English literature: literary Marxism
- Created by: elliethornton11
- Created on: 18-10-21 14:07
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- Marxism in Literature
- Karl Marx
- believed that Western capitalist economic systems were designed to suppress the poor and increase the wealth of the rich
- critics tend to believe that authors' writing is a product of their class and cultural values
- the texts themselves are a product of ideology
- Marxist reader keeps in mind: power, work, oppression and money
- Marxism questions whether the text supports the social / economic system of the time or whether it undermines it
- politics of class
- nowadays Marxism has died down within political parties and systems
- intellectual perspective
- provides a counterbalance to the idea of seeing authors and works of literature as separate from politics
- also counterbalances the idea that literature comes from free, uninfluenced thought
- Towards a Critique of Political Economy
- mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life
- it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness
- Marxist theory
- the way we think and experience the world is conditioned by the way the economy is organised
- the base of society determines its superstructure
- base - the way the economy is organised
- superstructure - culture: education, law, religion, philosophy, political programmes and the arts
- capitalism thrives on exploiting workers
- labourers get less than those higher up the scale
- Marxist literary criticism
- Marx and Engels didn't say anything about literature themselves
- emphasise a difference between art and propaganda
- a writer's social class has a major impact on what they write
- constantly formed by social contexts
- rarely discusses specific details of a historical event
- has a generic view on all class disputes
- Marx and Engels didn't say anything about literature themselves
- what Marxist critics do
- 1. make a division between the overt and covert
- relate the covert to Marxist themes like class division
- 2. relate the content of the work to the social class of the author
- the author is unaware of what they are revealing in the text
- 3. explain the nature of a whole literary genre in terms of which social period 'produced' it
- the novel speaks for this social class
- 4. relate the work to the social assumptions of the time in which it is consumed
- used in cultural materialism
- 5. 'politicisation of literary form'
- literary forms are determined by political circumstance, ie structure represent societal structure
- 1. make a division between the overt and covert
- Twelfth Night example
- every character has a secondary world
- those in higher class don't suffer consequences while the lower class do
- the servants have aspirations
- read with social mobility
- Marxist criticism
- if it is to be read like this then evidence of economy is needed
- not all Marxist readings will come to the same conclusion - it is varied
- a concern with material living conditions
- yet more theoretical in literature
- influential critics
- Louis Althusser
- Pierre Macherey
- Karl Marx
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