presentation on Marxist Theory

2. Marxist saw a direct cause-effect relationship between
the socio-economic base and literature and saw the writer
as conditioned by his or her social class.
 Social dimension is absolutely indispensable.
Social reality of the writer will always be part of the text.
The reliability of literary texts as social ‘evidence’.

3.  Meanings of the text must be seen as independent of
the political views of its author.
 The work of art must
‘reflect correctly and in proper proportion all
important factors objectively determining the area
of life it represents and reflect these that this area of
life becomes comprehensible from within and
without , re-experienceable’.

4.  Critics influenced by Althusser and his grim view of
an enormously powerful ideology, texts do not so
easily allow us a view of an undistorted reality.
 Ideology is a strong presence in the text
 Focus on what the text does not say, on what the text
repress rather than express.

5.  Macherey finds the cracks in the text’s façade
 In literary text’s the work of ideology is never fully
successful, we will find ‘the inscription of an
otherness in the work’.
 Literary criticism brings out the difference within the
work by demonstrating that it is other than it is.

6.  Bakhtin argues that novel as a genre is inherently plural; it
always presents a plurality of voices.
 The presence of a variety of characters who all articulate
themselves in different ways is a ‘mere diversity of voices.
 A natural language is not a seamless unity but a compound of
large number of languages: social dialects, characteristic group
behavior , professional jargons, generic language, language of
generation, … language of the authorities, of various circles
and of passing fashions”.

7.  Different socio-ideological position of the author and
the heteroglossia of the epoch
 Unlike the poetry in which he sees unity of style, the
novel is hybrid.
 Whatever the intentions of their authors, novels are
arenas, sites where diverse and often competing
discourses and ideologies live together in a not
necessarily peaceful existence.

8.  Language itself -every word, every phrase- comes laden with
a history that testifies to this.
 It is a work of art whose creation ‘demands enormous
effort: it is stylized through and through, thoroughly
premeditated, achieved’