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Presented by : Mrs. Arundhati Dutta Choudhury Asstt. Professor, Department of English Radhamadhab College Silchar-788006. An analysis of Marxist Criticism: A lecture prepared for English Major students.
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Presented by : Mrs. Arundhati Dutta Choudhury Asstt. Professor, Department of English Radhamadhab College Silchar-788006 An analysis of Marxist Criticism: A lecture prepared for English Major students.
Marxist Criticism is based on the economic and cultural theory of Karl Marx(1818-83) and Friedrich Engels i. Evolving history of humanity are largely determined by the changing mode of its material production
ii. Marxist Production effect class structure of a society ___in each era ---dominating , subordinate---struggle for economic ,political and social changes. • Ideology- values, beliefs, thinking, feeling of human beings. • It is an expression or product of the position and interest of a particular class. It is a key term in Marxist criticism of literature and the other arts.
According to a Marxist critic, literature is not in accordance with timeless artistic criteria but as “products” of the economic determination specific to that age/era. Bourgeois literature should be replaced by a “social realism” that will represent the true reality of our time that literature conform to an official party line.
According to the Hungarian thinker George Lukacs each great work of literature creates” its own world” which is unique and seemingly distinct from everyday reality. But Balzac or Tolstoy by bringing to life the greatest possible richness of the objective conditions of life creating “typical” characters in producing a fictional world which is a reflection of life. Real world constituted by class conflicts, economic and social contradictions and the alienation of an individual under capitalism/Marxist.
Lukacs contradicted the modern experimental writers as ‘decadents’. Society under capitalism de-humanizes and alienates an individual under capitalism. –( James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Samuel Backett)
Bertolt Brecht rejected the Aristotelian theory of tragedy to accept drama where the audience’s emotion merges with the emotion of the protagonist. He instead enforces audience to come out of their passive acceptance of modern capitalist society.
Walter Benjamin says that the modern technical innovations such as photography, phonographs, the radio or cinema or the recent technological developments of the mass media have promoted “ a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art”. Formerly an artist or an author produced a work which was a single object, regarded as the special preserve of the bourgeois elite but the new media with the reproducibility of the objects of art opens its way to the politics of art.
In 1960 the French Marxist, Louis Althusser says that society is not a monolithic whole but constituted by diverse institutions( legal ,religious, literary)
CONCEPT OF HAGEMONY Gramsci’s Prison Writings ( thirty documents on political, social and cultural subjects) Places special emphasis on the popular folklore, music to the cinema as opposed to the elite elements of culture. In such ideological view of society, the subordinate classes accept and participate in their own oppression.
Recently, according to the Marxist critics starting from Raymond Williams to Tarry Eagleton, a literary text is a special kind of production , where an ideological discourse is reworked into a literary discourse.
