To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: Marxist literary criticism.
Journal articles on the topic 'Marxist literary criticism'
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the top 50 journal articles for your research on the topic 'Marxist literary criticism.'
Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.
You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.
Browse journal articles on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.
1
Boer, Roland. "Twenty-five Years of Marxist Biblical Criticism." Currents in Biblical Research 5, no. 3 (June 2007): 298–321. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1476993x07077963.
Full textAbstract:
In the context of a renewed interest in Marxism outside biblical studies, this article surveys and critiques the background and current status of a similar renewal in biblical studies. It begins with a consideration of the background of current studies in liberation, materialist and political theologies, and moves on to note the division between literary and social scientific uses of Marxist theories. While those who used Marxist literary methods were initially inspired by Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson, more recent work has begun to make use of a whole tradition of Marxist literary criticism largely ignored in biblical studies. More consistent work, however, has taken place in the social sciences in both Hebrew Bible and New Testament studies. In Hebrew Bible studies, debates focus on the question of mode of production, especially the domestic or household mode of production, while in New Testament studies, the concerns have been with reconstructing the context of the Jesus movement and, more recently, the Pauline correspondence. I close with a number of questions concerning the division into different areas of what is really a holistic approach to texts and history.
2
Hamadi, Lutfi. "The Concept of Ideology in Marxist Literary Criticism." European Scientific Journal, ESJ 13, no. 20 (July 31, 2017): 154. http://dx.doi.org/10.19044/esj.2017.v13n20p154.
Full textAbstract:
This paper attempts an exploration of the development of the Marxist literary theory in general and the concept of ideology in particular. Showing the significant role this theory plays in the field of literary criticism, the paper focuses on remarkable Marxist figures, explores their most notable works, and sheds light on their contributions to the theory and the field of literary criticism. For this purpose, the paper starts with basic Marxist principles of reading literature set by Marx and Engels and examines the changes that occurred with other critics, mainly Althusser, Jameson, and Eagleton in their attempts to show the importance of ideology in explaining literature and understanding its backgrounds, goals, and methods. Thus, the methodology will include an historical overview, shedding light on early Marxist perspectives, comparing and contrasting the contributions and adjustments added by remarkable Marxist thinkers, and illustrating by examples of literary texts and how they are seen and analyzed by these Marxist scholars.
3
Jameson, Fredric. "Marxist Criticism and Hegel." Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 131, no. 2 (March 2016): 430–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2016.131.2.430.
Full textAbstract:
The interesting question is in fact a two-way street. Familiar enough, with its accusatory hint of idealism and intellectualizing elitism, is the query, In what sense was Marx a Hegelian? But more tantalizing, more science fictional and counterfactual, is its echoing alternative: In what sense was Hegel a Marxist? The sharing of the dialectic is of course the easy way out, in a speculative dilemma calculated to open up fresh answers and unexpected new problems. I will only take on one of them here—namely, what Hegel might have to tell us about the possibilities, and also the limits, of Marxist literary criticism, an issue that may seem as remote today as literature itself (and the theorizing criticism of it).
4
Zhang, Wei. "The Development of Marxist Shakespearean Criticism in China." Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance 20, no. 35 (December 30, 2019): 99–113. http://dx.doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.20.08.
Full textAbstract:
Chinese Shakespearean criticism from Marxist perspectives is highly original in Chinese Shakespeare studies. Scholars such as Mao Dun, Yang Hui, Zhao Li, Fang Ping, Yang Zhouhan, Bian Zhilin, Meng Xianqiang, Sun Jiaxiu, Zhang Siyang and Wang Yuanhua adopt the basic principles and methods of Marxism to elaborate on Shakespeare’s works and have made great achievements. With ideas changed in different political climates, they have engaged in Shakespeare studies for over eight decades since the 1930s. At the beginning of the revolutionary age, they advocated revolutionary literature, followed Russian Shakespearean criticism from the Marxist perspective, and established the mode of class analysis and highlighted realism. Before and after the Cultural Revolution, they were concerned about class, reality and people. They also showed the “left-wing” inclination, taking literature as a tool to serve politics. Since the 1980s, they have been free from politics and entered the pure academic realm, analysing Shakespearean dramas with Marxist aesthetic theories and transforming from sociological criticism to literary criticism.
5
Ghosh, Ritwik. "Marxism and Latin American Literature." SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH 8, no. 4 (April 28, 2020): 208. http://dx.doi.org/10.24113/ijellh.v8i4.10539.
Full textAbstract:
In the aftermath of the collapse of the U.S.S.R Marxism remains a viable and flourishing tradition of literary and cultural criticism. Marx believed economic and social forces shape human consciousness, and that the internal contradictions in capitalism would lead to its demise.[i] Marxist analyses can show how class interests operate through cultural forms.[ii] Marxist interpretations of cultural life have been done by critics such as C.L.R James and Raymond Williams.[iii]
6
Barry, P. "Feminist Literary Criticism; Modernism/Postmodernism; New Historicism and Renaissance Drama; Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism." English 42, no. 173 (June 1, 1993): 182–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/english/42.173.182.
Full text
7
Murphy, John W. "The importance of postmodernism for Marxist literary criticism." Studies in Soviet Thought 34, no. 4 (November 1987): 233–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/bf01043537.
Full text
8
Markov, Alexander V. "FROM IDEALISM TO NEW MARXISM. PART 1. LEV PUMPYANSKY." Articult, no. 2 (2021): 83–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.28995/2227-6165-2021-2-83-90.
Full textAbstract:
Lev Pumpyansky's turn at the end of the 1920s from criticism of Marxism to the full acceptance of Marxist sociology as the main working tool of the literary historian can be viewed as a capitulation, but it could also be a disclosure of the potential of previous criticism. I prove that the criticism of Marxism by Pumpyansky fully fit into the dispute of neo-Kantianism against Hegelianism, while his sociology of literature was based on neo-Kantian foundations and the acceptance of Hegel's dialectics, but not Hegelian philosophy. I reconstruct a common source for Pumpyansky and Bakhtin’s view from the outside to both the neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian traditionsm, an episode from Plato's Phaedo. The difference in the understanding of the novel genre led Pumpyansky and Bakhtin to opposite conclusions. Pumpyansky's interpretation of the difference between the novel and the novella allowed him to accept Marxism as a metacritic of Neo-Hegelianism and Neo-Kantianism, preserving the position of the hero, which was unacceptable for Bakhtin. For Pumpyansky, Marxist sociology just realizes the intentions of neo-Kantianism as soon as it is applied not to the field of science, but to the field of literature and art. Disagreeing with the convergence of ethics and creativity, promoted by Bakhtin, Pumpyansky coined a consistent Marxist sociology of literature, claiming to be philosophical and relevant for today.
9
Kelsall, Malcolm. "The Worker in the Landscape: Constable, Marx, Poetry." Romanticism 26, no. 3 (October 2020): 255–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/rom.2020.0476.
Full textAbstract:
Since John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972) Marxist criticism of John Constable has criticised his landscapes as ‘Tory’ mystifications of the condition of the agricultural worker. This essay challenges this Marxist approach by returning to the philosophical basis of the traditional approach to painting to which Constable subscribed: ut pictura poesis. It is argued that his relation of poetry to landscape seeks to emphasize the importance of agricultural labour to all human activity and by uniting the diurnal with the demotic enhances the status of the common worker. In this respect Marxist criticism, properly applied, should read Constable positively. By altering perception of the importance of labour Constable, like early Wordsworth, or Blake and Shelley, is a potentially revolutionary artist.
10
Tally, Robert T. "Boundless Mystification." South Atlantic Quarterly 119, no. 4 (October 1, 2020): 779–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00382876-8663687.
Full textAbstract:
In Marxist literary criticism—for example, as represented by Fredric Jame-son’s influential study, The Political Unconscious—the interpretation of texts has frequently involved ideology critique, by which the critic attempts to disclose both the ideological content or structural limitations of a given text while also being attuned to the text’s utopian or revolutionary potential. In recent decades, Marxist criticism in particular and what is taken to be the hermeneutics of suspicion more generally have come under attack by literary scholars who favor various forms of postcritique, including surface reading and thin description. This essay suggests that postcritique, and all that it involves, contributes to the radical dismantling of higher education caused by rampant neoliberalism. The vocation of ideology critique and of Marxist criticism is, this essay contends, the most appropriate response to a society so utterly mystified as our own.
11
MIDDLETON, STUART. "THE CONCEPT OF “EXPERIENCE” AND THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS, 1924–1963." Modern Intellectual History 13, no. 1 (January 8, 2015): 179–208. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1479244314000596.
Full textAbstract:
Despite intense scholarly interest in the “Anglo-Marxism” that rose to prominence in Britain from the mid-1950s, its intellectual lineaments and lineages have yet to be fully accounted for. This is particularly the case with the concept of “experience,” which was a central category in the work of two of the most influential figures of the early “New Left” in Britain: Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson. This essay traces a conceptual history of “experience” from its emergence in Cambridge literary criticism during the 1920s and 1930s, and in the quasi-Marxist literary culture of the 1930s, to the confluence of these two currents in the work of Williams and Thompson. Reassessing the nature of each thinker's engagement with Leavisite literary and cultural criticism, and of Thompson's attempted reformulation of Marxism, it argues that recovering their widely differing usages of “experience” illuminates their distinctive conceptions of “culture” as a site of political action.
12
Alli, Oyedokun, and Wasiu Ademola. "A Linguistic (Stylistic) Reading of Ideological Discourse in Festus Iyayi’s Violence, The Contract and Heroes." Advances in Language and Literary Studies 10, no. 1 (February 28, 2019): 129. http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.10n.1p.129.
Full textAbstract:
This paper undertakes, through the prism of linguistic (stylistic) analysis, a reading of the ideological discourse in Festus Iyayi’s novels- Violence, The Contract, and Heroes, with the broad aim of establishing the nexus between literature and ideology, through the instrumentation of language, for societal transformation. The paper explores the symbiotic relationship between language and literature and how the former is used in the study and understanding of the latter. Attempt is made to identify the patterns of use of language with reference to the purpose of commenting on quality, the exegesis and interpretative meanings of the text. The scaffold upon which our analysis is anchored is the Marxist literary criticism based on socialist and dialectical theories. It is the contention of the Marxist theorists that literary works are a reflection of the social institutions from which they originate. Terry Eagleton has affirmed that Marxist criticism “is not merely sociology of literature” but paying attention to its forms, style and meaning with a view to grasping those forms, style and meaning “as the products of a particular history. In all, four major literary tools-narrative technique, lexical choice, dialogue and authorial comments are deployed as indices for our analytical framework, using the Critical Discourse Analysis. What is apparent is that no success can be achieved in the reading and understanding of a literacy text without a manifest use of language.
13
Wang, Ning. "Remembering Raymond Williams: His Theoretical Heritage to China’s World Literature and Culture Studies." Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures 6, no. 2 (December 28, 2022): 88–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202202008.
Full textAbstract:
Raymond Williams, the eminent British Marxist literary theorist, was introduced to China in the late 1980s, and his theories have since been increasingly attractive to China’s literary and cultural studies. He not only touched upon some of the fundamental issues of Marxist literary theory, such as ideology, culture, hegemony and aesthetics, but also developed it with his dynamic construction of a sort of cultural materialism, thus bridging between Marxist socio-historical and aesthetic criticism and cultural and linguistic factors. While literary and cultural theory is in decline in the West, Williams’s legacy is still appreciated in international circles, which ought to be cherished and inherited by us Chinese scholars in our studies of world literature and culture.
14
Goldstein, Philip. "Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (review)." symploke 14, no. 1 (2006): 348–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sym.2007.0023.
Full text
15
Gross, David S., and Philip Goldstein. "The Politics of Literary Theory: An Introduction to Marxist Criticism." World Literature Today 65, no. 4 (1991): 781. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/40147843.
Full text
16
Rubinstein, Annette T. "Fundamental problems in Marxist literary criticism: Form, history and ideology." Socialism and Democracy 11, no. 1 (January 1997): 1–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08854309708428188.
Full text
17
Omelchuk, Olesia. "Koriak’s Cultural Critique." Слово і Час, no. 7 (July 21, 2019): 18–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.33608/0236-1477.2019.07.18-26.
Full textAbstract:
According to the author of the article, the content and directions of literary criticism of Volodymyr Koriak (1889–1937) were determined by the idea of proletarian culture. Its basic principle was the struggle between the bourgeois and proletarian world, formulated in the philosophy of Marxism. However, this concept was not sufficient to build the concept of Ukrainian proletarian literature. In 1920s the most problematic for the critics was the choice of the criteria for identifying the literary text as a proletarian one. They had to take into account such non-textual factors as the author’s biography, national cultural forms, historical influences of Europeanism, colonialism, anti-colonialism, nationalism, imperialism, etc. Koriak’s works reflect the conflicts and compromises that the concept of Ukrainian proletarian literature underwent during 1919 – 1934. Especially complicated were such topics as the history of Ukrainian Marxist-proletarian thought, the ‘Borotbyst’ narrative, the issues of proletarian style and bourgeois cultural influences. The Ukrainian ‘narodnytstvo’ became a major part of Koriak’s critique. As a result, the bourgeois legacy (namely modernism, ‘narodnytstvo’, ‘national literature’) in Koriak’s literary-critical discourse received a particular negative evaluation. Koriak’s literary work testifi es to the fact that the proletarian-Marxist criticism of his contemporaries is featured by the coexistence of the three schemes of constructing proletarian literature: proletarian literature as terra nova; proletarian literature as a continuation of the socialist ideas of the pre-October literary works; proletarian literature as a transformation of the past (bourgeois) qualities and their recombination with new proletarian ones.
18
Keena, Justin. "Categorising C.S. Lewis's Literary Theory." Journal of Inklings Studies 12, no. 1 (April 2022): 1–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/ink.2022.0132.
Full textAbstract:
C.S. Lewis's two volumes of literary theory are compared and contrasted with the particular works in mainstream twentieth century literary theory that they most closely resemble. The Personal Heresy is akin to, but ultimately divergent from, the New Critical papers ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ and ‘The Affective Fallacy’. Likewise An Experiment in Criticism is akin to reader-response theories of the phenomenological variety, especially those of Georges Poulet, Wolfgang Iser, and Roman Ingarden, but unlike most other kinds. Lewis's position as a theorist is too reader-focused for New Criticism but also more formalistic than most reader-response theories. Nevertheless, these are the two movements with which his work has most in common, unlike other major twentieth-century movements, such as gender studies, Marxist theory, new historicism, queer theory, postmodernism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and structuralism.
19
Walsh, Richard. "Marxist Criticism of the Bible: A Critical Introduction to Marxist Literary Theory and the Bible ? Roland Boer." Religious Studies Review 32, no. 3 (July 2006): 193. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-0922.2006.00092_15.x.
Full text
20
Pold, Søren Bro, Olav W. Bertelsen, Lone Koefoed Hansen, Christian Ulrik Andersen, Shaowen Bardzell, and Jeffrey Bardzell. "Criticism – for Computational Alternatives." Aarhus Series on Human Centered Computing 1, no. 1 (October 5, 2015): 2. http://dx.doi.org/10.7146/aahcc.v1i1.21621.
Full textAbstract:
<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>Criticism is a reflection on the dialectical relation between content and technology, a relation that is often political, tied to Marxist dialectics or to other concepts of criticism from aesthetic and literary theory. This workshop will ask how we can bridge between criticism of technology and design. If we are to envision and design critical alternatives, how can critical approaches to technology help? What do we need to take from criticism, which concepts of criticism and how can they be applied? </span></p></div></div></div>
21
Rudinsky, Norma. "The Context of the Marxist-Leninist View of Slovak Literature 1945-1969." Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 505 (January 1, 1986): 36. http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/cbp.1986.99.
Full textAbstract:
This paper resulted from an attempt to explore factors determining or underlying the "Marxificalion" of Slovak literature after 1945-- an attempt motivated by a hunch that certain Marxisl-Leninisl principles had provided a different insight into Slovak literature from that provided by the liberal, democratic "aesthetic appreciation" school of criticism in prewar Czechoslovakia. The idea that Slovak literary criticism has thrived, relatively, since World War II is by no means new and was advanced, for example, by emigre crilics.
22
Abarchah, Mahdia. "The Limits of Teaching Literary Discourse: A Stylistic Approach." Studies in Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis 3, no. 1 (July 25, 2022): 1–6. http://dx.doi.org/10.48185/spda.v3i1.436.
Full textAbstract:
Some scholars take it for granted that literature and linguistics are detached areas of education. Stylistics, however, as the study will show, is the field where literary criticism and linguistics could overlap and thus contribute to ameliorating the strategies of teaching literature. There are two streams of literary criticism: the textual approaches, such as Formalism and New Criticism, which highlight close reading of the given text. On the other hand, there are contextual disciplines, for instance, Marxist Criticism and Feminist Criticism, which draw on socio-political and ideological movements. Consequently, teachers vary in the way they interpret and instruct their students. Stylistics, nonetheless, is a field where different approaches could converge. It is not only a theory describing how one could read and understand a literary discourse but also a pedagogical method that could help students appreciate literature and encourage them to be involved in the interpretation procedure. The study will illustrate these points through the discussion of “foregrounding”—a stylistic device—in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem: “Pied Beauty”. Yet, however efficient in stylistics a teacher could be, he/she should respect certain limits.
23
Teres, Harvey. "Remaking Marxist Criticism: Partisan Review's Eliotic Leftism, 1934-1936." American Literature 64, no. 1 (March 1992): 127. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2927492.
Full text
24
Zhang, Zaixin. "Voices of the self in fiction: An alternative Marxist approach to literary criticism." Neophilologus 78, no. 1 (January 1994): 3–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/bf00999947.
Full text
25
Robinson, Mihail A. "The theoretical innovation of V. N. Peretz in the field of methodology for studying the history of literature. To the 150th anniversary of the birth of the researcher." Slavic Almanac, no. 3-4 (2020): 449–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.31168/2073-5731.2020.3-4.5.02.
Full textAbstract:
The article analyzes the methodological views of the academician V. N. Peretz, an outstanding Russian researcher and teacher. Refusing to follow the canons of the cultural-historical school of Russian literary criticism, in his works “From Lectures on the Methodology of the History of Russian Literature” (Kiev, 1914) and “A Brief Essay on the Methodology of the History of Russian Literature” (Petrograd, 1922) the researcher tried to find new approaches to the analysis of literary works. He believed that “the history of literature examines and studies the formal side of the works of verbal creativity, its evolution, leaving the cultural historian to study the content, the ideological side of the monuments of the past as such.” Peretz’s judgments were similar to those adopted by the followers of the OPOYAZ school (The Society for the Study of Poetic Language), and even had a certain influence on the development of formalism at the initial stage. This circumstance was noted by such researchers close to this research community as V. M. Zhirmunsky and its active members like Roman Jakobson. The relationship of Peretz’s theoretical positions with the methods of the Russian formalist school caused criticism from the followers of “Marxist” methodology in the 1920s. In the disputes between the formalists and the “Marxists”, Peretz clearly sympathized with the former believing that they were trying to “resurrect philology.” Peretz himself characterized his “Methodology” as “not Marxist” and had faint hopes for the possibility of its publication, although he continued to work on it. However, he never finished and published the extended version. His “Short Sketch” was reprinted twice abroad before being printed again in his homeland in 2010, 88 years after the first edition.
26
Qiu, Xiaolin. "From the Stand to the Method: On Western Marxist Literary Ideological Theory and Criticism." Comparative Literature: East & West 5, no. 1 (March 2003): 229–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2003.12015640.
Full text
27
Nento, Arief Rahmat. "Superhuman Marxism in Mark Millar’s Red Son." TRANS-KATA: Journal of Language, Literature, Culture and Education 1, no. 1 (November 29, 2020): 22–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.54923/transkata.v1i1.6.
Full textAbstract:
The object of this research is a Graphic Novel entitled “Superman: Red Son” by Mark Millar. The novel is a story about a Superman in a different universe who lived amongst the society of communist and was raised by communist Ideology, involving issues of social nomenclature. The basis of this research resides in Marxism Theory and Graphic Novel. This research aims to determine the message conveyed behind the book as either critique or support towards the ideas of Communism. This research applied qualitative descriptive method and Marxist Literary Criticism as its Literary Approach. The Research Result pointed out that the book significantly showcased how far the success of Communism could go, especially with a Superhuman leader by their side. Simultaneously, the results also indicated that this work also represents critique upon Communism failures, specifically over the downfall of a utopian state the Super-powered leader had worked so hard for. This research revealed how Marxism could ideologically endure and survive, despite being overpowered by relentless Americans. It also shows that despite having a Superhuman leader, several problems became the factor of Communism failure in both the book and in reality remains unaverted.
28
Walhout, M. D. "F. O. Matthiessen and the Future of American Studies." Prospects 22 (October 1997): 1–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s036123330000003x.
Full textAbstract:
Now that the Soviet empire has collapsed, it is time for a fresh look at the victims of the oppositional “Cold War criticism” that came to dominate American Studies in the 1980s. Hoping to stem the tide of the Reagan Revolution, the “New Americanists,” as Frederick Crews dubbed the academic heirs of the New Left, instigated a sweeping critique of their own discipline, charging the founders of American Studies with complicity in imperialism abroad and McCarthyism at home. Of all the founders, none was interrogated more thoroughly than F. O. Matthiessen, long regarded as the very model of a critic for whom radical politics and academic criticism were not mutually exclusive commitments. As late as the early 1980s, critics were still hailing Matthiessen as a pioneer in the development of American Marxist criticism. Frederick Stern, for example, asserted that Matthiessen's “methodology as a critic, though not in any pure sense Marxist…, comes closer to some of the distinguished efforts of the Marxist critics of Europe than does the work of just about any other major American critic of Matthiessen's time” (44). Similarly, Leo Marx argued that “in his subtle treatment of the interplay between literature and society, Matthiessen in a sense anticipated the development of a more supple Marxist cultural and literary theory since its liberation from the rigid doctrinal cast of the Stalin era” (256). Yet it was also in the early 1980s that the first blow to Matthiessen's reputation was struck in The American Renaissance Reconsidered, a collection of papers from the English Institute whose title, echoing that of Matthiessen's magnum opus, announced the beginning of an ambitious campaign to revise the history of American Studies – a campaign that proved to be quicker and easier than anyone could have expected.
29
Khadafi, Bima Iqbal. "Issues of Inequality and the Political Economy in the 1990s Singapore: A Marxist Reading on Alfian bin Sa’at’s “Birthday”." Journal of Language and Literature 22, no. 2 (September 26, 2022): 280–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.24071/joll.v22i2.4149.
Full textAbstract:
This research closely reads a short story by Alfian bin Sa’at entitled “Birthday” in relation to the historical narrative and the political economy of 1990s Singapore using the perspective of Terry Eagleton’s Marxist literary criticism. The result of this study shows 1) that Alfian challenges a portion of the historical narrative of Singapore’s political economy in the 1990s at which ideology works to justify the power hierarchy, yet altogether highlights the other portion of it to shed some light on the oppressed; 2) that challenging and, at the same time, highlighting the historical narrative are Alfian’s strategy to endorse his political commitment while not being openly partisan; and 3) that Alfian carefully configures the literary form and content of his work – through his use of multilingualism and Singaporean English – to advocate his idea of the future of Singapore and – through his use of simple sentences that build a stream-of-consciousness plot – to underline the complex social realities whereby issues of inequality (gender, racial, and class) are correlated. This study implies that the use of Marxist literary criticism in reading a literary work from a formerly colonized country cannot neglect the traces of neo- and/or colonial experiences since colonialism itself, following Marx and postcolonial theorists, is a more acute form of capitalism. However, this paper finds that, different from the usual postcolonial reading, the Singaporeans (its capitalists and government) are as complicit as the Western neo-colonial enterprises for the inequalities and oppression happening in the region.
30
Davies, Dominic. "All That Is Solid Falls from the Sky: Modernity and the Volume of World Literature." Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 9, no. 1 (January 2022): 1–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.33.
Full textAbstract:
AbstractThis article pits two conceptions of modernity—that of the Marxist humanist Marshall Berman and the ANT (Actor-Network Theory) sociologist Bruno Latour—against each other, exploring the implications of each for postcolonial and world literary criticism. The article begins by explaining “modernity” in the terms of both theorists, focusing on the “split” between subject and object, text and world. It then identifies a wider Latourian turn in postcolonial and world literary studies that has emerged in response to the prescriptively structural approaches of groups such as the WReC. In response, the article offers in turn a Latourian reading and then a structural critique of the Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s fifth novel, The Sound of Things Falling (2011, trans. 2013), probing their possibilities and limitations. In conclusion, it suggests Berman’s more expansive definition of modernist practice as one way in which postcolonial and world literary criticism might more effectively mediate between structural critique and close reading.
31
Esonwanne, Uzoma. "“Yes, but . . .” : On Reforming African Literary Scholarship." Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 4, no. 2 (April 2017): 265–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/pli.2017.4.
Full textAbstract:
Abstract“Yes, but . . .” subscribes fully to the arguments on the basis of which Tejumola Olaniyan refutes the often unspoken axioms such as the “corporeal” test by which what counts as genuinely “African” in African literary scholarship is determined. In those arguments, which appear in “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense” (PLI 3.3 [2016]: 387–96), he outlines very explicitly the views about the objects of study, methodologies, and critical theories that have implicitly guided the most powerful scholarship on African literature at least since the 1990s. It expresses some concern, however, that, in calling for a reformation of the “ideological test” that appears to tether African Marxist criticism to the critic’s identity, Olaniyan may have inadvertently left open a back door through which the corporeal axiom could sneak back into African literary criticism. To preempt this, it questions the narrative of globalization on the basis of which he posits the category of the “Post-Global Age.” More specifically, it argues that the temporal scheme represented in the “post” in the “post-global” on which his understanding of globalization rests is flawed. Finally, substituting “late capitalism” for globalization, it argues that “If what late capitalism/globalization longs for is to render capitalism as ineluctable ‘as fate,’ then African literary criticism is obliged ‘to consider the possibility that, to the question, “Are “post,” “trans,” and globalist/neo-universalist propositions now (more than ever) definitionally viable for African literature’ ” that Olaniyan poses, “the answer could be a qualified interrogative rather than a simple affirmative: ‘Yes, but . . . ?’ not ‘Yes.’ ”
32
Foxcroft, Nigel H., and Christian Høgsbjerg. "The Earle Birney – Malcolm Lowry Connection." University of Toronto Quarterly 91, no. 2 (June 1, 2022): 49–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/utq.91.2.03.
Full textAbstract:
The eminent Canadian poet, Earle Birney (1904–95), and the late modernist writer, Malcolm Lowry (1909–57), shared not only a supportive friendship in Vancouver (ignited by Sybil Hutchinson in 1947) involving the patronage of each other’s verses. Their deeper connections were rooted in shared experiences under the influence of Marxist ideas in 1930s England. A self-proclaimed “working-class boy,” Birney was radicalized toward Marxism whilst studying for a Toronto doctoral degree during the Great Depression. Attracted to the Young Communist League, he was won over to Trotskyism in 1933 by Kenneth and Sylvia Johnstone. Convinced that the Communist position was “basically unMarxist” for failing to build a united front against Adolf Hitler, he co-launched a branch of the International Left Opposition (Trotskyist) of Canada and organized political groups in Utah. Yet it was in the United Kingdom in 1934 that he joined (with Esther Heiger, C.L.R. James, and others) the Marxist group within the Independent Labour Party. His correspondence with Trotsky culminated in a visit to Norway to seek advice. His doctoral thesis, 1930s criticism, and literary works – such as Down the Long Table – were shaped by Marxist aesthetics. A Cambridge undergraduate in English in 1929–32, Lowry was aware of the appeal of Marxism to many UK intellectuals. He became involved in political debates hosted by the Haldanes at Roebuck House and contributed to The Venture and Experiment. Liaising with the “Cambridge Five,” he was impressed by Guy Burgess who lent his surname to a character in his 1930s novel, In Ballast to the White Sea (2014), a treatise on communism and revolutions of politics and the soul. Inspired by Waldo Frank, he ensured that Trotskyism and its impact on Mexico are central themes in Under the Volcano (1947).
33
Saoudi, Bechir. "Totalitarianism and Class Warfare in George Orwell’s Animal Farm." Arab World English Journal For Translation and Literary Studies 6, no. 4 (October 24, 2022): 162–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.24093/awejtls/vol6no4.12.
Full textAbstract:
This article studies the struggle between classes in George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm (1945). The most suitable school of literary criticism to tackle such a subject is that of Marxism. Two basic Marxist principles are at the center of the study: class conflict and the notion of base and superstructure. The article addresses the ongoing class conflict occurring at the base between humans and pigs on the one hand and lower-class animals on the other. Three main questions have been addressed: In what ways does the upper class oppress the lower? How does the lower class respond? What is the outcome of the struggle? The study uncovers the major factors that allow the upper class to overcome the lower in Animal Farm. The lower-class response consists of both constructive and destructive attitudes. The balance is ultimately tipped towards authoritarianism, leading the animals to live in conditions worse than those of the pre-revolutionary period.
34
Bounds, Philip. "A Spy in the House of Art: The Marxist Criticism of Anthony Blunt." Critique 46, no. 2 (April 3, 2018): 343–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03017605.2018.1456631.
Full text
35
Meng, Zekun. "Study on the Causes and Influence of New Marxism in Eastern Europe from a Humanitarian Perspective." BCP Social Sciences & Humanities 18 (June 30, 2022): 270–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.54691/bcpssh.v18i.995.
Full textAbstract:
New Marxism in Eastern Europe, as an important part of the development of Marxism, has rich theoretical connotation, and its emergence also has a unique social and cultural background. This paper mainly analyzes the causes of the emergence of neo-Marxism in Eastern Europe from the humanitarian perspective. The formation and development of new Marxism in Eastern Europe is rooted in the theoretical cornerstone of Marxism at the level of ideological origin, and its ideological and theoretical basis is the reinterpretation of the humanitarian concept in traditional Marxism. It also accepted the influence of contemporary Western European modern ideological trend and Western European neo-Marxism, which promoted the deep humanitarian thinking in Eastern European neo-Marxism. At the same time, the special meaning of the new Marxism in Eastern Europe lies in that it was formed in socialism, and it was a new Marxism that introspected and criticized the socialist construction mode at that time. It is also a neo-Marxism that absorbs the national spirits of different countries in Eastern Europe and is highly localized, showing different specific contents in different countries. Neo-Marxism in Eastern Europe is a philosophical system produced under the unique social background, in which the humanitarianism thought has promoted the development of Marxist thought, and made Marxism integrate with modern society. The criticism of the Soviet model also impacted the rigid system at that time, and after it was introduced into China, it also played a positive role in emancipating the mind of our ideological and literary circles in the new period.
36
Naishtat, Francisco. "Benjamin’s Profane Uses of Theology: The Invisible Organon." Religions 10, no. 2 (February 2, 2019): 93. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rel10020093.
Full textAbstract:
Invisible, but suggestive and fruitful; deprived of any reference to doctrine or ultimate assertive foundations, but nevertheless used in Benjamin like written images, crystallized as “images of thought”; as doctrinally mute as it is heuristically audible, Benjamin’s use of theology reminds us of the ironical use that Jorge Luis Borges himself made of theology and metaphysics as part of his own poetic forms. As such, these images of thought are located both in the place of philosophical use and in the one of methodological cunning or Metis, across the various levels of the corpus: a metaphysics of experience, literary criticism, philosophy of language, theory of history and Marxism. Therefore, accepting that criticism (Kritik) is the visible organon and the object of Benjaminian philosophy, is not theology, then, its invisible organon? What seems to be particular to Benjamin, however, is the agonistic but nevertheless heuristic way in which he intends to use theology in order to upset, disarray, and deconstruct the established philosophy, and specially its dominant trends in the field of the theory of history: historicism, positivism, and the evolutionary Hegelian–Marxist philosophy of history. In this article we try to demonstrate how this theological perspective is applied to a Benjaminian grammar of time. We conclude agonistically, confronting the resulting Benjaminian notion of historical past against Heiddeger’s own vision of historical time.
37
Majer-Bobetko, Sanja. "Between music and ideologies: Croatian music criticism from the beginning to World War II." Muzyka 63, no. 4 (December 31, 2018): 55–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.36744/m.344.
Full textAbstract:
As the Croatian lands were exposed to often aggressive Austrian, Hungarian, and Italian politics until WWI and in some regions even later, so Croatian music criticism was written in the Croatian, German and Italian languages. To the best of our knowledge, the history of Croatian music criticism began in 1826 in the literary and entertainment journal Luna, and was written by an anonymous author in the German language.A forum for Croatian language music criticism was opened in Novine Horvatzke, i.e. in its literary supplement Danica horvatska, slavonska i dalmatinska in 1835, which officially started to promote the Croatian National Revival, setting in motion the process of constituting the Croatian nation in the modern sense of the word. However, those articles cannot be considered musical criticism, at least not in the modern sense of the word, as they never went beyond the level of mere journalistic reports. The first music criticism in the Croatian language in the true sense of the word is generally considered a very comprehensive text by a poet Stanko Vraz (1810-51) about a performance of the first Croatian national opera Ljubav i zloba (Love and malice) by Vatroslav Lisinski (1819-54) from 1846. In terms of its criteria for judgement, that criticism proved to become a model for the majority of 19th-century and later Croatian music criticism. Two judgement criteria are clearly expressed within it: national and artistic.Regardless of whether we are dealing with 1) ideological-utilitarian criticism, which was directed towards promoting the national ideology (Franjo Ksaver Kuhač, 1834-1911; Antun Dobronić, 1878-1955), 2) impressionist criticism based on the critic’s subjective approach to particular work (Antun Gustav Matoš, 1873-1914; Milutin Cihlar Nehajev, 1880-1931; Nikola Polić, 1890-1960), or 3) Marxist criticism (Pavao Markovac, 1903-41), we may observe the above mentioned two basic criteria. Only at the end of the period under consideration the composer Milo Cipra (1906-85) focused his interest on immanent artistic values, shunning any ideological utilitarianism, and insisting on the highest artistic criteria.
38
Espejo, Lance. "The Place of Literary Criticism in the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Praxis of the Philippine National Democratic Movement." Kritika Kultura, no. 39 (September 20, 2022): 576–610. http://dx.doi.org/10.13185/kk2022.003926.
Full text
39
Zaitsev, Alexander V. "Humanistic ontology of the worldview in I. Dedkov's literary criticism: origins, nature, essence." Verhnevolzhski Philological Bulletin 1, no. 24 (2021): 193–203. http://dx.doi.org/10.20323/2499-9679-2021-1-24-193-203.
Full textAbstract:
The article examines the question of the nature, origins and content of the humanistic worldview of I. Dedkov, a literary critic. The author polemicizes with the existing views on this issue and offers his own approach to solving it using specific empirical material. From the author's point of view, the origins of Dedkov's humanistic worldview can be found in russian classical philosophy and russian pre-revolutionary philosophy. In addition, as it follows from the textual analysis of various verbal sources, including his epistolary heritage, diaries, literary and critical articles, I. Dedkov was strongly influenced by russian and Western European existentialism. The main purpose of this article is to reconstruct Dedkov's worldview in its dynamics and development, and to determine his relation to the marxist philosophy and communist worldview that prevailed at the time. This article demonstrates a gradual but systematic trend in the transformation of the literary critic's worldview from the dominance of stalinist elements in Dedkov's social, political, and philosophical views to overcoming them and to formaing free and independent perception of reality. The main methods the author relies on are the elements of system analysis, induction and deduction, analysis and synthesis, biographical approach, discursive and narrative analysis. As a result of this work the author of the article was able to reconstruct the main elements and features of I. Dedkov's humanistic worldview, as reflected in his biography and literary and critical work. The author used I. Dedkov's hitherto unpublished letters stored at the I. A. Dedkov Interregional scientific and educational center at Kostroma state university as a source for writing this article.
40
Mehring, Franz. "On Hauptmann's ‘The Weavers’ (1893)." New Theatre Quarterly 11, no. 42 (May 1995): 184–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00001202.
Full textAbstract:
Born in 1846, Franz Mehring as a young man was a follower of Ferdinand Lassalle, who in 1863 had organized Germany's first socialist party. As well as establishing a reputation as a journalist with his contributions to many liberal and democratic newspapers, Mehring was awarded his doctorate at Leipzig University in 1881 for his dissertation on the history and teachings of German social democracy. In his mid-forties he embraced Marxism and in 1891 joined the German Social Democratic Party, soon emerging as the intellectual leader of its left wing. He became editor of the Leipziger Volkszeitung and wrote prolifically for Die Neue Zeit and other radical journals on history, politics, philosophy, and literature. His book The Lessing Legend, published in 1893, is regarded as the first sustained attempt at Marxist literary criticism. His major biography of Karl Marx appeared in 1918, the year before his death. Completed in 1891, The Weavers was accepted for performance by the Deutsches Theater but was rejected by the Berlin censor as ‘a portrayal which specifically instils class hatred’. The first production of the play, discussed by Mehring below, was possible only because the Freie Bühne was a subscription society. In October 1893 a further private performance was given at the Neue Freie Volksbühne, followed by seven more in December at the Freie Volksbühne, where Franz Mehring was chairman. By now, the Prussian State censor had overruled his Berlin subordinate and The Weavers received its public premiere at the Deutsches Theater on 25 September 1894. On each occasion Hauptmann's play was greeted with great enthusiasm by the public, but found no favour with the Imperial family who indignantly cancelled their regular box at the Deutsches Theater. Subsequently The Weavers was banned from public performance in France, Austria, Italy, and Russia. Mehring's article appeared originally in Die Neue Zeit, XI, No. I (1893). Its translation in NTQ forms part of an occasional series on early Marxist dramatic criticism, which already includes Trotsky on Wedekind (NTQ28) and Lunacharsky on Ibsen (NTQ39). EDWARD BRAUN
41
Mbewe, Ian. "Application of Political Satire in Mission to Kala and Devil on The Cross." Journal of Law and Social Sciences 5, no. 1 (August 15, 2022): 69–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.53974/unza.jlss.5.1.793.
Full textAbstract:
The study attempted to demonstrate how political satire is applied in a pre-independence African fiction Mission to Kala and a post- independence African fiction Devil on the Cross. Satire, mild or bitter, has a history of being used to expose the negative socio-economic and political realities perpetrated by both the sympathisers of colonialism and later the agents of neo-colonialism in the post-independence phase. The study employed the Marxist literary theory and Literary Onomastics through stylistic analysis and demonstrated how satire exposed the evils and how a ‘training camp’ in the colonial era was transformed into a ‘jungle’ in post-independent Africa. Character types in both periods exhibited parasitic traits such as greed, selfishness, narrow appetites and sadistic violence leading to exploitation and oppression. This historical transition was delineated on the basis of the colonised African elite and subordinates as the direct off-shoot of the African bourgeoisie groups, which created a symbolic connection between the two periods of time in the African context. The findings indicated that both texts maintained the Marxist outlook, employed ironic juxtaposition to satirise capitalism, each satirist employed a different style and Beti had the colonised African elite and subordinates as his targets of satire as opposed to Ngugi’s comprador politicians, comprador and national bourgeoisie. The masses were not spared of criticism.
42
Cherryholmes, Cleo H. "Teaching About Research Methodology and Its Crises." News for Teachers of Political Science 44 (1985): 19–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0197901900003913.
Full textAbstract:
One promise of the behavioral revolution was that metaphysical assumptions would be minimized, if not eliminated, in political research and theorizing. Nothing would be taken for granted. It is now obvious that this is not possible. Instead, the question is which metaphysical assumptions are most felicitous and persuasive in our search for knowledge about politics. This question does not have a single, uncomplicated answer. For those of us who teach research methodology, interesting and at times disillusioning developments have influenced thinking about research methodology during the last twenty years. Developments in modern logic, continental and neo- Marxist thought, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and even literary criticism has upset previously held assumptions about behavioral political research and the nature of empirically based theory.
43
Waitzkin, Howard, and Theron Britt. "A Critical Theory of Medical Discourse: How Patients and Health Professionals Deal with Social Problems." International Journal of Health Services 19, no. 4 (October 1989): 577–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.2190/l84u-n4mq-9yac-d4pp.
Full textAbstract:
Criticism of social context does not generally appear in medical encounters. When contextual issues arise in medical discourse, messages of ideology and social control may become apparent, usually without the conscious awareness of the participants. By easing the physical or psychological impact of contextual difficulties, or by encouraging patients' conformity to mainstream expectations of desirable behavior, encounters with doctors can help win patients' consent to troubling social conditions. Seen in this light, doctor-patient encounters become micropolitical situations that do not typically encourage explicit statements or actions by health professionals to change contextual sources of their patients' difficulties. A critical theory influenced by structuralism suggests that the surface meanings of signs in medical discourse prove less important than their structural relationships. In addition, a theoretical approach adopting elements of post-structuralism and Marxist literary criticism emphasizes the marginal, absent, or excluded elements of medical discourse. Contextual features that shape a text include social class, sex, age, and race. Through the underlying structure of medical discourse, contextual problems are expressed, marginalized, and managed.
44
Brown, Will. "The essay and psychogeography: Negotiating Marxism in the essays of Iain Sinclair and Will Self." Art & the Public Sphere 8, no. 1 (July 1, 2019): 83–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/aps_00007_1.
Full textAbstract:
Abstract In their essays for the London Review of Books (LRB), Iain Sinclair and Will Self draw on two legacies in particular ‐ that of the essays of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, and that of Psychogeography and the work of the Situationist International. This article reviews a selection of these LRB essays ‐ appearing between 2002 and 2015. It traces and analyses a dialectical tension within them ‐ inherited from Benjamin and Adorno ‐ as to the commensurability of 'the essayistic' with the delivery of serious, effective Marxist criticism; whether (as Self himself says, noting an analogous tension in the films of Patrick Keiller) they are to see their own work 'as part of a strategy of resistance to the spatial forms of late capitalism, or only as incorporations of the everyday into a bourgeois calculus of the arty-factual'. It is argued that this tension is itself not only characteristic of, but in some way fundamental to their work and its impetus, concluding with a consideration of how the essay form might offer a means of moving beyond ideology (which is the constraint of both capitalism and Marxism alike) ‐ to find a literary analogue to, and vehicle for, the imaginative spatial possibilities and practices that the psychogeographic legacy represents.
45
Maver, Igor. "American 'committed' drama in Slovene theatres." Acta Neophilologica 27 (December 1, 1994): 57–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/an.27.0.57-65.
Full textAbstract:
The purpose of this study is essentially to demonstrate that the delayed stagings of American 'committed' plays, written in the thirties and produced in Slovene theatres immediately after World War Two in the late forties and fifties, were often miscontextualized and partly misinterpreted by the literary critics of the period. This was only in the early post-war years largely due to the need to serve the then ruling ideology and to comply with the criteria of Marxist aesthetisc, especially that of a radical social criticism. However, the later stagings particularly of Arthur Miller's and also Tennessee Williams's plays, did not see the same phenomenon, for it was they that assured the popularity of the American post-war drama on Slovene stages and, even more importantly, helped Slovene theatre to come off age in the sixties.
46
Maver, Igor. "American 'committed' drama in Slovene theatres." Acta Neophilologica 27 (December 1, 1994): 57–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/an.27.1.57-65.
Full textAbstract:
The purpose of this study is essentially to demonstrate that the delayed stagings of American 'committed' plays, written in the thirties and produced in Slovene theatres immediately after World War Two in the late forties and fifties, were often miscontextualized and partly misinterpreted by the literary critics of the period. This was only in the early post-war years largely due to the need to serve the then ruling ideology and to comply with the criteria of Marxist aesthetisc, especially that of a radical social criticism. However, the later stagings particularly of Arthur Miller's and also Tennessee Williams's plays, did not see the same phenomenon, for it was they that assured the popularity of the American post-war drama on Slovene stages and, even more importantly, helped Slovene theatre to come off age in the sixties.
47
Krummel, John W. M. "The Symposium on Overcoming Modernity and Discourse in Wartime Japan." HISTORICKÁ SOCIOLOGIE 13, no. 2 (November 29, 2021): 83–104. http://dx.doi.org/10.14712/23363525.2021.19.
Full textAbstract:
The symposium on overcoming modernity (kindai no chōkoku) that took place in Tokyo in 1942 has been much commented upon, but later critics have tended to over-emphasize the wartime political context and the ideological connection to Japanese ultra-nationalism. Closer examination shows that the background and the actual content of the discussion were more complicated. The idea of overcoming modernity had already appeared in debates among Japanese intellectuals before the war, and was always open to different interpretations; it could indicate Japanese ambitions to move beyond Western paradigms of modernity, but in other cases it referred to more radical visions of alternatives to modernity as such. Some versions linked up with Western critiques of existing modernity, including traditionalist as well as more future-oriented ones. These differentiations are evident in the symposium, and associated with diverse schools of thought. An important input came from representatives of the Kyoto school, the most distinctive current in twentieth-century Japanese philosophy. Despite the suppression of Marxist thought, the background influence of the unorthodox Marxist thinker Miki Kiyoshi was significant. Another major contribution came from the group known as the Japan Romantic School, active in literature and literary criticism. Other intellectuals of widely varying persuasions, from outspoken nationalists to Catholic theologians, also participated. The result was a rich but also thoroughly inconclusive discussion, from which no consensus on roads beyond modernity could emerge.
48
Hui, Haifeng. "Canon Studies in China: Traditions, Modernization, and Revisions in the Global Context." Poetics Today 42, no. 4 (December 1, 2021): 623–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/03335372-9356899.
Full textAbstract:
Abstract Though particular texts have long held culturally foundational authority, debates over the idea of a canon and the texts that are to compose it are a much more recent phenomenon, one that originated in the United States and quickly spread to other countries. The present article situates China in the international trend of canon studies by tracing how the Chinese conceptualization of the canon was modernized in the 1990s by Western ideas when canon studies were introduced to China by Dutch scholar Douwe W. Fokkema. While embracing the Western notion of the canon as always in a dynamic process of change that involves aesthetic qualities as well as a power mechanism, Chinese scholars, under the influence of culturally specific practices of literary criticism, the Confucian principle of the golden mean, and the more recent Marxist teaching of dialectical thinking, refuse to replicate Western discourses, instead adhering to a more dialectical treatment of the mutually antagonistic positions. Moreover, China's rising international status and its pursuit of wider global influence have led Chinese scholars to approach literary (re)historiography as an opportunity to showcase Chinese scholarship and to enhance China's national image.
49
Rodríguez, Juan Carlos. "Althusser: Blowup (Lineaments of a Different Thought)." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 123, no. 3 (May 2008): 762–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2008.123.3.762.
Full textAbstract:
Nothing is more remarkable in the tradition of Althusserian Marxism than the silence that has dogged the work of Juan Carlos Rodríguez. One thinks of the relative importance attached to the work of Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson. Some might believe the discrepancy is a matter of merit rather than of willful or unconscious neglect. But even the most casual comparison of Rodríguez's Theory and History of Ideological Production with Eagleton's Criticism and Ideology (1975) and with Jameson's The Political Unconscious (1981) suggests that this can hardly be the case. The parallel with Jameson is particularly intriguing. Like Rodríguez, the North American scholar accepts Louis Althusser's view of the social totality as a “decentered structure” in which various levels develop in “relative autonomy” and in which different feudal and capitalist matrices coexist. Also like Rodríguez, he considers literary works to be a form of ideological discourse that represses historical truth. Why, then, the silence that surrounds Rodríguez? The answer lies in the extent to which Jameson's work recontains diverse critical positions in the larger horizon of Marxism. Such a practice, as Eagleton has argued, is congenial to a dominant American pragmatism and eclecticism, as are the presiding Marxist Hegelian categories of reification and commodification (60–62). The consequences, politically, are found in Jameson's amorphous brand of “alliance” politics. The material situation of Rodríguez was very different. Given the militancy of the working class in Spain, his presiding categories were those of exploitation and class conflict, which combine to form the basis of a revolutionary proletarian politics that is anything but acceptable to the North American academy.
50
Puschaev, Yuriy V. "Perception of the Novel The Devils by F.M. Dostoevsky in Soviet Culture and Literary Criticism in the 1920s." Voprosy Filosofii, no. 9 (2022): 150–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.21146/0042-8744-2022-9-150-160.
Full textAbstract:
The evolution of Soviet ideology and culture can be traced through the prism of perception of novel by F.M. Dostoevsky The Devils: each new stage of Soviet history corresponds to its own attitude to this most polemical and politicized novel by Dostoevsky. Similarly, the history of Soviet culture and ideology in the pre-war 1920s and 1930s – from relative pluralism (within Marxist limits and frameworks, of course) to the rigid and monologue Stalinist canon – can be traced by this criterion. In the 1920s, there was still a relatively free discussion of literary critics and historians regarding various aspects of this novel. In this sense, we can note the discussion between V.P. Polonsky and L.P. Grossman, statements about the novel by the first People’s Commissar of Education A.V. Lunacharsky and one of the founders of Soviet literary criticism V.F. Pereverzev. The latter in the article Dostoevsky and the Revolution emphasizes the revolutionary component of Dostoevsky’s work, when he almost seems to be taken as an ally of the revolution. Moreover, this is done on a very controversial basis – on the material of his anti-revolutionary and anti-nihilistic novel The Devils. In this context, Pereverzev overestimates even the figure of Pyotr Verkhovensky, comprehending his image partly in a positive way. Also, Pereverzev’s article Dostoevsky and the Revolution, among other things, is also interesting because it is one of the expressive examples of some general trend of the first post-revolutionary years, consisting in attempts to re-evaluate the image of S.G. Nechaev in a positive way as a true revolutionary and even the predecessor of the Bolsheviks.