Marxist Literary Theory Research Articles

Di cosa parliamo quando parliamo di ideologia: un’approssimazione al concetto d’inconscio ideologico di Juan Carlos Rodríguez

The purpose of this article is to reflect on the notion of “ideological unconscious” as a way to analyse literary texts and, more generally, the artistic praxis considered in its inextricable relationship with the ideological context. At the basis of Juan Carlos Rodriguez’ critical thinking – currently one of the most relevant figures in Spanish Marxist literary theory –, the notion of ‘ideological unconscious’ derives from his reading of Louis Althusser and it is present throughout all his works. With the aim of offering an analytical approach to the concept of “ideological unconscious”, the theoretical horizon of Juan Carlos Rodriguez will be compared with some related concepts (Althusser’s notion of ideology, Terry Eagleton’ ideological imaginary and Fredric Jameson’s political unconscious) that will help us in positioning it within ideological criticism. As we will try to show, Juan Carlos Rodriguez recovers and deepens the encounter between Marxism and psychoanalysis inaugurated in 1964 by Althusser and responds with originality to the new challenges of Marxist literary criticism.

Influence of communal and private folklore on bringing meaning to the experience of persistent pain.

To provide an overview of the relevance and strengths of using the literary folkloristic methodology to explore the ways in which people with persistent pain relate to and make sense of their experiences through narrative accounts. Storytelling is a conversation with a purpose. The reciprocal bond between researcher and storyteller enables the examination of the meaning of experiences. Life narratives, in the context of wider traditional and communal folklore, can be analysed to discover how people make sense of their circumstances. This paper draws from the experience of the author, who has previously used this narrative approach. It is a reflection of how the approach may be used to understand those experiencing persistent pain without a consensual diagnosis. Using an integrative method, peer-reviewed research and discussion papers published between January 1990 and December 2014 and listed in the CINAHL, Science Direct, PsycINFO and Google Scholar databases were reviewed. In addition, texts that addressed research methodologies such as literary folkloristic methodology and Marxist literary theory were used. The unique role that nurses play in managing pain is couched in the historical and cultural context of nursing. Literary folkloristic methodology offers an opportunity to gain a better understanding and appreciation of how the experience of pain is constructed and to connect with sufferers. Literary folkloristic methodology reveals that those with persistent pain are often rendered powerless to live their lives. Increasing awareness of how this experience is constructed and maintained also allows an understanding of societal influences on nursing practice. Nurse researchers try to understand experiences in light of specific situations. Literary folkloristic methodology can enable them to understand the inter-relationship between people in persistent pain and how they construct their experiences.

African unity, identity and development in some contemporary Igbo poems

Poetry is a literary genre that gives poets the opportunity to mirror the society, addressing socio-economic, political, religious and security issues. Over the years, the issues of African unity, identity and development have been of great concern to Africans. This explains why the Organisation of African Unity (OAU); which later metamorphosed into African Union (AU) was formed. Obviously, some Igbo poets like other members of the African society equally express their interest in contemporary issues in Africa through their poetic works. Although, many literary scholars have been done some researches on the Igbo poetry, but it is observed that some of their works have not addressed some contemporary issues in Africa extensively. It is against this backdrop that this study examines some contemporary Igbo poems that address contemporary issues bordering on African unity, identity and development in general and Nigeria in particular, so as to determine the extent to which the poets have addressed them. The study adopts the Marxist literary theory. The theory is employed to enhance the analysis of the selected poems. From the study, it is observed that the selected poems really address contemporary issues in Africa such as unity, identity and development by satirizing, criticizing, correcting and admonishing Africans. Therefore, the paper recommends that the teaching and learning of literature especially African literature in African languages is indispensable and should be encouraged. This will no doubt, awaken the reading culture and interest in the society at large.

The Chinese Localization ofF oreign Marxist Literary Theory: - A Key Project on Eastern-European Marxist Literary Theory

(2014). The Chinese Localization ofF oreign Marxist Literary Theory: - A Key Project on Eastern-European Marxist Literary Theory. Comparative Literature: East & West: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 141-146.

An expose of how the themes of violence, victimisation and brutality preoccupy the short stories in the collection: We Killed Mangy Dog and Other Mozambique Stories

The study made an expose of the themes of violence, victimisation and brutality as they pervade the short story collection. Working essentially in the Marxist literary theory, Fanonian critical realism and Marxist criminological theories as the springboard for the expose, it has made ground in highlighting colonial brutality towards the colonised and its inevitable violent dehumanising effects to the colonised. Key words: Violence, victimisation, brutality, alienation, assimilado, criminology, Louis Bernardo Honwana, and Mozambican short stories.

The provincial cosmopolitan: Kipling, India and globalization

Rudyard Kipling was the product of a globalizing world. Aiming consciously to establish himself as an international author, he translated himself to the literary metropole from a marginal colonial background. However, his migration led him to register in his metropolitan writings a sense of cultural dislocation, jarring imperial Europe from the central position it presumed to occupy. This article draws on Marxist literary theory to locate the cause of this fin-de-siècle malaise as a tension between the universalizing power of western capital and its concomitant erosion of cultural diversity. Although Kipling’s peregrinations lead to a juggling of identities and poetic masks, he exploited this dynamic to assert himself as an articulator of identity who was ideally placed to respond to the crisis of alienation and anomie that he sensed was besetting European culture. This theme is explored through Kipling’s writings up to Kim. The concluding section discursively compares these writings with theosophical texts.

Juan Carlos Rodríguez y la renovación de marxismo althusseriano

In the immediate aftermath of 1968, a number of works on Marxist literary theory appeared that were destined to command the attention not only of writers who were re- cognizably ‘Marxist’ or ‘Marxian’ but of others who boasted little in the way of allegiance to the Marxist tradition, however broadly defined. Two such works were Terry Eagleton’s Criticism and Ideology (1976) and Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (1981). While deeply and confessedly indebted to Louis Althusser for kick-starting their careers, inspirationally speaking, both Eagleton and Jameson were subsequently to reveal an ambiguous, even troubled relation to the French Marxist: Eagleton, through a series of texts that, their unquestionable distinction notwithstanding, run hot and cold in their commitment to ‘Althusserianism’; Jameson, through a brand of Hegelianizing Marxism that finally proved unable to take on board the full complexity of the Althusserian legacy. Preceding both these scholars chronologically, and bearing comparison with them in terms of intellectual range, ambition, and productivity, was Juan Carlos Rodriguez, whose Teoria e historia de la produccion ideologica appeared in 1974. Except that there the similarities end, for whereas Eagleton and Jameson were destined to achieve star status within their profession, a rather different career trajectory awaited Rodriguez.

Europe’s Representation of Africa and Africans, African- Americans and Asians in Its Imperialistic Explorations and Colonization as It Appears in Literary Texts

In order to justify their annexation and subsequent subjugation and colonisation of Africa, the America and Asia, European imperalist nations had to depict Africa in a way that supported their missions. First, Africa had to be portaryed as a savage continent that needed the benevolence of the white man in order to attain civilisation. Second, Africa and the Americas had to be depicted as virgin lands that could provide all the raw materials that modern Europe needed for its indsutrial take-off. Third, one of the characteristics that was used in that project was that of the African man in genral and the "black" man in particular as a dangerous beast that is always in hot pursuit of the white woman's virginity. As a consequnence, the black man in Africa and in America had to be kept under constant check. This paper examines the problem whihc is represented by the fallacies put forth by Europe or the gap between the apologia and the reality in modern Europe's subjugation of the territories that it needed to posses for its own survival. The paper castigates the injustice and cruelty behind European colonisation and it also stresses the negative impact of such representations on today's post colonial citizens. Library research is the main approach. The main literary materials used are the racist and anti-racist texts and movies on Africa. Emphasis is laid on ideology and characterisation. Post colonial and Marxist Literary and Cultural theory and disaporan theory inform the research.

Marxist Criticism of the Bible: A Critical Introduction to Marxist Literary Theory and the Bible – Roland Boer

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 32, Issue 3 p. 193-193 Marxist Criticism of the Bible: A Critical Introduction to Marxist Literary Theory and the Bible – Roland Boer Richard Walsh, Methodist CollegeSearch for more papers by this author Richard Walsh, Methodist CollegeSearch for more papers by this author First published: 07 November 2006 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-0922.2006.00092_15.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume32, Issue3July 2006Pages 193-193 RelatedInformation

Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (review)

Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (review)

The Marxian imagination: representing class in literature

The Marxian Imagination is a fresh and innovative recasting of Marxist literary theory and a powerful account of the ways class is represented in literary texts. Where earlier theorists have treated class as a fixed identity site, Markels sees class in more dynamic terms, as a process of accumulation involving many, often conflicting, sites of identity. Rather than examining the situations and characters explicitly identified in class terms, this makes it possible to see how racial and gender identities are caught up in the processes of accumulation that define class. Markels shows how a Marxian imagination is at work in a range of literary works, often written by non-Marxists. In a field notorious for its difficulty, The Marxian Imagination is a remarkably accessible text. Its central arguments are constantly developed and tested against readings of important novels, ranging from Dickens's Hard Times to Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible. It concludes with a telling critique of the work of the major Marxist literary theorists Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson.

A master on the periphery of capitalism: Machado de Assis

A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism is a translation (from the original Portuguese) of Roberto Schwarz’s renowned study of the work of Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis (1839–1908). A leading Brazilian theorist and author of the highly influential notion of “misplaced ideas,” Schwarz focuses his literary and cultural analysis on Machado’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas , which was published in 1880. Writing in the Marxist tradition, Schwarz investigates in particular how social structure gets internalized as literary form, arguing that Machado’s style replicates and reveals the deeply embedded class divisions of nineteenth-century Brazil. Widely acknowledged as the most important novelist to have written in Latin America before 1940, Machado had a surprisingly modern style. Schwarz notes that the unprecedented wit, sarcasm, structural inventiveness, and mercurial changes of tone and subject matter found in The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas marked a crucial moment in the history of Latin American literature. He argues that Machado’s vanguard narrative reflects the Brazilian owner class and its peculiar status in both national and international contexts, and shows why this novel’s success was no accident. The author was able to confront some of the most prestigious ideologies of the nineteenth century with some uncomfortable truths, not the least of which was that slavery remained the basis of the Brazilian economy. A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism will appeal to those with interests in Latin American literature, nineteenth century history, and Marxist literary theory.

"You're (Still) a Marxist, Aren't You?": Some Brief Notes on the Politics of Affiliation

“You’re (Still) a Marxist, Aren’t You?”: Some Brief Notes on the Politics of Affiliation Jamie Owen Daniel (bio) Marxism, more clearly than any other kind of thinking, has shown us that we are in fact aligned long before we realize that we are aligned. —Raymond Williams, “The Writer: Commitment and Alignment” (1980) Whatever their own political and intellectual affiliations, most readers will have noted that a great deal of public writing on Marxism in the last decade, as well as many private conversations among those of us who self-identify as Marxists without any qualifying prefix, have been dominated by a sense of crisis. To cite just one typical example of the public crisis mode, Terry Eagleton wrote in his 1996 introduction to a Blackwell reader on Marxist literary theory that “Marxism at present is enduring the most grievous crisis of its fraught career—a crisis which involves nothing less than the question of its very survival” (ix). Nearly all of the U.S. left journals have run articles and special issues on the “crisis in” or “end of” Marxism, some of them giving rise to debates on what might or should take its place now that we are supposedly “post-Marxist.” Marxist academics and intellectuals are hardly the only people to have indulged in this funereal rhetoric, of course; the mainstream U.S. media have continued to delight in regularly reminding their readers and viewers that, if Marxism isn’t quite as dead as Marx himself, it lives on only as a farcical parody of itself, as a “style” devoid of any meaningful critical content or political force. Thus, the [End Page 108] May 5, 1998 New York Times story on Verso’s 150th anniversary edition of The Communist Manifesto began with a profile of Mavis Ueberall, the 77-year old manager of the Communist Party U.S.A. bookstore in New York who would have nothing of the glamorous new Verso edition. After describing the Manifesto as a “peppy little page-turner” and repeating with smug amusement Ueberall’s firm conviction that the long-awaited revolution is just around the corner, the article went on to note examples of how the “specter of Communism” is still haunting New York, but only as kitschy iconography used to sell watches, vodka, and fast food. In any case, the article concludes, the Verso Manifesto was much more likely to be purchased by trend-conscious yuppies as a cutting-edge coffee-table accessory than by anyone actually interested in its biting analysis of capitalism. Obviously, such articles are intended to trivialize Marxism, and to reassure those yuppies and the corporations in whose interests they work that its political and economic critique is as quaintly outdated as Ms. Ueberall’s belief in an impending communist revolution. But there is also plenty of evidence in the same mainstream media to suggest that not everyone is feeling so reassured. For every four or five articles that trivialize Marxism and its revolutionary legacies, whether taking as their point of departure the anniversary of the Manifesto or the 30th anniversary of the assassination of Che Guevara in October of 1997, 1 there is another that reveals a gnawing fear that it continues to lurk vampire-like among us, an unnatural abomination left over from previous centuries, taking human form in that already most suspect of guises, “the intellectual.” In a commentary in the Wall Street Journal published on May Day 1998 and subtitled “The proletariat is passé, but the revolution lives on in the culture,” Roger Scruton describes intellectuals as those people who, instead of “recogniz[ing] the deep inequality of human fate . . . . have an obsession with equality and with the condition of the underdog.” He condemns this obsession as both perverse and dangerous in that it makes it impossible for them to recognize the legitimacy of “the forms of government that [according to Scruton] naturally emerge in human society.” Intellectuals thus tend to devote their unnatural energies to undermining the “normality of the surrounding social order” and to discrediting the achievements of “successful and powerful” people who are “committed to a social order in which talent can work its way to the top and...

F. O. Matthiessen and the Future of American Studies

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 inThe 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.

A Marxist reading of Fuentes, Vargas Llosa and Puig

Utilizing selected characteristics of Marxist Literary Theory, this book analyzes the society and environment of three Latin-American countries as presented in three major Spanish-American novels. It focuses on social stratifications, national and international exploitation and addresses the issue of Latin-American identity. Contents: Introduction; Marxist Literary Theory; A Marxist Reading of Vargas Llosa's La Casa Verde; A Marxist Reading of Fuentes's La Muerte de Artemio Cruz; A Marxist Reading of Puig's Boquitas Pintadas; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Re‐thinking teaching english for another South Africa

Summary The article suggests new directions for the progressive teaching of English based upon Gramsci's notion of counter‐hegemonic struggle and Eagleton's recent study of the European aesthetic lineage in order to facilitate a process of cultural transformation conducive to a radical democratic society. Marxist literary theory needs to move beyond its mimetic and Althusserian models in order to confront fully these new demands. If English is to be the lingua franca of a post‐apartheid South Africa, English departments in universities and schools have a central role to play in this process.

Correspondence

Correspondence April 10, 1992 To the Editor: Robert Hughes, in the latest New York Review of Books, writes about the sad state of art criticism, squeezed between PC belief on the left and die "conservative view that any stick that you can beat liberals with is a good stick." The plot of criticism has moved from "style to gender and race, but the plot remains much the same" in the assumption that there is a "cutting edge," some vaguely warm notion of "hot new stuff slicing through the reactionary opposition , leaving the old stuff behind, shaping something, forging ahead." It is a broken model in art that cannot be revived, as he says; and I tried to challenge that model in my book, Making American Tradition. Alas, it seems to be very much alive in the world of lit. crit. that my reviewer, Granger Babcock, inhabits. He is certainly entitled to his belief in the value of contemporary literary theory, but he is not entitled to his assumption that I know "very little about these critical methodologies," especially when the evidence for his superior judgment is based on a straw man derived from misreadings of my text. His crude summation of my remarks about theory is derived entirely from a single parenthetical phrase contrasting the critics of an earlier generation who, for all their defects, had the merit of believing in a historical form of comparative criticism, with those for whom national comparison is no longer in fashion. Babcock responds to this point by ignoring the main part of the sentence and using the parenthesis to arrive at his conclusion that I lump together "structuralism , poststructuralism, Marxism, feminism, and black studies" as being in general "ahistoric forms of theorizing," but I say no such thing, for it would be false. Indeed, I say nothing at all about Marxist literary theory in this book, though in my The Veracious Imagination (1981) I quote with approval the Marxist Robert Weimann and specifically say tiiat "the best Marxist theory can be an antidote to the recent intellectual tendency to aestheticize history and dehistoricize literature." Moreover, in the book Babcock is reviewing I quote with approval Henry L. Gates, Jr. and say that, in celebrating an anthology of black women writers, he "justly observes that it demonstrates how works configure into a tradition" in the same way that writers' works do in my book: by grounding themselves in models "provided largely by other writers to whom they feel akin." It may be too much to expect my reviewer to read my footnotes , since he has passed over the cmcial word justly in my text, but one of them (n.21, p.237) cites with approval for its insight a feminist reading of Meridian. My reviewer says tiiat he is in favor of examining the "unexamined practices that produced literary canons," as if I in some reactionary way were not. In fact, the canon I present is itself revisionary and is explicitly presented only as a possible and necessarily unfinished one. Babcock exhibits die lack of historical consciousness I complain of by failing to notice that I begin my book with a criticism of the powerful tradition (including the most notable critics of American literature from Trilling to Quentin Anderson over a period of thirty years) that created tiie "historical achievement" of putting American literature on the map, but at the price of minimizing or neglecting "the close attention to time and place" even in those writers who seemed best to illustrate Tocque- 204 The Henry James Review ville 's prophecies about our literature. The bulk of my book tries to rectify that distortion. He writes as if there had been no theorizing before the current coalition of Marxist, feminist, African-American, and post-structuralist critics dominated the literary academic scene. I do refer to "political suspicion" of the idea of the nation as a possible barrier to a contemporary reader's sympathy for my project; but I explain tiiat suspicion as a confusion of "national identity" with "ideological nationalism," a distinction Babcock has no time for in his anxiety about my "liberal values." What I said about them, however, entailed another ignored distinction: they...

Macherey and Marxist Literary Theory

A resurgence of interest in the materialist aesthetics of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht has helped to free Marxist criticism from the neo-Hegelian forms within which it has long been imprisoned. Yet the central category of those materialist aesthetics—the ‘author as producer’—remains a transitional concept, potently demystificatory but politically indeterminate. And crucial though the analysis of the relations between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ within art itself clearly is, its historical explanatory power is not yet fully evident. The moment of Brecht, for example, is not easily translatable to English literary culture. Donne's Songs and Sonnets and George Herbert's The Temple belong to different modes of literary production, but inhabit alternative areas of the same ideological formation; Defoe and Fielding practise the same mode of literary production, but it is their ideological antagonism which claims our attention. Henry Esmond was the only novel of Thackerary to be published complete, rather than in monthly serialized parts; but though this difference of productive mode undoubtedly impresses itself on the novel's form, it leaves the ‘Thackerayan ideology’ essentially intact. No one expects modes of literary production and literary ‘superstructures’ to form a symmetrical relationship, dancing a harmonious minuet hand-in-hand throughout history; yet even if we allow for disjunction and uneven development, it seems true that the ‘author as producer’ concept is one which must, as it were, lie dormant over certain spans of literary history. The aesthetic redefinition of fiction as ‘organic form’ which develops in late nineteenth-century England, to discover its major ideologue in Henry James, is doubtless related to those shifts in literary production (from serialization and the ‘three-decker’ novel to the single volume) determined by the economic demands of the monopolist private lending libraries; yet it is not clear how such material mutations become an active element in the reconstruction of fictional ideologies.

Macherey and Marxist Literary Theory

A resurgence of interest in the materialist aesthetics of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht has helped to free Marxist criticism from the neo-Hegelian forms within which it has long been imprisoned. Yet the central category of those materialist aesthetics—the ‘author as producer’—remains a transitional concept, potently demystificatory but politically indeterminate. And crucial though the analysis of the relations between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ within art itself clearly is, its historical explanatory power is not yet fully evident. The moment of Brecht, for example, is not easily translatable to English literary culture. Donne's Songs and Sonnets and George Herbert's The Temple belong to different modes of literary production, but inhabit alternative areas of the same ideological formation; Defoe and Fielding practise the same mode of literary production, but it is their ideological antagonism which claims our attention. Henry Esmond was the only novel of Thackerary to be published complete, rather than in monthly serialized parts; but though this difference of productive mode undoubtedly impresses itself on the novel's form, it leaves the ‘Thackerayan ideology’ essentially intact. No one expects modes of literary production and literary ‘superstructures’ to form a symmetrical relationship, dancing a harmonious minuet hand-in-hand throughout history; yet even if we allow for disjunction and uneven development, it seems true that the ‘author as producer’ concept is one which must, as it were, lie dormant over certain spans of literary history. The aesthetic redefinition of fiction as ‘organic form’ which develops in late nineteenth-century England, to discover its major ideologue in Henry James, is doubtless related to those shifts in literary production (from serialization and the ‘three-decker’ novel to the single volume) determined by the economic demands of the monopolist private lending libraries; yet it is not clear how such material mutations become an active element in the reconstruction of fictional ideologies.

Deciphering the Academic Hieroglyph: Marxist Literary Theory and the Practice of Basic Writing

Deciphering the Academic Hieroglyph: Marxist Literary Theory and the Practice of Basic Writing