Abstract
The task undertaken in this paper is to discover a means by which the practice of literary criticism can derive an imperative for activism that confronts and changes the social conditions it critiques. The case of Karl Marx’s use of world literature in his critique of capitalism and the state, set within the history of the development of continental philosophy, is explored through a close-reading of its interterxtuality. Particular attention is paid to Marx’s use of quotations from and allusions to world literature, including Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe and Heine, to register the harmful inversions caused by an economy based on money and commodities. If literature registers the contradictions of its time in its form and content, then the urge to resolve those contradictions sits restless in literature. When Marx inserts literature into his theoretical texts, he transfers into his text the impulse of the contradiction to resolve itself. Similarly, literary criticism is well-placed to unfold clear, obvious and necessary logic which leads to activism.
Highlights
The task undertaken in this paper is to discover a means by which the practice of literary criticism can derive an imperative for activism that confronts and changes the social conditions it critiques
Literary criticism is driven by theory, and most theory is built from the contradictions and struggles that are registered in the literature
The material struggle reaches its highest level of abstraction and is presented to its readers/ scholars/ students to be read, discussed, examined and written about further
Summary
Citation: Smith, Christian. “’The point is to change it’: The Imperative for Activist Literary Studies.” Alicante Journal of English Studies, no. 33 (2020): 17-42. https://doi.org/10.14198/raei.2020.33.06 Licence: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
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