jakobson founded the Prague Linguistic Circle along with Rene Wellek and a few others. In Germany the Frankfurt School of Marxist aesthetics was founded in 1923 as a political research institute attached to the University of Frankfurt. Walter Benjamin , Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse were some of the important figures attached with this school. They tried to combine aspects of Formalism with the theories of Marx and Freud. They produced for the first time studies on mass culture and communication and their role in social reproduction and domination. The Frankfurt School also generated one of the first models of a critical cultural studies that analyzes the processes of cultural production and political economy, the politics of cultural texts, and audience reception and use of cultural artifacts.

Marxist scholars like Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht considered art as a social production. Walter Benjamin’s essay, The Author as Producer (1934) addresses the question, “What is the literary work’s position within the relations of production of its time?” Benjamin tries to argue that artistic production depends upon certain techniques of production which are part of the productive forces of art like the publishing, theatrical presentation and so on. A revolutionary artist should not uncritically accept the existing forces of artistic production, but should develop and revolutionize those forces. It helps in the creation of new social relations between artist and audience. In this process, authors, readers and spectators become collaborators. The experimental theatre developed by Brecht is a realization of Benjamin’s concept.

The French Marxist thinker, Louis Althusser further developed the Marxist approach through the introduction of various concepts like overdetermination , Ideology etc. Overdetermination refers to an effect which arises from various causes rather than from a single factor. This concept undercuts simplistic notions of one to one correspondence between base and superstructure. Ideology is another term modified by Althusser. According to him “ideology is a system of representations endowed with an existence and an historical role at the heart of a given society.” It obscures social reality by naturalizing beliefs and by promoting values that support it. The civil society spreads ideology through the law, textbooks, religious rituals and norms so that the people imbibe them even without their knowledge. Ideology is instituted by the state through two apparatuses, Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA) and Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA). The RSA includes law courts, prison, police, army etc and the ISA include political parties, schools, media, churches, family, art etc. Althusser imported structuralism to Marxism. In his view, society is a structural whole which consists of relatively autonomous levels: legal, political and cultural whose mode of articulation is only determined by the economy.

The founder of Italian communist Party, Antonio Gramsci was a politician, political theorist, linguist and philosopher. Known as an original thinker among Marxist scholars, Gramsci introduced the concepts like Hegemony and the Subaltern . Hegemony is the domination of particular section of the society by the powerful classes. Most often it works through consent rather than by power. It is the moral and intellectual leadership of the upper class in a particular society. The term subaltern was originally used by Gramsci as a collective description for a variety of different and exploited groups who lack class consciousness. But now it is being used to represent all marginalized sections like Dalits, women, minorities etc.

An influential figure among the New Left was Raymond Williams . His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Williams was interested in the relationship between language, literature and society. He coined the critical method, Cultural Materialism which has four characteristics, Historical context, Theoretical method, Political /commitment and Textual analysis. Cultural materialism gives us different perspectives based on what we choose to suppress or reveal in reading from the past.

Cultural Materialism argues that culture is a constitutive s social progress which actively creates different ways of life. Similarly creation of meaning is viewed as a practical material activity which cannot be consigned to a secondary level. Another important concept in Williams thought is Structures of feeling. They are values that are changing and being formed as we live and react to the material world around us. They subject to change. Williams contributed much for the development of Marxist aesthetics through his studies on culture. His most important works include The Country and the City (1973), in which chapters about literature alternate with chapters on social history. His tightly written Marxism and Literature (1977) is mainly for specialists, but it also sets out his own approach to cultural studies which he called cultural materialism.

Fredric Jameson , an American Marxist intellectual focused on critical theory and was influence by Kenneth Burke , Gyorgy Lukacs , Ernst Bloch , Theodor Adorno , Frankfurt School , Louis Althusser and Sartre . He viewed cultural criticism as an integral feature of Marxist theory. This position represented a break with more orthodox Marxism, which held a narrow view of historical materialism. In some ways Jameson has been concerned, along with other Marxist cultural critics such as Terry Eagleton to articulate Marxism’s relevance in respect to current philosophical and literary trends. In 1969, Jameson co-founded the Marxist Literary Group with a number of his graduate students at the University of California. His major works include Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971) and The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (1972). History came to play an increasingly central role in Jameson’s interpretation of both the reading (consumption) and writing (production) of literary texts. Jameson marked his full-fledged commitment to Hegelian-Marxist philosophy with the publication of The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), the opening slogan of which is “always historicize” .

Apart from Jameson, contemporary Marxist critics like Terry Eagleton , Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster, England and Aijaz Ahmad , a well known Marxist thinker and political commentator from India have significant contributions in the field of Marxist theory and aesthetics. Aijaz Ahmad’s famous work, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992) contained Marxist analysis of the concepts like Third World Literature and Orientalism . Eagleton on the other hand published more than 40 books which include Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), and The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996). Marxist thought have undergone huge transformation over the years befitting to the claim of Marx that change is the only unchanging phenomena in this world. It has been the backbone of almost all modern theories of culture and criticism. It may be a paradox that while Marxist practices have received set backs in recent years Marxist theory has been widely accepted all over the world.

Marxist Criticism

1. introduction.

The introduction of the essay is crucial to understand the principles and the various issues and themes that the essay explores. Marx was one of the most influential men in history; his ideas had many social, political implications. He considered himself to be a scientist who discovered a theory of society and when Karl Marx's ideas are discussed, it is not just about the subject of literary criticism but his view on life itself. On the other hand, it can be argued that everything is political. By writing about the working class or the poor, one is making a political statement and thus everything can be related to economics and the power struggle between the different classes in society. It is important to have a rough understanding of Marxism and the concepts that form the foundations of Marxist theory. Without some comprehension of these, it is quite hard to grasp Marxist criticism. Thus, some of the ideas in the first section may seem somewhat abstract with no immediate relation to literature, but they are essential in understanding the rest of the essay.

1.1. Definition of Marxist Criticism

Marxist critic seeks to understand the relation between literature and the social reality. It is important to define the nature of Marxism and the nature of literary reality. Only then can a work of literature, which itself contains a social analysis, be understood in terms of its own internal categories. For many people, the term Marxism brings to mind the ruthless totalitarian regimes of such political figures as Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung, or the German social theorist Jürgen Habermas. Others, however, think of such political leaders as Vladimir Lenin, who led the Russians through a successful revolution and a subsequent civil war, along with the establishment of a Marxist state. Any of these conceptions of Marxism carry a host of political and historical meanings, which vary from one person to another; but in order to understand Marxist literary theory, one must eliminate any preconceived political or historical bias. While these are far too numerous to discuss in this context, some basic explanation will be helpful in understanding the nature of Marxist theory and its various implications for the study of literature. To simplify, Marxism is an ideology based around the idea that the entirety of the human condition is based upon our existence in a given society or culture, which is primarily referred to as our historical era. According to Marxists, our basic survival is dependent upon the ways in which we acquire the means of life, by which they mean food, shelter, and protection from whatever may threaten our existence. Because we are biological creatures in need of sustenance, the very first thing we always do when we create a new society is organize some form of economic system by which we will produce a surplus of what we need in order to make our lives easier. This will result in a separation of classes, those who have what they need and those who do not, because in order to be able to produce a surplus, one must first have more than enough to get by. This is a very brief sketch of the Marxist view of history and historical change, although they do acknowledge that culture and cultural events can have a reciprocal effect upon the way that economic systems develop. A work of literature, in this view, will reflect the author’s ideology, or a proposed way of understanding the world, and this is determined by the author’s status in the given historical era. It must be stressed that the term ideology isn’t being used to carry its more common negative connotations, such as those seen in political propaganda or brainwashing. According to Marxists, any given speaker, writer or artist will always try to understand the ways of the world to the best of their abilities, and they will always do so based upon the sum total of all the experiences from their own lives and from the historical era in which they have lived. An author’s experiences in war, for example, will cause them to express ideas upon war which are different from someone who has never been in war, and these experiences will still affect the author’s ideas even if they are employed to write a piece which seems to have no relevance to war at all. Because ideology is determined by the author’s experiences in an historical era, and because an historical era is determined by a certain way of organizing an experience to obtain means of life, it can be said that an author will always have an ideology which is specific to a given social class. A knight from medieval Europe, for example, would have an entirely different set of ideas upon any topic than a suburbanite from modern America, although it can still be said in both cases that each man has ideas which are specific to the respective historical era and social class in which he has lived.

1.2. Key Concepts of Marxist Criticism

The first key concept is the Marxist critique of capitalism. In Marx's view, capitalism is a two-class system. A proletariat known as the working class and a bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie are those that own the means for producing wealth. They are the ruling class and propagate their view of the world upon the proletariat, the exploited working class. Marx believes that it is the base structure of society that affects all other aspects. With the bourgeoisie having control over the base structure, the idea is that they also have control over all other societal institutions. This results in a society in which the ruling class are the controllers and the working class are the controlled. All cultural products in the capitalist system, including literature, are the product of the prevailing mode of production. In the case of capitalist society, they will be ideological weapons used by the ruling class to assert and maintain their dominance. The ideas contained within a cultural product can be traced back to the social relations of production at the time. Marxists have a tendency to see literary characters as simple and transparent embodiments of these social relations. This leads to the second key concept, the materialist method of analysis. According to Terry Eagleton (one of the foremost Marxist literary critics), the task of the literary critic is to show the ways in which the literature reflects the dominant ideology of the time, and for this purpose, he will want to know to what extent the writer was conscious of the prevailing ideology, and what were his intentions about the readership. But because a writer is himself a product of a particular age, his ideas and intentions will be shaped by the prevailing ideology, and it will be very difficult for him to avoid reflecting it, even if he is attempting to subvert it. The extent of the reflection of ideology in a work and the writer's consciousness of it is a complex question, and what the Marxist critic looks for in analyzing literature is the relationship between the work, the writer, and the social situation. This relationship is to be discovered by a concrete study of the work in its historical context, and will reveal the ways in which the social situation has influenced the writer, and also the ways in which the writer has attempted to portray and even alter that situation through his work.

1.3. Historical Background of Marxist Criticism

The historical beginning of Marxist critical thinking is troublesome. At the end, Marxist origins of any kind of present-day literary hypothesis are faint. With work inquiry as the basis, Marxist theory initially advanced in the 1920s and '30s. And while a lot of this was focused around talk of literature and expressive arts, some theorists working in Marxist terms fundamentally sought to understand the function of literature in a larger cultural and social setting. Nevertheless, with Stalin's unpropitious ban of anything he considered formalist theory, creative writing, or the freedom for intellectual thought following the second Congress of the Author's Association in 1934, the most active work for the freedom conveyed by writing, expression, and interpretation migrated to the West. This relocation eventually resulted in scholarly output in the domain of what was starting to be known as "new" (modern language and literature) and with the progress of the Chicago School of analysis to yank and distinguish that body of theory and analysis from wary neo-Aristotelianism and Semiology, it was designated "literary break." In other words, the development of an autonomous size of educational circle yielded an educational investigation.

2. Application of Marxist Criticism

In practice, Marxist literary critics apply to works of literature a scrutiny analogous to that called for by Marx of the 19th century. Like all forms of Marxist analysis, literary criticism can be valuable for the light it sheds on the complex processes involved in the creation of a work, and on the ways in which the work reflects a superstructural reality. On the whole, however, it is in the study of ideology, and the concrete social and historical reality to which the ideology is bound, that the application of a specifically Marxist method has been most illuminating. Terry Eagleton's recent literary output has been primarily concerned with applying a Marxist approach to criticism, and it is he who has provided the most comprehensive investigation of the potential use for Marxist analysis in the understanding of literature. In Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Eagleton lists what he sees as the main points of a Marxist approach: the relation of the text to the social totality in which it is produced, the question of how cultural products come to be commodities, the relation of the author to the means of production, and the influence of the ideology of a class upon a body of literature. It is from these key points that Marxist literary critics take their cue.

2.1. Analysis of Class Struggle in Literature

A time of forming, for the sciences, and of systematizing. And along the way, the philosophers do not fail to ask, now as ever that 'importunate' question of James's: what is more valuable, more conducive to the advancement of mankind, than any other piece of knowledge? Class struggle is especially crucial because it is 'to the death.' All the various positivisms from Comte to Logical Positivism, with their mottled Weltanschauungen, their half-fabulous, half-science theories about the 'laws of history', 'recurrent rhythms', the social organism and other abstractions, ultimately lead to evasions of this question. From the most primitive to the modern writing of history, and from the prevailing philosophies to the works of high science, 'What is history?' 'What is society?' 'What are we?'—have always been prompted by extraordinary societal moments. History is tainted with the answer provided by the class forced from below against an entrenched ruling cast. Proceeding to the concrete page, it is not hard to find, from Homer to the present, descriptions and analyses of this struggle in its many epochs all the way up to modern literature; but the issue of course involves more than the content.

2.2. Examination of Capitalism and Exploitation in Literary Works

This concept in Marxist criticism should be understood as part of the critic's stance on the author. Literature is not the only form of human activity which can act as a mirror to the world, but it is the most flexible and is purposive. Stories can particularly be taken as acts which say "This is how such and such a human sort lives or fails to live". The practice of story writing is somewhat similar to the telling of a joke against oneself. The teller makes himself the hero of the joke and thus gains an indirect form of self congratulation. In the same way an author can subtly skill the represented human sort and say "let this be a lesson to me". For considering the various functional attitudes to literature so far delineated, I am going to use the example of the character Falstaff from Shakespeare's Henry IV and Henry V plays. The first of the three attitudes to literature, considering it a primary document of given culture has proposed varieties within itself, plain historicist empiricism (the mentality of collecting and pinning up any sort of fact about the past) believes in some sort of objective reality to be discovered and its own methods are discovery are the methods of the sciences of nature. He believes that literature is another kind of science providing its own unique insights into the essence of a period. According to Falstaff, he is a very rich character to historicist hence. That says he is an essence of uncommittedness to the sombre purpose and practice of normal English life. This is demonstrated in his speech "What is honoured in a Hollow Crown". A historicist of what I have termed the statecraft theory will say that Shakespeare, the child of tradition, has been led to construct the lives of increasingly serious men as a more patriotic slip from to Slough of despond. He says that Shakespeare knew of no higher realm duty than the welfare of his country. This duty could only be the duty of a prince or future prince.

2.3. Evaluation of Ideology and Social Structures in Texts

The evaluation of ideology and social structures in literary texts is one of the most important aspects of Marxist literary criticism. According to Marx and Engels in the 1846 preface to the German Ideology, "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force." Thus, for Marxists, literature is a form of social consciousness, and the relationship of a text to the social conditions of its production is a fundamental aspect of its meaning. Any text that provides a realistic portrayal of social life, and a great deal of literature has done so, can be evaluated according to the manner in which it represents the social conditions it purports to reflect. Here, as elsewhere, the nature of the reflection will be determined by what the author, consciously or unconsciously, has internalized of the prevailing ideology. But the determining factors in the writer's ideological stance, and those reflected in the work, may be the result of a complex process of 'distortion' and 're-constitution', as the raw materials of the writer's own concrete experience are mediated by the various influences of the 'super-structural' levels of society, which themselves are not entirely determined by the 'base'. The Marxist critic is not interested in the literature that is the 'self-conscious product of a narrow, alienated stratum of society'. Here too, as in his analysis of class itself the criterion will be the extent to which a literature reflects the social reality of the 'whole' society. The growth of a middle class society is reflected in the literature of the period and literature can indirectly manifest both the ascendancy of a new class and the ongoing struggle between it and the old ruling class – whether that literature is consciously 'radical' or not. The great work of the 'high' period of bourgeois literature will most clearly successful and as valuable to a Marxist critic, and even a good literature of a later period can no more be dismissed and reality dropped out Marx asserts that his own analysis of political economy is valid for all epochs, the difference is that in earlier epochs the social relations – and with them the conditions of production – were clouded in an obscure way, in later epochs with have the force and boldness to unveil and trace in bare outline.

2.4. Critique of Power Dynamics and Social Inequality in Literature

Marxist criticism is not merely a "sociology of literature"; it deals with the relationship between material life and the "life of the mind." This means that Marxist criticism looks at the economic and material aspects of society, how the modes of production influence the formation of class, and how literature is a reflection of these things. It also looks at how literature can often be a form of propaganda. Marxist criticism will be used as a theoretical framework for revealing the imbalance in economic and political power throughout Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This play is saturated with the issue of "mendacity" and the hiding of truth, particularly during Act II. Throughout the play, the younger characters, namely Gooper and Mae, would be seen as the "proletariat" as they are attempting to seize their inheritance of Big Daddy's wealth from the "bourgeois" older couple, Big Daddy and Big Mama. This is a simplistic view, of course, as all characters seem to have their

3. Criticisms and Limitations of Marxist Criticism

There are a number of very valid criticisms of Marxist literary theory enumerated by Terry Eagleton. One of Eagleton's major criticisms is that the base/superstructure model is too simple to be applied fruitfully to literature. Although Eagleton does not specifically mention educational or pedagogic literature, it is here that the base/superstructure model most obviously breaks down. In children's literature, for example, one thing that makes Marx's view of the world so bleak is the realization that for many, life can hold little more than the need to sell their labor power to survive. However, it is undeniably true that children's literature is written and bought by adults. In a sense, the promise of a brighter future leaking through from the superstructure to mold the attitudes of the oppressed does occur at various other points in literature. A good example is Paul Laurence Dunbar's 'We Wear the Mask,' which poignantly suggests that the psychological mask worn by the oppressed ends up sticking to them and becoming an unconscious part of their true selves. However, essentially, literature often progresses through the envisioning of a different world to the one currently experienced, something that denies total adherence to the base/superstructure model. The exact nature of the relationship between literature and 'class consciousness' is a difficult one to define, and this too is an assertion leveled against the base/superstructure model. It might be possible for literature to directly influence the political consciousness of an individual, an example might be a text by an aristocrat that seeks to personally justify his class' position of dominance in society. However, often literature only passively reflects a prevalent ideology or set of cultural attitudes at a specific time, and members of all social classes have claimed literature of a wide variety of genres as their own. The belief that only the proletariat have a true class consciousness and that it is possible to lead all other classes to proletarian revolution by the spreading of revolutionary class consciousness is a contentious Marxist point, and follows on from this is the belief that true revolutionary literature would be ideologically bound to one specific class: the proletariat, and would cease to exist once the achievement of a classless society. With regard to the aforementioned racial and feminist literary criticisms, Crick makes note of an interesting issue in a 1987 article, in referencing 'political' literature, the vast majority of such literature was created in historical eras that do not coincide with the historical materialist theory of history. This work can be loosely classified as 'non-contemporary' with a great deal of it being classified as literary classics that are studied in educational institutions; for example, Orwell's (implied anti-Stalinist) Animal Farm.

3.1. Lack of Focus on Individual Agency and Creativity

In the initial concept of Marxist literary criticism, literature serves as a reflection of the troubles in our society. Literature accurately depicts the hopes, fears, and repercussions of the environment in which it was produced. Literature, like any other 'product', is produced solely as a result of the base-superstructure theory. This theory explains that it is a response to a specific need from society coming from its infrastructure. A reflection of the working classes' aspirations for freedom and equality in a piece of literature is there as the result of a strive for those very things (Tyson 54). This reflects an ideological stance that if we were to understand why certain literature was written or why specific events occurred, we would know all too well that it is because some type of action was taken by the ruling class to take an opportunity that would ensure favorable to them. Literature serves only to reflect these types of events. This is a shift away from the previous orientation in other critical schools which might try to argue that some great literature was inspired by a genius or some higher calling. With this belief, Marxist critics categorize literary elements (i.e. the plot or character) into basically two categories: those of the 'progressive' literature which encourage revolutionary change and those on the side of bourgeoisie wishing to maintain the status quo.

3.2. Oversimplification of Complex Social Issues in Literature

This type of one-sidedness on the part of Marxist critics is symptomatic of a deeper failing in their method and it points to a general limitation in their capacity to deal with the representational aspect of literature. This limitation arises from the emphasis in Marxist criticism on the social and historical content of literary works. This emphasis means in effect that literature is treated as an epiphenomenon of society; and while it may be granted that the intrinsic connections between literature and society are of unique importance, the reduction of the former to a mere reflection of the latter is to simplify a very complex issue. For literature is not simply determined by social conditions but by the interaction of these conditions with an autonomous play of ideas within the confines of the literary work itself. Now this play of ideas is not necessarily coterminous with the author's ideological intentions, which themselves are often ambiguous and complex. Of Mice and Men, Dos Passos's U.S.A., Camus's La Peste, are all literary works of the utmost historical consciousness, deriving their imaginative power from a deeply felt engagement with the social and historical realities which are their ostensible subjects. Yet in each case the richness and complexity of the work transcends the specificity of these subjects; and it is this surplus of meaning over and above any straightforward ideological message which constitutes the specific aesthetic reality of the work. The Marxist critic however will tend to read these books as transparent reflections of their writers' attitudes to the social situations in which they lived, thus reducing the multiplicity of significance within the works themselves to a simple 'what the author is saying'.

3.3. Neglect of Non-economic Factors in Literary Analysis

Two further criticisms of generic Marxist literary criticism are first that it does not consider individual agency and second that it oversimplifies literature and the social issues found within it. Terry Eagleton is a proponent of how to improve Marxist literary criticism and in 1983 wrote an article "The Rise of English" where he argues for focus to be on individual historic works of literature, 'in order to discover the social intentions encoded within it', taken as an intention to further understand the writer and the times in which said work was scripted. His argument continues that more emphasis needs to be placed on the historical context of the individual work of literature, and to do so one must study the historical facts of the author, the public and ideologies which surrounded the author, the means of publishing and the available literary and critical models of the period. Eagleton also suggests using Roy Bhaskar's theory of the logic of historical explanation in stating that literature should be studied in the context of a four-sided open system, where literature begins with an intransitive or transitive real referent, the author then praxis and the work which was scripted, and it ends with further changing the environment. This theoretical usage does more to consider the creation of a work of literature and its reason during the period of creation and can be taken as a method of reintroducing historic materialism into studying literature.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Marxism

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Marxism by Wendy Lynne Lee LAST REVIEWED: 26 July 2017 LAST MODIFIED: 26 July 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0031

Marxism encompasses a wide range of both scholarly and popular work. It spans from the early, more philosophically oriented, Karl Marx of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the German Ideology , to later economic works like Das Kapital , to specifically polemical works like The Communist Manifesto . While our focus is not Marx’s own contributions to philosophy or political economy, per se, it is important to note that the sheer breadth of scholarship rightly regarded as “Marxist” or “Marxian,” owes itself to engagement with texts ranging across the works of a younger, more explicitly Hegelian, “philosophical Marx” to those of the more astute, if perhaps more cynical, thinker of his later work, to the revolutionary of the Manifesto’s “Workers unite!” Hence, while it is not surprising to see an expansive literature that includes feminist, anti-racist, and environmental appropriations of Marx, it is also not unexpected to see considerable conflict and variation as a salient characteristic of any such compilation. Indeed, it is difficult to capture the full range of what “Marxism” includes, and it is thus important to acknowledge that to some extent the choice of organizing category is destined to be arbitrary. But this may be more a virtue than a deficit since not only have few thinkers had more significant global impact, few have seen their work applied to a broader range of issues, philosophic, economic, geopolitical, environmental, and social. Marx’s conviction that the point of philosophy is not merely to know the world but to change it for the good continues to infuse the essential bone marrow of virtually every major movement for economic, social, and now environmental justice on the beleaguered planet. Although his principle focus may have been the emancipation of workers, the model he articulates for understanding the systemic injustices inherent to capitalism is echoed in Marxist analyses of oppression across disciplines as otherwise diverse as political economy, feminist theory, anti-slavery analyses, aesthetic experience, liberation theology, and environmental philosophy. To be sure, Marxism is not Marx; it is not necessarily even a reflection of Marx’s own convictions. But however far flung from Marx’s efforts to turn G. F. W. Hegel on his head, Marxism has remained largely true to its central objective, namely, to demonstrate the dehumanizing character of an economic system whose voracious quest for capital accumulation is inconsistent not only with virtually any vision of the good life, but with the necessary conditions of life itself.

For a general overview of Karl Marx, look to Sidney Hook’s Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation (1933), Isaiah Berlin’s Karl Marx (1963), Louis Dupré’s The Philosophical Foundations of Marxism (1966), Frederic Bender’s Karl Marx: The Essential Writings (1972), or David Mc’Lellan’s Karl Marx: Selected Writings (1977). General overviews of Marxism present, however, a more daunting challenge. These range not only over an expansive array of subject matter, but also across a wide and diverse span of application. A distinctive feature of Marxist scholarship is the effort to include interpretation of Marx’s original arguments and their application to a range of issues. Georg Lukacs offers an example of this strategy in History and Class Consciousness ( Lukacs 1966 ). Louis Althusser takes a similar tack in Reading Kapital ( Althusser 1998 ) and For Marx ( Althusser 2006 ) arguing for an important philosophical transition between the young Marx and the Marx of Kapital —that Marxism should reflect this “epistemological break.” Throughout a career which included Marx and Literary Criticism ( Eagleton 1976 ), Why Marx was Right ( Eagleton 2011 ), and Marx and Freedom ( Eagleton 1997 ), Terry Eagleton demonstrates why Marx and Marxism remain relevant to our reading of literature. In On Marx ( Lee 2002 ), Wendy Lynne Lee endeavors to bridge the gap between general introduction and application via contemporary examples relevant to Marxist scholars and civic activists across a range of disciplines and accessibility. John Sitton’s Marx Today ( Sitton 2010 ) takes a historically contextualized approach to contemporary socialist theorizing via The Communist Manifesto . Through a diverse selection including Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism?,” John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney’s “Monopoly-Finance Capital and the Paradox of Accumulation,” and Terry Eagleton’s “Where Do Postmodernists Come From?,” Sitton demonstrates the continuing relevance of the Marxist commitment to make philosophy speak to real world issues. One of the best general works, however, is Kevin M. Brien’s Marx, Reason, and the Art of Freedom ( Brien 2006 ). Brien argues that Marxism can and should proceed from the assumption that, contrary to Althusser, Marx can be read as a coherent whole. As Marx Wartofsky puts it, Brien’s reading of Marx creates opportunities to theorize an internally consistent Marxism, but also incites “lively criticism.” Lastly, though perhaps less a general introduction to Marxism than to a Marxist view of political/economic revolution, the Norton Critical Edition of The Communist Manifesto ( Bender 2013 ) includes essays situating Marx’s incendiary pamphlet in the history of Marxist scholarship. It includes a rich selection of pieces devoted to themes including the revolutionary potential of Marx’s critique of capitalism (Mihailo Markoviç), his theory of wage labor (Ernest Mandel), Marxist ethics (Howard Selsam), and the applicability of Marxist analyses to contemporary dilemmas (Slavoj Zizek, Joe Bender).

Althusser, Louis. Reading Kapital . London: New Left Review/Verso, 1998.

In Reading Kapital Althusser argues for an epistemological break between the young Marx and the Marx of Kapital . Marxist analyses, according to Althusser, should not only reflect this maturation in Marx’s thinking, but should seek to understand and capitalize on the important changes in Marx’s view of capitalism.

Althusser, Louis. For Marx . London: New Left Review/Verso, 2006.

In For Marx Althusser continues his argument for an epistemological break between the young Marx and the Marx of Kapital utilizing specifically Freudian and Structuralist concepts to support his analysis. The focus here is on the “scientific” Marx as opposed to the younger, more Hegelian thinker. But, as Althusserlater acknowledged, more attention needed to be paid to class struggle.

Bender, Frederic, ed. The Communist Manifesto: A Norton Critical Edition . New York: Norton, 2013.

The Norton Critical Edition of The Communist Manifesto includes essays situating Marx’s incendiary pamphlet in the history of Marxist scholarship. It includes a rich selection of pieces devoted to themes including the revolutionary potential of Marx’s critique of capitalism (Mihailo Markoviç), his theory of wage labor (Ernest Mandel), a socialist feminist interpretation (Wendy Lynne Lee), a Marxist-inspired ethics (Howard Selsam), and an analysis of the applicability of Marxist work to contemporary dilemmas (Slavoj Zizek, Joe Bender).

Brien, Kevin M. Marx, Reason, and the Art of Freedom . Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2006.

In Marx, Reason, and the Art of Freedom Brien argues that Marxism can and should proceed from the assumption that Marx can be read as a coherent whole, that is, that there’s no “epistemological break” as identified by Althusser. As Marx scholar Marx Wartofsky puts it, Brien’s reading of Marx creates opportunities to theorize an internally consistent Marxism, but also incites “lively criticism.”

Eagleton, Terry. Marx and Literary Criticism . Oakland: University of California Press, 1976.

In Marx and Literary Criticism , Eagleton’s seminal work, he shows how and why it is that Marx is relevant to our reading not only of political economy, but to a wide array of literature. Among other topics, he offers an analysis of the relationship of literature to its historical context, and of literature to political activity. He also situates Marxist critique in the larger context of understanding the human relationship to society and civilization.

Eagleton, Terry. Marx and Freedom . London: Phoenix House, 1997.

In Marx and Freedom , Eagleton continues his critique of capitalism, arguing that freedom means not only liberation from material constraints to more creative praxis, but emancipation from capitalist labor as a variety of alienation. Eagleton incorporates a very rich account of individual perception and activity as key to realizing freedom.

Eagleton, Terry. Why Marx Was Right . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.

In Why Marx Was Right Eagleton adopts a more combative tone, defending against the claim that Marxism has outlived its usefulness. He takes on a number of common objections to Marxism, including that it leads to tyranny, or that it’s ideologically reductionistic.

Lee, Wendy Lynne. On Marx . Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002.

Lee’s aim is to offer an introduction to Marx and to Marxism accessible to a wide range of disciplines and audiences. On Marx also provides concise possible applications of Marxist themes for use in environmental philosophy and feminist theory with an emphasis on bridging the gap between philosophical comprehension and activist application—theory and praxis.

Lukacs, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics . Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1966.

History and Class Consciousness offers a classic example of a strategy common in Marx scholarship, namely, an interpretation of Marx’s work (particularly the concept of alienation), the influence of G. W. F. Hegel on Marx, and an application of Marx to contemporary themes, in Lukacs’s case, the defense of Bolshevism.

Sitton, John. Marx Today: Selected Works and Recent Debates . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230117457

Marx Today takes a historically contextualized approach to contemporary socialist theorizing via The Communist Manifesto , among other Marx’s works. Aimed at a broad audience, this anthology includes both sympathetic and critical readings. Sitton’s selections demonstrate the relevance of the Marxist commitment to make philosophy speak to real world issues.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Marxist Criticism

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A marxist criticism of a streetcar named desire, analysis of w. blake's poem "london" using marxist critisism, made-to-order essay as fast as you need it.

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Marxist Criticism of The Watsons Go to Birmingham

Analysis of people’s key drives on the example of prebble’s enron and marlowe’s doctor faustus, analysis of little red riding hood through marxist theory, the detrimental effects of consumerism and religion in persepolis, let us write you an essay from scratch.

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Marx's Ideas of Society in Austen's Pride and Prejudice

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Features of The Sociological Criticism Standards in Story Analysis

"harlem" by langston hughes: meaning of the marxist technique, ideological criticism of marxist ideology and meta ideology, the great gatsby through a marxist lens.

Marxist critisism is a form of cultural criticism that applies Marxist theory to the interpretation of cultural texts.

Marxist criticism places a literary work within the context of class and assumptions about class. A premise of Marxist criticism is that literature can be viewed as ideological, and that it can be analyzed in terms of a Base/Superstructure model. Economic means of production within society account for the base. Human institutions and ideologies that produce art and literary texts comprise the superstructure. Marxist criticism thus emphasizes class, socioeconomic status, power relations among various segments of society, and the representation of those segments.

Several concepts are indispensable for Marxist criticism: class, ideology, alienation, base and superstructure.

Terry Eagleton (Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976)), Fredric Jameson (Marxism and Form (1971), The Political Unconscious (1981)), Lukács (History and Class Consciousness (1923)), Pierre Macherey (A Theory of Literary Production (1978)), Raymond Williams.

Karl Marx was a 19th century German thinker most famous for developing a notion of communism in The Communist Manifesto. His notion of communism was not simply a utopia presented in a vacuum, it was a political program meant to critique the social conditions of capitalism.

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Introduction to Marxism

Back to: Literary Theory in English Literature

Marxism is a political and social movement as well as a critique of capitalism. It presents an analysis of society, its problems and a solution. Its works were written by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels .

Let us understand how do Marx and Engels interpret literature. Marx’s major contribution was to the development of its ideas. Engels, on the other hand, contributed ideas and popularized Marxism. Marx and Engels announced a system in Communist Manifesto as Communism based on their ideas. They opposed the domination of one class over another and imagined a classless society.

The Marxist theory originated in the mid-nineteenth century and its development and systematization became possible in the 1920s after the October Revolution of 1917.

In the consequence of the revolution, the ‘ socialist realism ’ emerged as a literary tradition which focuses on the struggle of the socio-economic condition of the working class in relation to the suppressive power structure.

Marxism’s influence is not limited to the socialist realism of Soviet Russia only, it also glimpses in the works of eminent writers such as Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir , and Bertolt Brecht.

Marxism analyzes society in terms of class struggle between the oppressed and the oppressor, “ The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. ” Marx’s Communist Manifesto explains the historical background that led to the development of modern capitalist society wherein the bourgeois (ruling class) exploits the proletariat (working class).

Marx gives the solution to social problems as a classless society whose development is theoretically based on the development of each individual. Marxism aims at achieving this goal through the revolutionary process, through the annihilation of the capitalist system.

Marxist literary criticism holds the view that a writer’s work is shaped by social institutions and prevailing discourse of his time. It does not regard writers as autonomous individuals. Marxist approach interprets a work of art by putting it into its historical context and analyses conflicts of historical forces and social classes.

The Marxist approach is based on ‘ dialectical materialism ’. The term was coined by German Marxist Joseph Dietzgen in 1887 . This concept focuses on the material conditions of society. It emphasizes matter as the fundamental basis of nature. It, thus emphasizes that consciousness is determined by social existence.

Marx viewed that material conditions have contradictions. These contradictions are what Marxism resolves. The concept is inspired by Hegelian dialectics. Marx’s dialectics differs from Hegel’s in a way that Marx’s focus is on material while Hegel sees contradictions in ideas. Hegel holds the view that consciousness determines social existence.

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Beware the Plastics: A Marxist Interpretation of "Mean Girls" Anonymous College

In the film “Mean Girls,” the dominant female inner clique in high school imitates social disparity in terms of catty societal groups in a present context. The members of the Plastics: a snobby social group symptomatic of spoiled, rich young ladies, treat classmates like dirt and utilize their economic wellbeing and influence to exploit them. By renewing original, contemporary Marxist class struggle, “Mean Girls” associates economic wellbeing to social partition in modern day societal setting.

The movie’s illustrates Marxist social divide within a traditional high school by producing a significant split in the general student body. The main student population represents the working class, who are “victimized” by the privileged upper class. The student population consists of subordinate social groups, which have their own hierarchies and figureheads. For example, a group known as the “desperate wannabes” are characterized and stereotyped by their skimpy and attractive clothing (crop tops), and their obsession with their cell phones (constant texting.) At the center of these groups is a leader, one who directs the others and organizes their activities and routines. These social groups have a clearly defined alpha position, while...

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Colleges Wonder if They Will Be ‘the Enemy’ Under Trump

Higher education has been a favorite target of Republicans who believe schools have tilted leftward. Now, colleges and universities are bracing for the Trump administration to take action.

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President-election Donald J. Trump walks out from blue velvet curtains wearing a red tie and dark suit, while members of his family stand in the wings.

By Vimal Patel and Sharon Otterman

Nov. 12, 2024

For many years, Republicans portrayed colleges as bastions of leftism, awash in bias against conservatives and impervious to change.

With Donald J. Trump’s victory to a second presidential term and a Congress potentially under unified G.O.P. control, Republicans are now poised to escalate their efforts to root out what they see as progressive ideology in higher education.

The return to power of Mr. Trump comes at a vulnerable moment for higher education. Universities have been under increasing pressure from lawmakers, while public confidence in colleges has fallen . Last year, two Ivy League presidents resigned following their widely panned performances before Congressional panels that grilled them about how they handled pro-Palestinian activists on their campuses. Other top university leaders have resigned amid criticism over protest responses.

Mr. Trump has said he thought that colleges needed to be reclaimed from “Marxist maniacs,” and his running mate, JD Vance, has described universities as “the enemy.” (Both men attended Ivy League institutions.)

Republicans have often trained their focus mainly on highly selective campuses, but their proposed policies could have a wider impact. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — an outline for Mr. Trump’s second term that he has tried to distance himself from — calls for sweeping changes, like privatizing all student loans, rolling back protections for transgender students, and paring back diversity efforts on campus.

“This is a moment of enormity for American higher education,” said Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. “Many of President Trump’s top advisers are the architects of Project 2025, which seeks to dismantle higher education, not reform it, and to replace what they perceive as woke Marxist ideology with their own conservative ideology.”

Some items on Republicans’ wish lists, like eliminating the Department of Education , will be challenging to achieve. But their plans include a slew of other ideas that worry universities.

The administration could wield control over the arcane but crucial accreditation process, which Mr. Trump has described as his “secret weapon” to force ideological changes. The president-elect has spoken of expanding the taxation of university endowments. And the new administration could scrap President Biden’s expansive student-debt forgiveness efforts and loosen regulation of for-profit colleges.

Mr. Trump did not make higher education a major focus of his first term. His focus on the sector in his second term may depend partly on who he chooses to lead the Education Department.

Still, advocates for colleges worry that Republicans will push their plans aggressively, with an emboldened Mr. Trump and an army of conservative activists who have honed their strategy and amassed a striking run of recent victories.

“There’s a gathering force here,” said Steven Brint, a public policy professor at the University of California at Riverside. “They feel — and rightly, actually — that Americans have lost confidence in higher education.”

Much about how Republicans may attack higher education in the new Trump term remains unclear, according to Robert Kelchen, an education professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. But Republicans will no doubt use the bully pulpit, as they did during Congressional hearings over the last year, to ramp up efforts to reshape higher education at a moment when colleges and universities are politically and culturally weaker.

“If I was the president of a selective private college, or even a big blue-state public university, I would be very concerned,” Dr. Kelchen said, “especially if I was a woman or person of color, because that’s who was disproportionately brought in for hearings.”

Universities have been under pressure to crack down on student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, which Republican and some Democratic lawmakers have described as supportive of terrorism and veering into antisemitism. Civil rights complaints filed with the Education Department related to antisemitism have proliferated since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel.

Mr. Trump’s Education Department could play an important role in trying to curb student and faculty protesters. In a 2019 executive order, Mr. Trump embraced a definition of antisemitism that included claims that Israel’s existence was a “racist endeavor,” a move that advocates of academic freedom said would chill speech.

The Biden administration did not reverse Mr. Trump’s executive order, and universities have expressed confusion about exactly what the Education Department required of them on the issue. Now, supporters of academic freedom worry that a new Trump administration will have a more aggressive interpretation of what constitutes antisemitism, one that could further stifle speech about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

There is nothing resembling a consensus about how universities should be preparing for a new Trump administration, partly because it remains an open question how much of the president-elect’s rhetoric will be turned into reality.

Dr. Brint said colleges should start by making a better case to the public that they are not partisan. They should commit to institutional neutrality — the practice of avoiding making statements about the political issues of the day — and should reconsider some aspects of their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, which he said have become divisive.

“Colleges have become a little too closely tied to the policy objectives of one of the two political parties,” Dr. Brint said.

Fewer college presidents seem to be weighing in on the election of Mr. Trump in 2024 than did in 2016. One who has spoken out is Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, who said in a statement the day after the election that he would double down on the university’s equity and inclusion office.

“President-elect Trump has threatened the largest deportation in American history, and we have students and faculty and staff who will be threatened by that,” Dr. Roth said in an interview. “I want them to know that the university will do what it can to support them.”

He was more forceful in an opinion essay published shortly before the election.

“The folks who brought us the fraudulent Trump University, ” he wrote, referring to Mr. Trump’s failed for-profit venture, which resulted in a payment of $25 million to former students to settle fraud claims, “now threaten to dismantle a higher education ecosystem that is still (for now) the envy of the rest of the world. We must not be neutral about this.”

Among the ideas Mr. Trump floated during his campaign was a new university : the American Academy, a tuition-free online university that the president-elect said would compete with existing colleges and dole out bachelor’s degrees that would be recognized by all government agencies and federal contractors.

This new institution — which he said would be “strictly nonpolitical” with “no wokeness or jihadism” — would be paid for by another proposal by Mr. Trump: Expanding taxation of university endowments, a notable departure from his broader focus on cutting taxes .

Dr. Kelchen said such a new university would be “exceedingly unlikely,” though he added a caveat: “I’m just expecting the unexpected at this point.”

The endowment tax increase could stand a better chance of becoming reality because of universities’ weakened political position. Mr. Trump signed a bill in 2017 that levied a 1.4 percent tax on the income from the wealthiest university endowments. Some Republicans want to sharply increase that tax rate, or expand it to apply to more institutions.

Some colleges depend heavily on their endowments to pay for student financial aid. At Colby College, a small liberal arts college in Maine, the endowment’s annual income of roughly $60 million covers about 20 percent of the school’s annual budget, according to David Greene, the university’s president.

The gain for the Treasury from expanding the endowment tax would be “less than a rounding error,” Dr. Greene said.

“So it’s simply a punishment,” he added. “A political tool. If you do that, you have to realize who you’re actually punishing. And it’s going to be students.”

Another way of applying financial leverage would be to go after the way colleges and universities are accredited, and therefore become eligible to participate in federal student aid programs.

The current system is overseen by nongovernmental organizations that are approved by the federal government. Mr. Trump has talked about opening up the process and allowing states to accredit universities directly. He might also decide to approve new accrediting agencies that would be friendlier to for-profit colleges, similar to actions taken during his first term .

Other major policy priorities, including imposing tariffs on imports, may occupy the president-elect’s bandwidth before he turns to higher education. And some industry leaders have not abandoned hope of finding an accommodation with the new administration.

Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, a higher education trade group, said he worried that the administration would use federal funding to force ideological conformity and promote conservative program preferences. But he also hoped for common ground.

“Income inequality, job preparation, a belief in strong civic values — these are all things that we depend on higher education to deliver,” he said. “And together, we can — but we need to start from a point of partnership.”

Anemona Hartocollis contributed reporting.

Vimal Patel writes about higher education with a focus on speech and campus culture. More about Vimal Patel

Sharon Otterman is a Times reporter covering higher education, public health and other issues facing New York City. More about Sharon Otterman

Trump Builds His Administration

As his team ramps up the transition process, president-elect donald trump says his administration will radically reshape the federal government..

Foreign Policy : While many of Trump’s foreign policy picks were once called neocons by their peers, they now speak the language of the “America First” movement .

Skirting the Senate : Trump’s demand that Senate Republicans surrender their role in vetting his nominees poses an early test of whether his second term will be more radical than his first.

Department of Education : The president-elect said he would use the department to further his priorities. He also said he would close it. Both options would face difficulties .

Middle Eas t: Trump’s nominees to serve as top diplomatic envoys to Israel and the Middle East indicate a staunch pro-Israel policy .

Deportations : Trump is signaling with his staffing decisions his intention to carry out a campaign promise of widespread deportations of undocumented immigrants .

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Marxist Criticism
Marxist Criticism. Marxist Criticism refers to a method you'll encounter in literary and cultural analysis. It breaks down texts and societal structures using foundational concepts like class, alienation, base, and superstructure. By understanding this, you'll gain insights into how power dynamics and socio-economic factors influence narratives ...
Marxist Criticism
The Marxist criticism definition is an approach to diagnosing political and social problems in terms of the struggles between members of different socio-economic classes. Drawing from this ...
Student Example: Marxist Criticism
33 Student Example: Marxist Criticism. 33. Student Example: Marxist Criticism. The following student essay example of Marxist Criticism is taken from Beginnings and Endings: A Critical Edition. This is the publication created by students in English 211. This essay discusses Raymond Carver's short story, "A Small, Good Thing.".
Marxist Literary Criticism: An Overview
Marxist Literary Criticism: An Overview. Marx and Engels produced no systematic theory of literature or art. Equally, the subsequent history of Marxist aesthetics has hardly comprised the cumulative unfolding of a coherent perspective. Rather, it has emerged, aptly, as a series of responses to concrete political exigencies.
Marxism: Examples, Concepts, Ideology, Criticisms
Marxism: Examples, Concepts, Ideology, Criticisms. Marxism is a political, cultural, and economic philosophy that theorizes that social conflict exists due to constant power struggles between capitalists and workers. Examples of marxism that demonstrate its powerful ability to critique capitalism include: the evidence of continual social ...
Marxist Criticism
Marxist Criticism. Marxist criticism is based on the theory of Marxism, which stands against the capitalistic model of society and class discrimination. E.g. Marxist literary criticism is an approach to reading, writing, and studying literature, while Marxism is a theory of history and social change based on class struggle.
Marxist literary criticism
Marxism. Marxist literary criticism is a theory of literary criticism based on the historical materialism developed by philosopher and economist Karl Marx. Marxist critics argue that even art and literature themselves form social institutions and have specific ideological functions, based on the background and ideology of their authors.
Marxist Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reading Guide
Prior to his Marxist radicalisation, Lukács wrote two major works of literary criticism: the first, Soul and Form (Columbia UP, 2010 [1910]), is a (criminally) neglected set of passionate, tormented essays on the relation between art and life, the perfect abstractions of form versus the myriad imperfect minutiae of the human soul. These ...
Marxist criticism
Marxist Criticism. A form of cultural criticism that applies Marxist theory to the interpretation of cultural texts. Since neither Karl Marx nor his collaborator Friedrich Engels ever developed a specific form of cultural criticism themselves, Marxist Criticism has been extrapolated from their writings. As there is no one form of Marxism, so ...
Marxism and Literary Theory
Marxism is a materialist philosophy which tried to interpret the world based on the concrete, natural world around us and the society we live in. It is opposed to idealist philosophy which conceptualizes a spiritual world elsewhere that influences and controls the material world. In one sense it tried to put people's thought into reverse….
The New Marxist Criticism
The New Marxist Criticism. has been salvaged from the New Criticism is a complex, primary recog. nition of the literary work, and a sophisticated concern for such literary. qualities as symbol, form, allegory. What is more, these essays show a real capacity for incorporating within the Marxist framework the ques.
Marxist Criticism
Marxist criticism is not merely a "sociology of literature"; it deals with the relationship between material life and the "life of the mind." This means that Marxist criticism looks at the economic and material aspects of society, how the modes of production influence the formation of class, and how literature is a reflection of these things.
Applying the Marxist Approach to a Poem by W. Blake Essay Example
Marxist criticism is a useful technique that allows the listener to develop meaning and is particularly relevant due to the social issues raised within Blake's writing. His deliberate use of metaphor enables the listener to gain valuable insight into the concerns of the time and is helpful when interpreting the significance of social ...
Marxism
In Marx and Literary Criticism, Eagleton's seminal work, he shows how and why it is that Marx is relevant to our reading not only of political economy, but to a wide array of literature. Among other topics, he offers an analysis of the relationship of literature to its historical context, and of literature to political activity.
The Marxist Criticism of Literature
Marxist criticism would discard meaningless battle-cries like "escape," "ivory tower," the pejorative use of "decadent," and the rest, if Marxist critics recognized that their sociological analysis is a tool for the under- standing of literature, not the debunking of it, "unmasking its ideology," etc.
Essays on Marxist Criticism
Marxist critisism is a form of cultural criticism that applies Marxist theory to the interpretation of cultural texts. Marxist criticism places a literary work within the context of class and assumptions about class. A premise of Marxist criticism is that literature can be viewed as ideological, and that it can be analyzed in terms of a Base ...
Full article: What Is Marxism?
Some writers have tried to define Marxism by specifying an essential core of social, historical and economic theory. ... in recent years—particularly since the financial crisis of 2008—Marxism has grown and led the analysis and criticism of neoliberal capitalism. It has created the intellectual climate and provided the theoretical framework ...
Essay On Marxist Criticism In Literature
Essay on Marxist Literary Criticism in English Literature • Marxism is a political and social movement as well as a critique of capitalism. It presents an analysis of society, its problems and a solution. Its works were written by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Mean Girls Essay
The members of the Plastics: a snobby social group symptomatic of spoiled, rich young ladies, treat classmates like dirt and utilize their economic wellbeing and influence to exploit them. By renewing original, contemporary Marxist class struggle, "Mean Girls" associates economic wellbeing to social partition in modern day societal setting.
Marxism
Marxism, a body of doctrine developed by Karl Marx and, to a lesser extent, by Friedrich Engels in the mid-19th century. It originally consisted of three related ideas: a philosophical anthropology, a theory of history, and an economic and political program.There is also Marxism as it has been understood and practiced by the various socialist movements, particularly before 1914.
What Could Happen in Higher Education During a Second Trump Term?
For many years, Republicans portrayed colleges as bastions of leftism, awash in bias against conservatives and impervious to change. With Donald J. Trump's victory to a second presidential term ...