marxist criticism meaning essay

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Writing with artificial intelligence, 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 and cultural perspectives

This illustration depicts as woman who is looking through glasses that say "class" and "alienation"

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?


Class	a classification or grouping typically based on income and education
Alienation	a condition Karl Heinrich Marx ascribed to individuals in a capitalist economy who lack a sense of identification with their labor and products. The estrangement individuals feel in capitalist societies, where they become disconnected from their work, the products they produce, and even themselves.
Base	the means (e.g., tools, machines, factories, natural resources) and relations (e.g., Proletariat, Bourgeoisie) or production that shape and are shaped by the superstructure (the dominant aspect in society). Marxist criticism theorizes that the economic means of production within society account for the base.
Superstructure	the social institutions such as systems of law, morality, education, and their related ideologies, that shape and are shaped by the base. Human institutions and ideologies—including those relevant to a patriarchy—that produce art and literary texts comprise the superstructure.

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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Marxist Criticism

Mar-ks-hist Kri-tuh-siz-uhm

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.

Related terms: Literary criticism , Socialist Criticism, Marxist Theory of Literature, Proletarian Literature, Cultural Hegemony, Ideology, Materialist Interpretation, Class Analysis

Marxist criticism in arts, or particularly Marxist literary criticism, is based on the materialist philosophy of Marxism rooted in the works of German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles.

Explore Marxist criticism

1 What is Marxist Criticism?
2 Marxist Model of Society
3 Key Marxist Terms and Concepts
4 Key Methods of Marxist Literary Criticism
6 Suggested Readings

What is Marxist Criticism?

Marxist view of history, economics, politics, culture, and social conflict is grounded in class struggle. Marx and Engels developed their economic and cultural theories amidst the peaking industrial capitalist society of 19th-century Europe, specifically Britain.

Marx and Engles addressed a broader interplay between ideas, society, and historical development. While Marx’s works focused on economic aspects, Engels reflected on the role of ideas and culture, especially in his letters to Marx and others. He traced the dialectical relationship between economic conditions and ideas in his book ‘Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy’ (1888). Like Marx, he revered great art and did not assign economic circumstances as its sole determinants.

However, in the 20th century, some forms of Marxism became rigid and dogmatic, rejecting any autonomy to art (see FAQs). Simultaneously, some critics known to be practicing Englesian Marxist criticism adopted a flexible approach to analyzing art and literature, reflecting on how it both reinforces and challenges the dominant status quo. The Engelsian critics became more acceptable as they sought to understand the intricate relationship between artistic expression, social context , and historical dynamics from a Marxist perspective .

Marxist Model of Society

The fundamental Marxist view is that the working of society, its social groupings, dominant ideas, and political institutions are determined by its “material production,” i.e., the organization of economic resources like production and distribution of material goods.

Thus, in a Marxist explanation, society is formed by two constituents superstructure, i.e., culture, art, or the world of ideas, and its base, i.e., the material world or resources of production, distribution, and trade; the base or economic base determines the superstructure or other aspects of society like culture and art.

Key Marxist Terms and Concepts

The following are the crucial Marxist terms and concepts:

Proletariat

The Proletariat is the working class in the Marxist theory, which is the subservient and exploited class. Marx and Engles used the term proletariat to define the powerless class in a modern capitalist society, which does not own the means of production and thus must sell their labor to the bourgeoisie to generate income and sustain themselves. Marxism anticipates a proletarian revolution wherein workers will unite to overthrow capitalism, establishing a classless society.

Bourgeoisie

The bourgeoisie is the ruling class in Marxist theory, which reinforces its power by exploiting the proletariat and appropriating the value of their labor. Marx and Engles used the term bourgeoisie to define the dominant class in the modern capitalist system, which owns the means of production and distribution. The bourgeoisie gained prominence during the 18th and 19th centuries with the rise of capitalism, as they owned capital and controlled trade and production, wielding economic and political power.

Ideology is an essential concept for all Marxist critics. It is the set of dominant ideas and values in any era that perpetuate and legitimize the supremacy of the ruling class; such values or beliefs are usually covert and may go unrecognized, but they percolate all the culture and art of the given era. French Marxist theoretician Louis Althusser defined ‘Ideology’ as “a system (possessing its logic and proper rigor) of representations (images, myths , ideas or concepts according to the case) endowed with an existence and a historical role at the heart of a given society.”

Interpellation

Introduced by French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser in Marxist theory, interpellation is the process through which class dominance is maintained and reinforced not by physical force but through the ideological modulation of individuals. Individuals are tricked into thinking they are free agents in making choices, but the available options constantly perpetuate the ruling class’s dominance, making people internalize the social organization. Institutions like education and media are often used to interpellate individuals while seemingly offering a wide array of choices.

Repressive Structures

Introduced by Louis Althusser in Marxist theory, the term repressive structures refers to the direct physical force or overt political control exerted by the dominant class, primarily through state institutions like prison, army, police, courts, etc. To suppress dissent or revolutionary tendencies and reinforce the existing social structure, the ruling class uses direct coercion through repressive structures to overpower the proletariat. Antonio Gramsci used the term “rule” for such repressive structures in his ‘Prison Notebooks’ (1929-1935).

Introduced by Antonio Gramsci in Marxist theory during the 1930s, hegemony contrasted with “repressive structures” or “rule” refers to the covert power exerted by the state or the dominant classes through subtle manipulation of values, ideas, and culture. It subverts the revolutionary consciousness while shaping people’s consciousness in a way that makes the dominant class’s worldview seem ‘natural’ like it is just ‘the way things are.’ Louis Althusser’s ideas of “ideological structures” and “state ideological apparatuses” are similar to Gramsci’s notion of hegemony.

Economic Determinism

Economic determinism refers to the traditional Marxist theory wherein the economic structure of the society determines and shapes everything from political institutions and class relations to culture, history, and art. Traditional Marxism has often been criticized for such an oversimplified explanation of the development and history of societies, which ignores the complexities of various other factors that impact the changes in human society.

Overdeterminism

Introduced by Althusser in Marxist theory during the 1960s, the idea of overdeterminism undercuts the simplified explanation of economic determinism, arguing that society and history are determined or shaped by multiple interconnected factors, including economic, political, cultural, psychological, etc. Borrowing the concept of overdeterminism from psychoanalysis, Althusser provided a broader Marxist understanding of society, overcoming its limitation of a simplistic explanation of societal development.

Relative autonomy

The concept of relative autonomy in Marxism is the view that acknowledges a certain degree of independence of art and culture from the economic structure of the society. It does not disregard the connection between art and economics or, in Marxist terms, between the cultural superstructure and economic base, respectively; instead, the concept attributes partial independence or relative autonomy to art, including literature, thus crediting it a role in change, complexity, and resistance within capitalist society.

Key Methods of Marxist Literary Criticism

Marxist critique of literature includes the following crucial methods:

Marxist criticism considers the authors and their work significantly influenced by socio-economic circumstances. Thus, it is assumed that the context of a work is related to the social class of the author. However, the authors might be unaware of any such class or its ideological impact, which, according to Marxist perspective, is always present in the text overtly or covertly.
Marxist literary critics, like psychoanalytic critics, often find the covert or hidden themes or motifs in a work of literature that are related to primary Marxist concerns, such as class struggles or conflict of interests, the impact of socio-economic forces, and the progression of society due to manifested class conflicts .
Marxist critics also relate the formation of a literary genre or movement to the socio-economic circumstances of the time in which it emerged. For instance, Marxists often consider novels as a product of the middle class; the growth of the novel is related to the expansion of the middle class during the 19th century as industrialism was at its peak.
Another Marxist point of view includes situating the literary form within the socio-economic and, specifically, political context of the times in which it was dominant. For instance, for some Marxist critics, formal forms such as sonnets (dominant during the Elizabethan era ) and the use of strict metrical patterns convey discipline, order, and stability; for some, realism bears and conveys a validation of the bourgeoisie social structure, and for others, ballads rooted in oral traditions with fluid patterns, refrains , and simplicity reflect working-class culture.

Vulgar Marxism, which emerged during the 1930s in Soviet Russia, was an orthodox approach to Marxist theory that followed a crude form of economic determinism, disregarding the role of any other factors that could contribute to societal change or development. Thus, art or literature was also reduced to an effect of economic circumstances, and authors were considered mere viewpoints of their respective social classes. The approach is criticized within Marxism; Gramsci’s and later Althusser’s ideas, like hegemony, overdeterminism, and relative autonomy, target such reductionist, limiting, and simplistic approaches toward Marxist criticism.

Frankfurt School, founded in 1923 as a political research institute under the University of Frankfurt, Germany, is a social theory and criticism school. During the 20th century, significant thinkers of the school, including Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Max Horkheimer, expanded simplistic traditional Marxism and challenged Soviet propaganda by taking an interdisciplinary approach emphasizing the role of hegemony aiming to understand various forces and complex relationships between culture, politics, and economics.

When modernist writers were banned in Soviet Russia during the 1930s as propagandist literature and straight social realism were advocated to present the ruling communist party’s views methodologically, the Frankfurt School approved modernist literature, which, according to them, through disruption and experimentation, exposed the ideological workings and unconscious processes of capitalist society that perpetuate oppression and resist resistance. Literary Marxist Bertolt Brecht presented innovative modernist but Marxist theatre.

Challenging orthodox Marxism while expanding the limits of traditional Marxism, Revisionist Marxism reinterprets the Marxist theory, offering pragmatic and flexible concepts amidst the dynamic capitalist society. It emerged in the 20th century against the rigid views advanced in Soviet Russia. Revisionist Marxism expands beyond economic determinism and offers complex ways of how society works while sticking with Marxism and keeping it relevant in changing times. Louis Althusser is the most recent theoretician who provided a rich theoretical base for flexible but strictly Marxist revisionist thinking.

Recent prominent Marxist critics include Louis Althusser (French), Raymond Williams (Welsh), Terry Eagleton (British), Fredric Jameson (American), Franco Moretti (Italian), Slavoj Žižek (Slovenian), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Indian), Judith Butler (American), Catherine Belsey (British), David Harvey (British), Aijaz Ahmad (Indian), and Nancy Fraser (American).

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Cite This Page

Chopra, Jyoti. "Marxist Criticism". Poem Analysis , https://poemanalysis.com/movement/marxist-criticism/ . Accessed 16 August 2024.

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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

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

Quick reference.

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 »

Subjects: Literature

31 What Is Marxist, Postcolonial, and Ethnic Studies Criticism?

Marxist criticism is a critical approach to literature that views texts through the lens of economic and social class structures and the relationships of power and oppression that exist within these structures. This type of criticism is based on the ideas of Karl Marx , a 19th-century German philosopher and economist, who argued that social class is the primary determinant of human history and culture. Marxist critics examine the ways in which literature reflects and reinforces the dominant ideology and power structures of a society, as well as the ways in which texts can challenge and subvert these ideologies. The Marxist critic Terry Eagleton explains it this way: “Marxist criticism is not merely a ‘sociology of literature’, concerned with how novels get published and whether they mention the working class. Its aim is to explain the literary work more fully; and this means a sensitive attention to its forms, styles and, meanings. But it also means grasping those forms styles and meanings as the product of a particular history” (Eagleton 3). One of the key principles of Marxist criticism is the idea that literature is not a neutral or objective reflection of reality, but is instead shaped by the interests and values of those who produce and consume it. When we do Marxist criticism, we are concerned with class struggles and the means of production.

Postcolonial criticism is a theoretical and analytical framework that emerged in the 1980s as a response to the legacy of European colonialism and imperialism from the 18th-20th centuries. It seeks to examine how the experiences of colonized peoples are represented in literature and other cultural forms, and how these representations reflect and perpetuate colonial power relations. With this lens, we explore how colonialism impacts language, identity, and culture, and how these impacts are reflected in literary texts. The term “post” does not imply that colonialism has ended; it refers to the effects on Indigneous people after colonialism. One of the key principles of postcolonial criticism is the importance of examining the intersectionality of colonialism with other forms of identity and oppression, such as race, gender, sexuality, and class. It also emphasizes the importance of centering the perspectives and experiences of colonized peoples in literary analysis, and in understanding how their experiences are shaped by systemic colonialism and imperialism. Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism, which considers how the West has used this term to denigrate the East, is widely credited with introducing this critical approach.

Ethnic studies is a broad term that encompasses a variety of critical approaches to literature, all focusing on a particular ethnic group that is marginalized or subordinate to a dominant culture. For example, African American studies focuses on literature written by and for African Americans. Chicano/a studies explores literature produced by people of Mexican ancestry who live in the United States. Indigenous studies looks at literature from the perspective of native peoples in counties that have been colonized. For authors who are based in the United States, scholars use an ethnic studies rather than a postcolonial approach, even though both postcolonialism and ethnic studies are concerned with the imbalance of power between colonizers and Indigenous or marginalized peoples. All three types of criticism can be intersectional; in other words, it’s entirely appropriate to consider both socioeconomic class and race (or gender, which we will study later in this book) in your critical analysis.

Learning Objectives

Recognize how different approaches determine possible outcomes in interpretation (CLO 1.3)
Deliberate on what approach best suits particular texts and purposes (CLO 1.4)
Understand how formal elements in literary texts create meaning within the context of culture and literary discourse. (CLO 2.1)
Be exposed to a variety of critical strategies through literary theory lenses, such as formalism/New Criticism, reader-response, structuralism, deconstruction, historical and cultural approaches (New Historicism, postcolonial, Marxism), psychological approaches, feminism, and queer theory (CLO 4.1)
Demonstrate through discussion and/or writing exposure to critical strategies that deal with cultural, historical, thematic, and theoretical contexts (CLO 6.1)
Understand that interpretation is inherently political, and that it reveals assumptions and expectations about value, truth, and the human experience (CLO 7.1)
Demonstrate awareness of the political stance one takes interpreting literature (CLO 7.2)
Discuss the significance and impact of multiple perspectives on a given text (CLO 7.3)

Excerpts from Scholarship

Marxist: from “bourgeois and proletarians” in the communist manifesto by karl marx and friedrich engels.

The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development. The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop. Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois. Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its time, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages. We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

Postcolonial: Excerpt from “The Profits of Postcolonialism” by Dorothy Figueira

Postcolonial criticism, like most poststructural theory, relies in great measure on the notion that some heritage of systems limits the reader. Our present condition, although seemingly benign, imposes an existential limit, and theory alone can liberate us from systemic constraints (Fluck, “Literature, Liberalism” 216). Curiously missing from the discussion is any serious questioning of how the text’s appearance as a network of hegemonic or subversive gestures suits the state of literary theoretical professionalization. Theory thus allows individuals cut off from any effective social action and buoyed by their security as academic professionals to claim solidarity with the disenfranchised. This alienation from real powerlessness (the academic Marxist’s guilt vis-a-vis the worker) can then be compensated for by a posture of powerlessness vis-a-vis representation. But even this strategy sometimes fails. The critic must then self-fashion him/herself through imaginary marginalization or, as the German Americanist Winfried Fluck has termed it, “expressive individualism” (Fluck, “Literature, Liberalism” 228), resulting in the wide-ranging identification of a privileged class of academics with the marginalized other. The historically oppressed become the new role models for the critic, giving political authority to the search for cultural difference (Fluck, “Literature, Liberalism” 228). In this way, theory and professionalism interact and justify each other (Fluck, “Americanization” 18). The lack of an effective historical consciousness explains the curious phenomenon that the study of postcoloniality has primarily found urgent currency in the First World, whereas few ripples resonate in the excolonized worlds of South Asia and Africa. The predominance of critical contestants in Euro-American centers reflects how much most theory is inherently Eurocentric and culture bound (Clark 24). Thus, some critics have been led to ask what agendas lurk behind the academic formation called postcoloniality and its complicity with certain forms of Eurocentric cultural theory (Radhakrishnan 750). What power struggles are being replicated within this critical discourse? Does it represent nothing but a production of a comprador intelligentsia (Appiah 348)? Nor has the posturing or positioning of postcolonial critics gone unquestioned. Benita Parry has accused them of exorbitation of their roles and the suppression of native voices (172). Arif Dirlik (343) and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (598) cite the postcolonial theorists’ disengagements from significant issues of neocolonialism and retreats into a ratified form of postmodern abstraction. Dirlik even sees postcolonialism’s emergence as a form of global capitalism where critics, commanding high salaries in the First World, presume to be existentially connected to continuing problems of Third-World social, political and cultural domination. As a result, postcolonial critics’ refusal to define postcolonial theory in an unambiguous manner might not necessarily point to diversity or vitality, but rather to personal projects and games of identification. Any adequate analysis of the literature of postcolonial criticism cannot avoid highlighting the extent to which the intellectual rigor and development of this criticism are seriously circumscribed by ideological posturing, reifying critical jargon, and strategies of self-representation. It might well be that postcolonial criticism never intended to address directly the myriad problems of analyzing Third-World societies, but rather has been fascinated with theorizing structures of power and, by extension, the critic’s position vis-a-vis these structures. This subtext informs a work such as Zantop’s Colonial Fantasies (1997), where the German imaginaire is the focus of discussion rather than any historical colonial reality. A German fictional literature on colonialism is then telescoped to show the ways in which fantasies of power can function even in a vacuum. The Holocaust becomes the inevitable case where such fantasies are unleashed upon reality. Here, the logic of postcoloniality reaches its natural conclusion, where a text is only a text and refers to no historical action. No coloniality, no postcoloniality, just ruminations on fantasies of power. Postcolonial studies of this genre strike the old-fashioned pose of the European psychoanalyst who unmasks the cultural crime of deformation. They are based on the virtually self-explanatory phenomenon of cultural struggle and adjustment. Since the postcolonial subject/critic is someone with access to positional knowledge, the work of generations of nonpostcolonial scholars (Orientalists or others who fit only marginally into the construction of Orientalism) is not particularly important. Even those who made a genuine effort to bring cultures formerly called “Oriental” into the Euro-American continuum need not be examined. The postcolonial critic can dismiss this work as serving a decrepit ideology (Clark 23). Often the postcolonial critic is unaware that a body of scholarship written by area specialists pertaining to the topic even exists. In a quasimessianic manner, the postcolonial critic positions her/himself to speak for the Other. Since Spivak’s subalterns theoretically are mute, she can effectively coopt their voice. In the process, she creates a need for the theorist (Spivak herself) who will determine the discourse of the victimized. This is, indeed, a slippery game. For the postcolonial critic, notions of voicelessness and absence serve to license the neglect of any texts (“archives,” “voices,” and “spaces”) that contradict the theoretical script.

African American Studies: Excerpt from “ Controversial Blackness: The Historical Development & Future Trajectory of African American Studies” by Martha Biondi

The black studies movement has been marked by intense debates over its academic character. During and after the years of its emergence, black studies was criticized, internally and externally, on two interrelated grounds: that it lacked curricular coherence and that, by not having a single methodology, it failed to meet the definition of a discipline. As a result, many educators in the early black studies movement pursued a two-pronged quest for a standardized curriculum, on the one hand, and an original, authoritative methodology on the other. At the same time, many scholars in the black studies movement questioned whether either of these pursuits was desirable or even attainable. In other words, while some scholars have insisted that African American studies must devise its own unique research methodology, others contend that as a multidiscipline, or interdisciplinary discipline, its strength lies in incorporating multiple, diverse methodologies. In a similar vein, while some have argued for a standardized curriculum, others argue that higher education is better served by dynamism and innovation. I argue that the discipline’s ultimate acceptance in academe (to the extent that it has gained acceptance) has come from the production of influential scholarship and research and the development of new conceptual approaches that have influenced other disciplines. Pioneering scholarship and influential intellectual innovations, rather than standardized pedagogy or methodology, have been the route to influence in American intellectual life. A tension between authority and freedom animates these debates. As late as 2000, an article in The Chronicle of Higher Historical Education reinforced the idea that multiple perspectives and methodologies had retarded the trajectory of African American studies- The author of an essay on the state of the field criticized the diverse character of African American studies courses at different universities: “The Ohio State class is chronological with a literary bent,” she wrote. “Duke’s take: cultural studies. The Penn course filters everything through a W.E.B. Du Bois lens, and N.Y.U. combines pan-Africanism with urban studies.” Of course, this sampling reflects the range one would find in the departments of history, sociology, or English at these same universities. But the author stresses disarray. “There’s a reason 30 years after the discipline developed that people still wonder whether the black-studies curriculum represents a coherent subject or a smorgasbord,” she concludes. In this view, the discipline’s strengths—”eclectic, expansive, experimental curricula” —are also its weaknesses…. Scholars and teachers influenced by Afrocentricity have been among the most consistent advocates of the need to create a distinctive methodology. For Temple University scholar Molefi Asante, Afrocentricity “is the only way you can approach African American Studies” because it puts ancient African knowledge systems at the center of analysis. For Greg Carr of Howard University, the challenge is to draw on “deep Africana thought,” the traditions of” classical and medieval Africa,” for guidance in enacting positive social change for African descendants. A key mission of African American studies, he believes, should be to reconnect “narratives of African identity to the contemporary era.” His department taps “into the long genealogy of Africana experiences” in order to assess how to improve the world. Carr distinguishes this mission from the mission of African American studies on other campuses. “We’re not trying to explain blackness for white people” or looking at “our contributions to American society.” Rather, the approach at Howard is “an extension of the long arc of Africana intellectual work.” The inclination to look for insights in the precolonial African past, rejecting European modernity and thereby hoping to escape or resolve the legacies of colonialism and enslavement, is fundamental to the approach that leading architects of Afrocentricity have taken.

Looking for Power Relationships in Texts

The short story “A Cup of Tea” by the New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield, who was an important author in the modernist movement, provides opportunities for us to consider a text through its power dynamics. Mansfield was from a socially prominent and well-off family. When she was in her twenties, she had a romantic relationship with a Māori woman, Maata Mahupuku. The short story below is set in London, where Mansfield went to college and lived for many years before her death from tuberculosis at the age of 34.

A Cup of Tea (1921)

Black and white image of Katherine Mansfield

BY KATHERINE MANSFIELD

ROSEMARY FELL was not exactly beautiful. No, you couldn’t have called her beautiful. Pretty ? Well, if you took her to pieces … But why be so cruel as to take anyone to pieces ? She was young, brilliant, extremely modern, exquisitely well dressed, amazingly well read in the newest of the new books, and her parties were the most delicious mixture of the really important people and… artists—quaint creatures, discoveries of hers, some of them too terrifying for words, but others quite presentable and amusing.

Rosemary had been married two years. She had a duck of a boy. No, not Peter—Michael. And her husband absolutely adored her. They were rich, really rich, not just comfortably well off, which is odious and stuffy and sounds like one’s grandparents. But if Rosemary wanted to shop she would go to Paris as you and I would go to Bond Street. If she wanted to buy flowers, the car pulled up at that perfect shop in Regent Street, and Rosemary inside the shop just gazed in her dazzled, rather exotic way, and said: ” I want those and those and those. Give me four bunches of those. And that jar of roses. Yes, I’ll have all the roses in the jar. No, no lilac. I hate lilac. It’s got no shape.” The attendant bowed and put the lilac out of sight, as though this was only too true; lilac was dreadfully shapeless. ” Give me those stumpy little tulips. Those red and white ones.” And she was followed to the car by a thin shopgirl staggering under an immense white paper armful that looked like a baby in long clothes…

One winter afternoon she had been buying something in a little antique shop in Curzon Street. It was a shop she liked. For one thing, one usually had it to oneself. And then the man who kept it was ridiculously fond of serving her. He beamed whenever she came in. He clasped his hands ; he was so gratified he could scarcely speak. Flattery, of course. All the same, there was something…

” You see, madam,” he would explain in his low respectful tones, ” I love my things. I would rather not part with them than sell them to someone who does not appreciate them, who has not that fine feeling which is so rare…” And, breathing deeply he unrolled a tiny square of blue velvet and pressed it on the glass counter with his pale finger-tips.

To-day it was a little box. He had been keeping it for her. He had shown it to nobody as yet. An exquisite little enamel box with a glaze so fine it looked as though it had been baked in cream. On the lid a minute creature stood under a flowery tree, and a more minute creature still had her arms round his neck. Her hat, really no bigger than a geranium petal, hung from a branch ; it had green ribbons. And there was a pink cloud like a watchful cherub floating above their heads. Rosemary took her hands out of her long gloves. She always took off her gloves to examine such things. Yes, she liked it very much. She loved it; it was a great duck. She must have it. And, turning the creamy box, opening and shutting it, she couldn’t help noticing how charming her hands were against the blue velvet. The shopman, in some dim cavern of his mind, may have dared to think so too. For he took a pencil, leant over the counter, and his pale bloodless fingers crept timidly towards those rosy, flashing ones, as he murmured gently : ” If I may venture to point out to madam, the flowers on the little lady’s bodice.”

” Charming! ” Rosemary admired the flowers. But what was the price ? For a moment the shopman did not seem to hear. Then a murmur reached her. ” Twenty-eight guineas, madam.”

” Twenty-eight guineas.” Rosemary gave no sign. She laid the little box down ; she buttoned her gloves again. Twenty-eight guineas. Even if one is rich… She looked vague. She stared at a plump tea-kettle like a plump hen above the shopman’s head, and her voice was dreamy as she answered: ” Well, keep it for me—will you ? I’ll…”

But the shopman had already bowed as though keeping it for her was all any human being could ask. He would be willing, of course, to keep it for her for ever.

The discreet door shut with a click. She was outside on the step, gazing at the winter afternoon. Rain was falling, and with the rain it seemed the dark came too, spinning down like ashes. There was a cold bitter taste in the air, and the new-lighted lamps looked sad. Sad were the lights in the houses opposite. Dimly they burned as if regretting something. And people hurried by, hidden under their hateful umbrellas. Rosemary felt a strange pang. She pressed her muff against her breast; she wished she had the little box, too, to cling to. Of course, the car was there. She’d only to cross the pavement. But still she waited. There are moments, horrible moments in life, when one emerges from shelter and looks out, and it’s awful. One oughtn’t to give way to them. One ought to go home and have an extra-special tea. But at the very instant of thinking that, a young girl, thin, dark, shadowy—where had she come from ?—was standing at Rosemary’s elbow and a voice like a sigh, almost like a sob, breathed : ” Madam, may I speak to you a moment ? ”

“Speak to me ? ” Rosemary turned. She saw a little battered creature with enormous eyes, someone quite young, no older than herself, who clutched at her coat-collar with reddened hands, and shivered as though she had just come out of the water.

“M-madam,” stammered the voice. ” Would you let me have the price of a cup of tea ? ”

“A cup of tea ?” There was something simple, sincere in that voice ; it wasn’t in the least the voice of a beggar. ” Then have you no money at all?” asked Rosemary.

“None, madam,” came the answer.

“How extraordinary!” Rosemary peered through the dusk, and the girl gazed back at her. How more than extraordinary! And suddenly it seemed to Rosemary such an adventure. It was like something out of a novel by Dostoevsky, this meeting in the dusk. Supposing she took the girl home ? Supposing she did do one of those things she was always reading about or seeing on the stage, what would happen ? It would be thrilling. And she heard herself saying afterwards to the amazement of her friends : ” I simply took her home with me,” as she stepped forward and said to that dim person beside her : ” Come home to tea with me.”

The girl drew back startled. She even stopped shivering for a moment. Rosemary put out a hand and touched her arm. ” I mean it,” she said, smiling. And she felt how-simple and kind her smile was. ” Why won’t you ? Do. Come home with me now in my car and have tea.”

“You—you don’t mean it, madam,” said the girl, and there was pain in her voice.

“But I do,” cried Rosemary. ” I want you to. To please me. Come along.”

The girl put her fingers to her lips and her eyes devoured Rosemary. ” You’re—you’re not taking me to the police station ? ” she stammered.

“The police station ! ” Rosemary laughed out. ” Why should I be so cruel ? No, I only want to make you warm and to hear— anything you care to tell me.”

Hungry people are easily led. The footman held the door of the car open, and a moment later they were skimming through the dusk.

“There!” said Rosemary. She had a feeling of triumph as she slipped her hand through the velvet strap. She could have said, ” Now I’ve got you,” as she gazed at the little captive she had netted. But of course she meant it kindly. Oh, more than kindly. She was going to prove to this girl that—wonderful things did happen in life, that—fairy godmothers were real, that— rich people had hearts, and that women were sisters. She turned impulsively, saying: ” Don’t be frightened. After all, why shouldn’t you come back with me ? We’re both women. If I’m the more fortunate, you ought to expect…”

But happily at that moment, for she didn’t know how the sentence was going to end, the car stopped. The bell was rung, the door opened, and with a charming, protecting, almost embracing movement, Rosemary drew the other into the hall. Warmth, softness, light, a sweet scent, all those things so familiar to her she never even thought about them, she watched that other receive. It was fascinating. She was like the rich little girl in her nursery with all the cupboards to open, all the boxes to unpack.

“Come, come upstairs,” said Rosemary, longing to begin to be generous. ” Come up to my room.” And, besides, she wanted to spare this poor little thing from being stared at by the servants; she decided as they mounted the stairs she would not even ring for Jeanne, but take off her things by herself. The great thing was to be natural!

And “There ! ” cried Rosemary again, as they reached her beautiful big bedroom with the curtains drawn, the fire leaping on her wonderful lacquer furniture, her gold cushions and the primrose and blue rugs.

The girl stood just inside the door ; she seemed dazed. But Rosemary didn’t mind that.

“Come and sit down,” she cried, dragging her big chair up to the fire, ” in this comfy chair. Come and get warm. You look so dreadfully cold.”

“I daren’t, madam,” said the girl, and she edged backwards.

“Oh, please,”—Rosemary ran forward—” you mustn’t be frightened, you mustn’t, really. Sit down, and when I’ve taken off my things we shall go into the next room and have tea and be cosy. Why are you afraid ? ” And gently she half pushed the thin figure into its deep cradle.

But there was no answer. The girl stayed just as she had been put, with her hands by her sides and her mouth slightly open. To be quite sincere, she looked rather stupid. But Rosemary wouldn’t acknowledge it. She leant over her, saying : ” Won’t you take off your hat ? Your pretty hair is all wet. And one is so much more comfortable without a hat, isn’t one ? ”

There was a whisper that sounded like ” Very good, madam,” and the crushed hat was taken off.

“And let me help you off with your coat, too,” said Rosemary.

The girl stood up. But she held on to the chair with one hand and let Rosemary pull. It was quite an effort. The other scarcely helped her at all. She seemed to stagger like a child, and the thought came and went through Rosemary’s mind, that if people wanted helping they must respond a little, just a little, other-wise it became very difficult indeed. And what was she to do with the coat now ? She left it on the floor, and the hat too. She was just going to take a cigarette off the mantelpiece when the girl said quickly, but so lightly and strangely : ” I’m very sorry, madam, but I’m going to faint. I shall go off, madam, if I don’t have something.”

“Good heavens, how thoughtless I am ! ” Rosemary rushed to the bell.

“Tea ! Tea at once ! And some brandy immediately ! ”

The maid was gone again, but the girl almost cried out. ” No, I don’t want no brandy. I never drink brandy. It’s a cup of tea I want, madam.” And she burst into tears.

It was a terrible and fascinating moment. Rosemary knelt beside her chair.

“Don’t cry, poor little thing,” she said. ” Don’t cry.” And she gave the other her lace handkerchief. She really was touched beyond words. She put her arm round those thin, bird-like shoulders.

Now at last the other forgot to be shy, forgot everything except that they were both women, and gasped out: ” I can’t go on no longer like this. I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it. I shall do away with myself. I can’t bear no more.”

“You shan’t have to. I’ll look after you. Don’t cry any more. Don’t you see what a good thing it was that you met me ? We’ll have tea and you’ll tell me everything. And I shall arrange something. I promise. Do stop crying. It’s so exhausting. Please ! ”

The other did stop just in time for Rosemary to get up before the tea came. She had the table placed between them. She plied the poor little creature with everything, all the sandwiches, all the bread and butter, and every time her cup was empty she filled it with tea, cream and sugar. People always said sugar was so nourishing. As for herself she didn’t eat; she smoked and looked away tactfully so that the other should not be shy.

And really the effect of that slight meal was marvellous. When the tea-table was carried away a new being, a light, frail creature with tangled hair, dark lips, deep, lighted eyes, lay back in the big chair in a kind of sweet languor, looking at the blaze. Rosemary lit a fresh cigarette ; it was time to begin.

“And when did you have your last meal ? ” she asked softly.

But at that moment the door-handle turned.

“Rosemary, may I come in ? ” It was Philip.

“Of course.”

He came in. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said, and stopped and stared.

“It’s quite all right,” said Rosemary smiling. “This is my friend, Miss——”

“Smith, madam,” said the languid figure, who was strangely still and unafraid.

“Smith,” said Rosemary. “We are going to have a little talk.”

“Oh, yes,” said Philip. “Quite,” and his eye caught sight of the coat and hat on the floor. He came over to the fire and turned his back to it. “It’s a beastly afternoon,” he said curiously, still looking at that listless figure, looking at its hands and boots, and then at Rosemary again.

“Yes, isn’t it?” said Rosemary enthusiastically. ” Vile.”

Philip smiled his charming smile. “As a matter of fact,” said he, ” I wanted you to come into the library for a moment. Would you ? Will Miss Smith excuse us ? ”

The big eyes were raised to him, but Rosemary answered for her. ” Of course she will.” And they went out of the room together.

“I say,” said Philip, when they were alone. “Explain. Who is she? What does it all mean?”

Rosemary, laughing, leaned against the door and said : “I picked her up in Curzon Street. Really. She’s a real pick-up. She asked me for the price of a cup of tea, and I brought her home with me.”

“But what on earth are you going to do with her ? ” cried Philip.

“Be nice to her,” said Rosemary quickly. “Be frightfully nice to her. Look after her. I don’t know how. We haven’t talked yet. But show her—treat her—make her feel——”

“My darling girl,” said Philip, ” you’re quite mad, you know. It simply can’t be done.”

“I knew you’d say that,” retorted Rosemary. “Why not ? I want to. Isn’t that a reason ? And besides, one’s always reading about these things. I decided——”

“But,” said Philip slowly, and he cut the end of a cigar, “she’s so astonishingly pretty.”

“Pretty?” Rosemary was so surprised that she blushed. “Do you think so ? I—I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Good Lord!” Philip struck a match. “She’s absolutely lovely. Look again, my child. I was bowled over when I came into your room just now. However… I think you’re making a ghastly mistake. Sorry, darling, if I’m crude and all that. But let me know if Miss Smith is going to dine with us in time for me to look up The Milliner’s Gazette.”

“ You absurd creature!” said Rosemary, and she went out of the library, but not back to her bedroom. She went to her writing-room and sat down at her desk. Pretty ! Absolutely lovely ! Bowled over ! Her heart beat like a. heavy bell. Pretty ! Lovely ! She drew her cheque-book towards her. But no, cheques would be no use, of course. She opened a drawer and took out five pound notes, looked at them, put two back, and holding the three squeezed in her hand, she went back to her bedroom.

Half an hour later Philip was still in the library, when Rosemary came in.

“I only wanted to tell you,” said she, and she leaned against the door again and looked at him with her dazzled exotic gaze, “Miss Smith won’t dine with us to-night.”

Philip put down the paper. “Oh, what’s happened? Previous engagement? ”

Rosemary came over and sat down on his knee. “She insisted on going,” said she, “so I gave the poor little thing a present of money. I couldn’t keep her against her will, could I? ” she added softly.

Rosemary had just done her hair, darkened her eyes a little, and put on her pearls. She put up her hands and touched Philip’s cheeks.

“Do you like me?” said she, and her tone, sweet, husky, troubled him.

“I like you awfully,” he said, and he held her tighter. “Kiss me.”

There was a pause.

Then Rosemary said dreamily. “I saw a fascinating little box to-day. It cost twenty-eight guineas. May I have it?”

Philip jumped her on his knee. “You may, little wasteful one,” said he.

But that was not really what Rosemary wanted to say.

“Philip,” she whispered, and she pressed his head against her bosom, “am I pretty ?”

Let’s examine the short story using our three approaches to see how we can use power relationships to explore texts.

Marxist Questions

Class Disparities : How does the story portray the economic differences between Rosemary and the girl she meets? In what ways do Rosemary’s wealth and privilege affect the dynamics between them?
Commodification of Art and Luxury : Explore the theme of consumerism and the commodification of art and luxury goods in the story. How does Rosemary’s interaction with the shopkeeper reflect larger societal attitudes towards material possessions?
Labor and Social Class : Analyze the role of labor and social class in the story. How are the characters positioned in terms of social class, and how does their economic status influence their actions and relationships?
Exploitation and Power Dynamics : Discuss the power dynamics between Rosemary and the girl she meets. How does Rosemary’s offer to take the girl home reflect underlying structures of power and privilege? In what ways does Rosemary’s benevolence reinforce or challenge existing social hierarchies?
Alienation and Isolation : Explore the theme of alienation and isolation, considering both Rosemary’s privileged but potentially lonely existence and the girl’s apparent vulnerability. How do these characters experience and navigate their respective social environments?

Remember, Marxism often focuses on economic and social structures, so consider how these structures are reflected in the characters’ relationships, choices, and the overall narrative.

Example of Marxist thesis statement: In “A Cup of Tea” by Katherine Mansfield, the exploitation of a poor girl by a wealthy woman reveals the way in which socioeconomic status keeps the bourgesoie from being able to act morally toward those of a different social class. Even when she thinks she means well, Rosemary cannot escape the transactional consumerism that defines her existence.

Postcolonial Questions

Next, let’s explore the story through a postcolonial lens.

Colonial Influence on Aesthetics : How does Rosemary’s fascination with the little box and her interactions with the shopkeeper reflect colonial influences on aesthetics? Consider Mansfield’s own background and how colonialism might have shaped perceptions of beauty and value.
Othering and Exoticism : Analyze the theme of othering and exoticism in the story, particularly in Rosemary’s interactions with the shopkeeper and her decision to bring the girl home. How does Mansfield’s own experiences and relationships contribute to or challenge the portrayal of the “exotic” other?
Representation of Indigenous Culture : Explore the representation of indigenous culture in the story, considering Mansfield’s own connection with Maori culture. How does the story depict or neglect aspects of indigenous identity, and in what ways might it reflect the author’s relationship with New Zealand’s cultural landscape?
Cultural Appropriation and Power Dynamics : Discuss the power dynamics and potential cultural appropriation in Rosemary’s actions. How might Mansfield’s personal experiences inform our understanding of the power imbalances present in the story, especially in the context of colonial history?
Postcolonial Feminism : Investigate the intersectionality of postcolonial feminism in the story, taking into account Mansfield’s own experiences. How do issues of gender, race, and colonialism intersect, and what insights can be gained by examining the characters and their relationships through this lens?

Consider how Mansfield’s background and experiences as a person from New Zealand might have influenced her perspectives on colonialism, indigenous cultures, and power dynamics. This lens can provide valuable insights into the story’s underlying themes and messages.

Example of a postcolonial thesis statement: Katherine Mansfield, a New Zealand modernist author who was the product of British imperialism, once loved an indigenous Māori woman, but set her aside for a life among London’s literati. Mansfield’s 1921 short story “A Cup of Tea” reveals the inescapable influence of colonial power structures through Rosemary’s obsession with a costly foreign trinket and the girl’s equation of her worth with a cup of tea, which serves as a symbol for the carelessness with which Mansfield and her peers treated indigenous lives and culture.

Ethnic Studies Questions

Finally, how could we approach this story from an ethnic studies lens? As I noted in the introduction to this chapter, ethnic studies, not postcolonial studies, is the critical approach used for American authors who are not white. As Christine MacLeod observes regarding the divide between postcolonial and African American studies, “the fact remains that with neither a territorial identity nor physical separation from the metropolitan centre, black American cannot strictly be said to fit any standard model of the colonial or postcolonial experience” (p. 51).

Because Katherine Mansfield is a New Zealand author and part of the British colonial structure, we would probably use a postcolonial rather than an ethnic studies lens to analyze her work. One subset of ethnic studies, Indigenous studies, might apply. Indigenous studies are often used to consider how texts function in a dominant culture. The Māori are the Indigenous people of New Zealand. For Māori studies, we could explore the story using the traditional knowledge, culture, knowledge, and beliefs of Māori and Indigenous peoples. “A Cup of Tea” does not feature any Māori characters, so an ethnic studies approach would focus on the absence of Māori culture and the way that the dominant culture has replaced the traditional Indigenous one.

A better Mansfield short story to use for an ethnic studies approach would be “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped.” In this short story, written in 1912, Mansfield relates the story of a young white girl who follows two Māori women to their settlement, where they feed her and take her to the ocean to play. The story ends with white policemen “rescuing” Pearl. Because the story is told through a child’s point of view, ultimately, the nature of the kidnapping is ambigious. She goes willingly with the Māori women but resists the white policemen.

You’ll notice that the questions below about “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped” feel very similar to postcolonial criticism questions about “A Cup of Tea.”

How do the Māori women in the story resist colonial control and assert their agency in the face of White hegemony?
In what ways does the story challenge the dominant colonial narratives of New Zealand as a “settled” and “tamed” land, presenting instead a more nuanced understanding of Māori culture and resistance?
How does the character of Pearl Button represent the colonial gaze, and what does her fascination with the Māori women and their culture reveal about the power dynamics between colonizers and the colonized?
How do the Māori women use their knowledge of their environment and traditional practices to navigate and resist the colonial presence in their lives?
How does the ending of the story, with the Māori women watching Pearl Button’s departure, challenge the idea of colonial rescue and instead suggests the possibility of mutual understanding and solidarity between the colonized and the colonizers?

Example of an Ethnic Studies thesis statement: “In the context of their original publication, Mansfield’s Rhythm writings reveal the author’s ambivalent relationship to metropolitan primitivism—ranging from romantic idealization of the Māoris in ‘How Pearl Button was Kidnapped’ to satirical mockery of the western European fascination with exotic cultures and artifacts in ‘Sunday Lunch,’ a sketch prefiguring the themes of Mansfield’s later story ‘Bliss’ (1918). Yet while these writings largely frustrate metropolitan desires for quaint exoticism, I argue that as a Pākehā New Zealander with a penchant for cultural cross-dressing (both in life and in print), Mansfield did not fully escape the dynamics she ridiculed.” (Snyder 139).

Note: “Pākehā is a word for a white New Zealander.

The Limitations of Marxist, Postcolonial, and Ethnic Studies Criticism

While Marxist, postcolonial, and ethnic studies approaches can provide valuable insights into literary texts, each approach has its limitations.

Economic Determinism: Marxist criticism can sometimes oversimplify complex human motivations by reducing them to economic factors. It may neglect the role of other aspects such as psychology, individual agency, or cultural influences.
Neglect of Other Power Structures: While economic structures are central, Marxist criticism may downplay or overlook other power structures, such as those based on gender, race, or personal relationships.
Homogenization of Cultures: Postcolonial criticism might risk oversimplifying diverse cultures within a colonized region, treating them as homogeneous entities. This can lead to the erasure of internal conflicts and complexities within these cultures.
Western-Centric Perspectives: There is a risk of perpetuating a Western-centric view, as postcolonial theory often originates from Western academic institutions. This may unintentionally reproduce power imbalances (the scholarship example you read identifies this limitation).
Overemphasis on Identity : Sometimes, ethnic studies can focus so much on racial, cultural, or national identities that it may overlook other important aspects of the text, such as its formal qualities, narrative structure, or thematic elements.
Homogenization : There’s a risk of essentializing or homogenizing diverse experiences within a particular racial or ethnic group. For instance, if we assume that all African American experiences are the same, or all Asian American experiences are the same, we can overlook the complex and varied experiences of individuals within these groups.
Political and Ideological Biases : Ethnic studies can sometimes be influenced by political or ideological biases, which might limit the scope of analysis or lead to particular interpretations being favored over others.

It’s important to note that these issues don’t necessarily negate the value of these approaches; however, scholars and critics should be cautious to avoid oversimplification or bias. Combining multiple critical perspectives can often provide a more comprehensive understanding of a literary text.

Post Script: What about Critical Race Theory?

It seems like everywhere we look, we hear someone talking about Critical Race Theory. Can we apply CRT to literary texts?

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is one of the more well-known frameworks that can be considered under the broader lens of New Historicism. CRT examines how race and racism operate in society. It emerged in the United States in the late 1970s as a response to the limitations of traditional civil rights approaches to addressing racial inequality. CRT seeks to understand how racism and discrimination are embedded in social structures and institutions, and how they are perpetuated through everyday interactions and practices.

CRT can be defined as “a set of ideas holding that racial bias is inherent in many parts of western society, especially in its legal and social institutions, on the basis of their having been primarily designed for and implemented by white people.” (Oxford Languages). According to Mateo Castelli, “Critical Race Theory can be used to deconstruct the power dynamics that surround race and racism through everyday societal structures and institutions.”

In literature, CRT is applied to examine the ways in which race and racism are represented and constructed in literary texts. With a CRT approach, scholars are interested in exploring how literature reflects and perpetuates racial inequality, and in how it can be used to challenge and disrupt racist ideologies and practices. CRT emphasizes the importance of examining the intersectionality of race with other forms of identity and oppression, such as gender, sexuality, class, and ability. It also emphasizes the importance of centering the perspectives and experiences of people of color in literary analysis, and in understanding how their experiences are shaped by systemic racism and discrimination.

One of the key principles of CRT is the importance of recognizing the role of power in shaping social relations and discourse. CRT seeks to examine how power operates in literary texts, and how it is used to perpetuate racial hierarchies and maintain the status quo. Literary texts may be used as artifacts to demonstrate these power structures. However, in literary studies, African American studies criticism (a subset of ethnic studies) is a more common approach.

Marxist, Postcolonial, and Ethnic Studies Scholars

Terry Eagleton
Antonio Gramsci
Raymond Williams

Postcolonial

Edward Said
Frantz Fanon
Homi Bhabha

Ethnic Studies (African American/Black)

W.E.B. DuBois
James Baldwin
Amiri Baraka
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Ethnic Studies (Chicano/a)

Rodolfo Acuña

Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Ethnic Studies (Indigenous/First Nations)

Wikipedia lists several important Indigenous scholars here.

Critical Race Theory

Kimberlé Crenshaw
Derrick Bell

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Marxist Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reading Guide

2019, Historical Materialism

Appeared online here: http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/index.php/reading-guides/marxist-literary-criticism-introductory-reading-guide?fbclid=IwAR2vioz8HnlwSHpgoUdnH6cnwFNE7D2gb7juShyG0-z2LxNmyzYevqJLH8I

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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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12 Texts for Introducing Marxist Criticism

Instructional and Assessment Strategies , Reading Instruction

When my students study literary criticism , I usually introduce Marxist criticism after feminist criticism . In part, I introduce these two lenses in close order because they are both political lenses. They’re not political in the sense of partisan politics. But they both deal with how literature navigates issues of power and privilege.

However, I usually introduce Marxist criticism after feminist criticism because students stumble over the “Marxist” title. Students know Karl Marx from their social studies classes. And they know about communism from reading The Crucible . Sometimes that leads students to believe that Marxist criticism is all about communism. So I spend a lot of time upfront addressing this misunderstanding.

From that point forward, we apply Marxist criticism by evaluating how social class and privilege intersect. At the high school level, I work to keep criticism as straightforward as possible. In other words, we’re asking these questions over and over:

First, what social classes or hierarchies appear in the text?
Second, which characters have privilege? What does privilege look like in the text? How does access to or distance from privilege affect a character?
Similarly, how does the text treat characters from various social classes? How does membership in a particular social class affect a character’s actions and/or how they are treated by other characters?

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Introducing Marxist Criticism

At the high school level, students don’t need all the vocabulary of Marxist criticism. However, the concept of “privilege” is so closely related to Marxist criticism that we always explore this term. Most of my students are at least familiar with the concept of privilege even if they can’t define it. For this reason, the essay “ Privileged ” by Kyle Korver can be a good text for introducing and unpacking this term.

Oftentimes, I find short works to be useful in exploring a new concept. The brevity of poetry can make it ideal for exploring a new idea. To practice applying Marxist criticism, teachers might consider “ Richard Cory ” by Edwin Arlington Robinson. This poem has a straightforward “plot.” The content of the poem is also high interest, so students will be engaged. Then, students can practice applying Marxist criticism to explore the relationship between Richard Cory and the speaker. Grab “Richard Cory” and two more of Robinson’s most-famous poems in this great bundle !

Additionally, a short story like “ A Worn Path ” by Eudora Welty is a good tool for practicing Marxist criticism. For one, this is a short short story, and the plot is clear and easy to follow. Furthermore, social class plays a clear role in how the main character is treated and how she interacts with the white, urban world. Read it here .

Short Stories

Short stories are the primary way that I teach students to apply literary criticism. These three short stories provide readers with plenty of opportunities to evaluate how social class and privilege affect a text’s meaning.

First, “ A White Heron ” by Sarah Orne Jewett is straightforward enough that students can usually read the story independently. Then, students can apply literary criticism with a partner or small group. Read it here .
Second, “ Berenice ” by Edgar Allan Poe may seem like an unusual suggestion. However, this text is high interest, and the main character’s life would be wildly different if he didn’t have privilege. He simply could not have gotten away with his crimes if his social class didn’t protect him. Read it here .
Finally, “ Winter Dreams ” by F. Scott Fitzgerald is the longest short story on this list. My students usually enjoy this story because the main characters are so infuriating! The social classes of the main characters play a clear part in their interactions. Of the texts mentioned so far, this is the only one with a character actively working to advance his social class. This text also lends itself to feminist criticism . Read it here .

Grab all my lesson plans for these short stories plus “A Worn Path” and lessons for 5 other short stories in the 9-12 Short Stories Bundle !

Longer Works

Longer texts take more time to read, so I usually incorporate longer works after we have tried different critical lenses. I also like to choose texts that lend themselves to a variety of critical lenses. All the longer works on this list would be good candidates for historical criticism , too! Exploring the intersection of history and literature also adds another layer of complexity to Marxist criticism.

First, The Crucible by Arthur Miller is an ideal candidate for applying several critical lenses. The allegory for McCarthyism lends itself to historical criticism. Also, Miller makes it clear that social class plays an important part in the Salem Witch Trials. Check out my favorite activities for teaching The Crucible .
Similarly, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of the first texts I think of when discussing Marxist criticism. The symbolism of East and West Egg and the Valley of Ashes lends itself beautifully to evaluating the role of social class and privilege in the text. These are my favorite activities for teaching The Great Gatsby .
Additionally, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is not a text I usually associate with literary criticism. However, social class is an unavoidable part of teaching and reading this novel. The text also covers issues related to race and gender, so it suits a variety of critical lenses. I also pair To Kill a Mockingbird with a variety of related texts that provide a richer view of Maycomb.
Finally, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen is a text that clearly lends itself to Marxist criticism. Because social class plays such an important part in this novel, I usually start students with this primer about class in the Victorian Era. I also love this collection of activities for helping students engage with Pride and Prejudice .

Honorable Mentions

These two texts lend themselves to Marxist criticism although they are not my first choices.

First, the poem “ The Last of the Light Brigade ” by Rudyard Kipling focuses on the lives of the brave survivors of “ The Light Brigade .” Because this premise of this poem is based on another poem, it takes a little more time to get students to the Marxist criticism. That being said, this poem also connects well with Pride and Prejudice because it emphasizes the hardship of life in Victorian England. Read it here .

Finally, Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare is one of my favorite plays to read with students! While this play more closely aligns with archetypal criticism, social class also plays a role in the drama. The citizens in the play are cast as a moronic, gullible mob. That they come from the plebian class and not from the patrician class of the main characters suits Marxist criticism. Julius Caesar also goes well with these unexpected text pairings !

What other texts would you recommend for teaching Marxist criticism?

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Marxist Theory & Criticism

Primary sources i marxist theory & criticism.

Louis Althusser , " Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (1970, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, 1971).

Louis Althusser , Pour Marx (1965, For Marx , trans Ben Brewster, 1969).

Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar , Lire le "Capital" (1965, Reading "Capital , " trans. Ben Brewster 1970).

Renée Balibar , Les Français fictifs: Le Rapport des styles littéraires au français national (1974).

Renée Balibar and Dominique Laporte , Le Français national: Politique et pratique de la langue nationale sous la révolution (1974).

Terry Eagleton , Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (1976).

Fredric Jameson , The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981).

Fredric Jameson , The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (1972).

Pierre Macherey , A quoi pense la littérature ? (1990, The Object of Literature, trans. David Macey, 1995).

Pierre Macherey , Pour une théorie de la production littéraire , (1966, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall, 1978).

Pierre Macherey and Étienne Balibar , " Sur la littérature comme forme idéologique: Quelques hypothèses marxistes " (1974), " Literature as an Ideological Form: Some Marxist Propositions, " Praxis 5 (1981).

Michel Pêcheux , Les Vérités de La Palice: Linguistique, sémantique, philosophie (1976 Language, Semantics, and Ideology: Stating the Obvious , trans. Harbans Nagpal, (1982).

Nicos Ar. Poulantzas , L’État, le pouvoir, le socialisme (1978, State, Power, Socialism , trans. Patrick Camiller, 1980).

Aijaz Ahmad , In Theory (1993).

Aijaz Ahmad , "The Third World in Jameson’s Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Social Text 31–32 (1992).

Étienne Balibar , Masses, Classes, Ideas (trans. James Swenson, 1994).

Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein , Race, nation, classe: Les Identités ambiguës (1988, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities , trans. Chris Turner, 1991).

Antonio Callari and David F. Ruccio , eds., Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory (1996).

Jacques Derrida , Spectres de Marx (1993, Specters of Marx , trans. Peggy Kamuf,. 1994).

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri , Empire (2000).

Rosemary Hennessy , Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse (1993).

Peter Hitchcock , Oscillate Wildly: Space, Body, and Spirit of Millennial Materialism (1999).

Fredric Jameson , The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (1992).

Fredric Jameson , Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (1990).

Fredric Jameson , The Political Unconscious (1981).

Fredric Jameson , "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (1984).

Fredric Jameson , Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).

Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean , Materialist Feminisms (1993).

Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg , Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective (1995).

Karl Marx , "Eighteenth Brumaire," Surveys from Exile (ed. and intro. David Fernbach intro. Ben Fowkes, et al. 1973).

Karl Marx , Grundrisse, (1953, Grundrisse., trans. Martin Nicolaus, 1973).

Karl Marx , Das Kapital , vol. 1 (1867, Capital, vol. 1, Ben Fowkes, 1976).

Karl Marx , Karl Marx : Early Writings (trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, 1975).

Toril Moi , Sexual/Textual Politics (1985).

Toril Moi and Janice Radway , eds., Materialist Feminism , special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 93.4 (1994).

Antonio Negri , Marx oltre Marx (1979, Marx Beyond Marx, trans. Harry Cleave, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano 1984).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak , A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak , In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak , Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993).

Slavoj Žižek , The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989).

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Terry Eagleton and Marxist Literary Theory

Terry Eagleton and Marxist Literary Theory

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on January 6, 2018 • ( 4 )

Terry Eagleton’s contribution to Marxist cultural theory is broad in its range. While his earlier writing examined in some depth certain Marxist categories of literary-cultural analysis, his later, more popularizing, work has argued persuasively the need for theory. Eagleton has revaluated the English literary-critical tradition, redefined the critic’s function, and reappraised specific authors from his historical materialistic perspective. These are substantive aspects of the general task of a Marxist critic . But what stands out more saliently in Eagleton’s recent texts is his resolute critical engagement with, and historical contextualization of, other modern critical trends. It is this engagement that will be considered here.

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In traditional logic, as deriving from its comprehensive formulation by Aristotle, the law of identity serves among other things as a basis of categorization and exclusive definition: an entity is what it is precisely because it is not anything else. Its identity is thus born in the process of dirempting its relations with other similarly “identified” things in the world, a process which thereby denies ontical status to those relations, treating them as somehow external to the entities related. This suppression of relations and relegation of them to a contingent status, a procedure closely tied to Aristotle’s various definitions of “substance” and “essence,” can serve a political and ideological function. For example, the identity of an object (which could be simply a physical entity or something as complex as a system of law or religion) which is in fact historically specific could be passed off as an eternal or natural identity. As Eagleton remarks in his essay on Adorno in The Function of Criticism, the notion of identity is “coercive”: it is the “ideological element of pure thought” and was “installed at the heart of Enlightenment reason.” It is installed also, one can infer, in all philosophies which positivistically accept the apparent given-ness of an object at face value, failing to see the object as essentially the result of a process whether philosophical or political.

The form of thought which most comprehensively impugns the notion of identity is dialectical thought. Hegel’s Logic is explicitly an attack on the one-sidedness of traditional logic, which fails to see identity as an intrinsic function of difference. It should be said that Eagleton has not sympathized with Hegelian Marxism, an antipathy partly taken over from Althusser . In Criticism and Ideology Eagleton was influenced (though by no means uncritically) by Althusser , particularly with regard to the epistemological break between the earlier “humanistic” and later “scientific” attitudes which Althusser claimed to have found in Marx’s work: it had been Althusser ’s intention to divest Marxism of Hegelian notions. But, quite apart from the facts that Eagleton has moved beyond Althusser ’s influence and acknowledged the lasting value of Lukács (whom he calls the greatest Marxist aesthetician 2), it should equally be observed that Eagleton has never denied the dialectical character of Marxism.

Marx, in both his earlier and later work, takes over some central features of the form of Hegel’s dialectic: firstly, an imperative to abolish or negate the given object (or state of affairs) by articulating the full rationality of that object’s relations with a particular social and historical context, showing how these relations constitute the object. That is why, when the bourgeoisie was the revolutionary class, the Hegelian system was called a “negative” philosophy; it could be interpreted as revolutionary. In his 1844 manuscripts, Marx saw the “outstanding achievement” of Hegel’s Phenomenology as the recognition of the “dialectic of negativity” as the moving principle of history. And of course, as late as the famous preface to Capital , Marx still claimed adherence to the form, though not the idealist content, of Hegel’s dialectic. Writing in 1859, Engels was at great pains to stress that the superiority of Hegel’s thought to previous philosophy lay in “the tremendous historical sense” of the dialectic, though Marx “divested it of its idealistic wrappings” (CPE, 55).

The second dialectical feature is a tendency to view an entity as unstable and intrinsically in a state of transition, being part of a more comprehensive process leading beyond it. This was an aspect of Hegel’s ontological vision whereby, for example, “existence” itself was viewed as contradictory. For Marx the notion of “contradiction” acquires a social content, characterizing not only the historical relations between classes but also the central bourgeois concepts. The bourgeois notion of the individual, for instance, entails a contradiction between the individual’s “human” needs as a member of civil society and that individual’s abstract identity as a “citizen” of the state.

The third aspect of the dialectic is the notion of “sublation,” which refers to the dual process of negating and transcending a given opposition or state of affairs while retaining certain features of what is negated. The extent to which this informs, for example, Marx’s view of communist society as arising out of bourgeois relations of production is problematic, not least in the realm of superstructure. According to Marx, a change in the “economic foundation” is followed by more or less prolonged struggle in the ideological sphere (CPE, 4). The point is that one ideology or social structure does not simply replace another in linear fashion; whatever predominance is achieved is preceded by struggle and conflict. But even here it is a question of emphasis. Eagleton has little sympathy with Lukács ’ view of a Marxist society which Eagleton characterizes as “the triumphant sublation of the bourgeois humanist heritage” (WB, 83). But Eagleton acknowledges that “Socialists . . . wish to draw the full, concrete, practical applications of the abstract notions of freedom and democracy to which liberal humanism subscribes.”3

All three features of Hegel’s dialectic, utilized by Marx and Engels, constitute an attack on the notion of simple identity. Eagleton affirms that the “power of the negative . . . constitutes an essential moment of Marxism” (WB, 142). This perhaps gives us the clearest perspective from which we can understand how, in Eagleton’s eyes, non-Marxist literary theory can be useful to Marxism. For there is a sense in which modern literary theories can be viewed as embodying “negative” philosophies, attacking received notions of identity, subjectivity, objectivity, and language. Non- Marxist theories effectively arrest the Hegelian dialectic at its second phase (of externalization and relationality) and their political valencies depend on the direction of their reintegration of that externality. For example, structuralism uses “structure” and “language” as a basis of reintegration. Psychoanalysis posits the “unconscious,” while deconstruction effectively posits “difference.” Feminism and socialism use political goals as a basis. Eagleton brings out this “negative” aspect of literary theory in some detail. Among the “gains” of structuralism he ranks its demystification of literature, which it views not as unique or essential discourse but as a construct. The codes of structuralism are indifferent to traditional compartmentalizations. Again, structuralism regards “meaning” not as substantively self-identical but as relational, the product of a shared system of signification. Eagleton acknowledges that these views harbor an implicit “ideological threat” to bourgeois representational and empiricist views of language and literature inasmuch as structuralism shows reality and experience to be discontinuous rather than comprising a simple correspondence (LT, 107–109).

Eagleton also sees psychoanalysis as a form of inquiry of some value to Marxism. Eagleton refuses to regard Freud as an individualist. Rather, Freud sees the development of the individual in social and historical terms: “What Freud produces . . . is nothing less than a materialist theory of the making of the human subject” (LT, 163). Eagleton skillfully shows how Lacan rewrites Freud on the question of the human subject, its place in society and its relationship to language. Eagleton also demonstrates how, writing under the influence of Lacan , Althusser describes the working of ideology in society. What Eagleton effectively shows here is how the relation between Marxist and non-Marxist theory cannot be reduced to direct commensurability or opposition, and is rather one of extrapolation and varying degrees of mediation.

The most controversial “philosophy” of the negative is deconstruction . Eagleton accepts that there are political possibilities in deconstruction. According to Eagleton, deconstruction’s denial of a unity between signifier and signified, as well as its rejection of “meaning” as self-identical and immediately present, can help us to see that certain meanings – such as those of “freedom,” “democracy,” and “family” – are elevated by social ideologies to a privileged position as the origin or goal of other meanings. Deconstruction shows that so-called first principles are the products, rather than the foundations, of systems of meaning. Moreover, deconstruction’s view of all language as metaphorical, as harboring a surfeit over exact meaning, undermines classical structuralism’s typically ideological oppositions which draw a rigid line between what is and is not acceptable, for example between truth and falsehood, sense and nonsense, reason and madness. Eagleton also points out that Derrida himself, though not all of his followers, sees deconstruction as a political practice: he sees meaning, identity, intention, and truth as effects of a wider history, of language, the unconscious as well as social institutions and practices.

So far, all are in accord: Hegel, Marx, non-Marxist theory, and Eagleton’s Marxism. All view “identity” as somehow coercive, meaning as relational, the objective world as a subjective construction, and truth as institutional. One is tempted to think of the Homeric gods feasting at this banquet of pure difference. But just as Marx’s thought, whatever its similarities in form, has a content entirely different from Hegel’s thought, so Eagleton’s Marxism is marked by a specificity alien to non-Marxist theory.

It is true that some of Marx’s insights, such as those listed above, are superficially compatible with those of non-Marxist theory. But Marx’s attacks on the various expressions of identity, such as subject, object, and stable meaning, are without exception necessarily and internally related to the economic infrastructure. It is not just that the identification “private property” represents the bourgeois reification of an abstract category: such reification hides the nature of private property as a product of alienated labor. It is not just that man is abstractly perceived to have no essence: man is a result of specific productive forces and specific social relations. Again, man as subject is not created in an abstractly perceived interaction with objects: he produces himself through labor. And Marx views language not as a self-enclosed or independent system but as a social practice (GI, 18, 21, 51, 118). In each case, the “negative” aspect of Marx’s thought is necessarily, not contingently, related to his affirmative material basis.

There are at least two fundamental premises in Marx from which any Marxist criticism must begin. In the first place all forms of consciousness – religious, moral, philosophical, legal, as well as language itself – have no independent history and arise from the material activity of men. Eagleton identifies a twofold specificity of Marxist criticism : material production is regarded as the ultimate determining factor of social existence, and class struggle is viewed as the central dynamic of historical development. Eagleton adds a third, Marxist-Leninist, imperative, namely a commitment to the theory and practice of political revolution.4 Eagleton is aware of the highly mediated and complex relation between base and superstructure,5 but his aptly Marxist insistence on the primacy of material production can be seen, as we shall see, to be the basis of virtually all his attacks on non-Marxist literary theory.

The second premise is Marx’s view that the class which is the ruling material force is also the ruling intellectual force: it owns the means of production both materially and mentally. In the light of this we can better understand Eagleton’s statement of the tasks of a “revolutionary literary criticism.” Such a criticism

would dismantle the ruling concepts of “literature,” reinserting “literary” texts into the whole field of cultural practices. It would strive to relate such “cultural” practices to other forms of social activity, and to transform the cultural apparatuses themselves. It would articulate its “cultural” analyses with a consistent political intervention. It would deconstruct the received hierarchies of “literature” and transvaluate received judgments and assumptions; engage with the language and “unconscious” of literary texts, to reveal their role in the ideological construction of the subject; and mobilize such texts . . . in a struggle to transform those subjects within a wider political context. (WB, 98)

But all of this subserves the “primary task” of Marxist criticism , which is “to actively participate in and help direct the cultural emancipation of the masses” (WB, 97). Eagleton repeatedly stresses that the starting point of theory must be a practical, political purpose and that any theory which will contribute to human emancipation through the socialist transformation of society is acceptable (LT, 211). He effectively develops Marx’s premise above when he emphasizes that the “means of production” includes the means of production of human subjectivity, which embraces a range of institutions such as “literature.” Eagleton regards the most difficult emancipation as that of the “space of subjectivity,” colonized as it is by the dominant political order. The humanities as a whole serve an ideological function that helps to perpetuate certain forms of subjectivity. Eagleton’s views here imply that for Marxist criticism , “ideology” is a crucial focus of the link between material and mental means of production.

Eagleton affirms that the “negation” entailed by Marxist criticism must have an affirmative material basis. There is an internal, not merely epiphenomenal, connection between practical goal and theoretical method. Hence the similarities between Marxism and “negative” non-Marxist theories are purely superstructural: which is itself an impossible contradiction since no Marxist insight can be “purely” superstructural. Whatever “threat” structuralism may pose to received ideology is thwarted by its complicity. As Eagleton shrewdly observes, the reactionary nature of structuralism lies in the very concept of “structure” (LT, 141), in the very positing of this received ideological notion as a basis of enquiry. It is only at this expense that structuralism dismantles the ruling ideologies of subjectivity. The general point here is that whatever non-Marxist theory postulates as a base or infrastructure of investigation is in fact an aspect of superstructure. Inasmuch as these theories fail to articulate their connections with the material infrastructure, they lapse into an effective, if sometimes undesired, complicity with ruling ideologies.

This is why Eagleton views non-Marxist theories as both subversive and complicit with capitalism, a contradiction inherent in their superstructural status. He arraigns,for example, structuralism’s static ahistorical view of society, as well as its reduction of labor, sexuality, and politics to “language.” Structuralism, moreover, ignores both literature and language as forms of social practice and production. Its anti-humanism brackets the human subject, thereby abolishing the subject’s potential as a political agent. These factors, Eagleton observes, contributed to a certain integration of structuralism into the orthodox academy (LT, 110–115). Similarly, in Eagleton’s eyes, the insights of psychoanalysis are not necessarily politically radical. For example, he asserts that the political correlative of Julia Kristeva’s theories, which disrupt all fixed structures, is anarchism. And her dismantling of the unified subject is not in itself revolutionary (LT, 189–193).

quote-all-propaganda-or-popularization-involves-a-putting-of-the-complex-into-the-simple-but-such-a-move-terry-eagleton-327236

Again, there is a recognition in Derrida’ s work that the manifestations of identity and presence in history are coercive. But this recognition is abstract: he views every philosophical opposition, regardless of its content, as a “violent hierarchy.” For Derrida, the base–superstructure model is one such deconstructible “opposition.” He views the “violence” of “writing” as “originary.”8 Derrida characteristically coerces historically specific texts and institutions into an abstractly uniform assailability in the name of “writing”: he defines “grammatology” as “the science of arbitrariness.” Hence Eagleton views d econstruction as outflanking every type of knowledge “to absolutely no effect.” Eagleton continues to say: “In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black. Marx is a metaphysician, and so is Schopenhauer, and so is Ronald Reagan. Has anything been gained by this manoeuvre?” (WB, 140).

Eagleton points out in his essay on Adorno that not all identity or unity is equally terroristic and that poststructuralism effects an “indiscriminate conflation” of different orders of power, oppression, and law. He stresses that any effective opposition to a given political order presupposes unity, solidarity, and at least a sense of provisional identity. The point is that Marxist attacks on identity and ideology derive their force from their inclusion within a more comprehensive vision governed by the necessity of their relation to an economic infrastructure.

It is clear that in Eagleton’s view, Derrida ’s insights, whatever their superficial opposition to prevailing orthodoxies, have merely a contingently subversive capacity since they dispense with “identity” altogether and do not claim internal coherence except a coherence of the negative: they can affirm nothing to replace the order they “subvert.” Eagleton points out that deconstruction ’s “dispersal” of the subject, itself a politically disabling gesture, is “purely textual”: “the infrastructure . . . for deconstruction is not de(con)structible” (WB, 139). As Derrida admits, his thought effectively arrests the Hegelian dialectic at its second phase, of “difference”: he abstracts this phase, divests it of all historical content, and employs it as a transcendental principle. As Eagleton has it, deconstruction “fails to comprehend class dialectics and turns instead to difference, that familiar ideological motif of the petty bourgeoisie” (WB, 134).

Hence Eagleton regards deconstruction as itself ideological. Like much poststructuralism , it effectively “colludes with the liberal humanism it seeks to embarrass.” Eagleton insists that deconstruction reproduces common bourgeois liberal themes (the notions of “identity” and “substance” were, after all, attacked by Locke and Hume). Again, Eagleton observes that many of the ideas of deconstruction are already prefigured and developed in Marxist writers such as Benjamin , Macherey, and Adorno , where the empty shell of deconstructive “difference” is imbued with political content. And because deconstruction’s insights are divorced from any infrastructure, it is unaware of the historical determinants of its own aporiai (WB, 133).

Eagleton acknowledges the potential of deconstruction . But he is also aware that this potential is already contained in the dialectical character of Marxism. What is original to Derrida and his followers is their remorseless insistence on “difference” as a basis of impugnment of literary and philosophical texts. Eagleton says of the “negative”: “only a powerless petty-bourgeois intelligentsia would raise it to the solemn dignity of a philosophy” (WB, 142). The bases of Derrida’s insights are already contained, according to Eagleton, in the context of a far vaster historically self-conscious vision, in the writings of Hegel and Marx. In fact, Eagleton’s latest work, After Theory, suggests that we need to return in some respects to a “plain realism.” He cautions that “If cultural theory is to engage with an ambitious global history, it must have answerable resources of its own, equal in depth and scope to the situation it confronts. It cannot afford simply to keep on recounting the same narratives of class, race and gender, indispensable as these topics are.”9

Notes 1 Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1984), p. 93. 2 Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1981), p. 84. Hereafter cited as WB. 3 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford and Minnesota: Blackwell/ University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 208. Hereafter cited as LT. 4 Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain: Essays 1975–1985 (London: New Left Books, 1986), pp. 81–82. 5 See Marxism and Literary Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1976), pp. 8–10. 6 Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: New Left Books, 1976), p. 54. Hereafter cited as CI. 7 Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 9. Hereafter cited as POS. 8 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 106. 9 Terry Eagleton, After Theory (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane and Penguin, 2003), pp. 221– 222.

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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

Mod-04 Lec-28 Marxist Literary Criticism

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.

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.

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.

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.

Marxist Criticism Essay

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Introduction

Economic forces, materialistic values, class conflicts, works cited.

Steered by Terrence Malick, Days of Heaven is an affirmative piece of masterwork, set in the dawn of the twentieth century in America. Malick qualifies in presenting the then weird conditions of America that fueled economical change. The film sets in during a time when industrialization was on the rise.

It is a time when people were yearning for the long-awaited days: the days of heaven, when the world was to take a new shape of economy. Marxism theory underscores the theme of this movie that, social conflicts between the rich and the poor fueled the social change that America underwent along her the path to capitalism.

Malick successfully creates a picture of a society that bears two categories of people, powerful (the owners) and the powerless (the workers). Abby and her Boyfriend Bill exemplify the powerless class while the wealthy lonely owner of a wheat farm stands in for the powerful lot.

This follows since the two poor jobless lovers end up seeking refuge from the rich farmer. According to them, he is more powerful than they are. Worth noting is that the two groups of people are not depicted with equal attention. The powerless class draws lesser attention from the movie compared to the powerful.

For instance, Linda says “…we used to roam the streets. There were people suffering of pain and hunger. Some people their tongues were hanging’ out of their mouth” (Malick). These words are symbolic in that, they refer to the poor countries that end up in crises, only for the powerful countries like America to ignore their cries. However, when the reverse occurs, all of them must respond. I admire the Bourgeoisie because this group stays on top of the world watching the others serve under its commands.

On the other hand, the proletariat class is subject to sympathy because it has to struggle to cope up with the standards of the former group. In fact, Dirk asserts, “The foreman, riding in a buggy, chides everyone to work hard, while the owner sits in a padded chair in the middle of a field” (Para. 14).

The powerful people have their power because they own vast lands and are rich. However, they deny it to others in fear of competition as well as the fear of losing the work force, which they get from the powerless class. Malick symbolically shows a fight between Bill, a worker, and a wealth man to show that this power comes through violence.

Concerning the then distribution of power and wealth,the 1916 setting of this movie tells it all. It pictures America as the only powerful and wealthy nation assuming the front line in World War I. The author provides sufficient evidence of conspicuous consumption.

The film is set in a time when electricity and expensive things were rare. ”…the owner sits in a padded chair in the middle of a field” (Dirk Para. 16). The workers, earning $3 a day cannot afford a padded chair; therefore, the owner only intents to show his wealth, hence a conspicuous consumption.

The society brought to light by the author value things to convey their social status and not their usefulness. The scenario between the farmer and the workers exemplifies the social value this society places on things as opposed to their usefulness. The farmer owns a gothic mansion but when the workers are tired of working in the wheat farms, they can only camp outside the star-lit night and not in the mansion. It is of no use to them.

The work done by the powerless lot is not a product of the culture that produces it. The taking by force of poor Bill’s girlfriend by the rich man symbolizes how the culture on study delights in things from elsewhere and not in its own products. Bill bases his decision to persuade his girlfriend to fall in love with the rich man on material rather than spiritual reasons. The two want to benefit economically from the wealthy man.

The characters employed in the film picture two different social classes. There is the class of the poor workers like Bill, Abby, and Linda and that of the wealthy men like Robert Wilke, the rich rancher. The two classes are in a struggle with each other. Each class wants to develop itself economically.

For instance, Bill tells his girlfriend never to give up the fake love affair because he knows what he expects in return. “Just have to get fixed up first. Things are not always gonna be this way” (Malick). On the other hand, Abby feels oppressed following the advantage that the rich man makes out of her, which is no more than a manipulation of workers. It is worth noting that this bourgeoisie lot manipulates the less powerful through religion. For instance, Linda says, “Unless one is…saved by God’s mercy in heaven…” (Malick).

The powerful lot wants the less powerful people to think that it can save them if they serve it but Linda comes in to declare God as the only savior of humanity. There is a sufficient evidence of alienation and fragmentation in the film when the workers are warned not to enter in the owners’ houses. As the films unfolds, when Bill protests against the charges subjected to Abby because of her poor work, he fears being fired showing how the working class admits their powerlessness.

The Days of Heaven is a must-watch masterpiece for any person interested the economic history of the current powerful countries like America. People tend to think that the power that America boasts today came in overnight; however, Malick shows the struggles and conflicts Americans faced as the economy walked down the path to capitalism. It is an informative piece of composition.

Dirk, Tim. Days of Heaven Review, 2004. Web.

Malick, Terrence, dir. Days of Heaven. Twentieth Century Fox, 1978. Film.

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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

12 Texts for Introducing Marxist Criticism