This document provides an overview of Marxist literary criticism and its key concepts. It discusses how Marxist criticism examines the socio-economic forces behind creative works and aims to uncover what texts hide about their conditions of production. Some main areas of study are the difference between natural/material/spiritual, ideology, class conflict, and hegemony. It also outlines concepts like class structure and class conflict in capitalist societies, how the bourgeoisie use ideology and art/literature to impose their value systems, and terms commonly used in Marxist analysis like reification.

1. MARXIST LITERARY CRITICISM
COOCH BEHAR PANCHANAN BARMA UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
EM 18 OF MA 4TH SEMESTER 2020
Dr Saunak Samajdar
Marxism Lecture 7

2. Marxism
 Along with psychoanalytical, feminist, and
cultural criticism, Marxist literary criticism
exemplifies what the French philosopher Paul
Ricouer terms a “hermeneutics of suspicion.”
Because all these theories suspected older
values and institutions to be unjust and skew.
 These are approaches that concern themselves
not with what the text says but what it hides.

3. introduction
 AsTerry Eagleton, a leading Marxist critic,
writes, the task of Marxist literary criticism
“is to show the text as it cannot know
itself, to manifest those conditions of its
making (inscribed in its very letter) about
which it is necessarily silent.”
 THAT IS , MARXIST CRITICISM AIMS AT
UNCOVERINGTHE SOCIO-ECONOMIC
HIDDEN FORCES BEHIND ANY CREATIVITY

4. Reminding you of what has
been explained in the class-
room
 The Marxist approach to
literature is based on the
philosophy of Karl Marx, whose
major argument was that
whoeve controlled the means
of production (the factories, for
example ) in a society,
controlled the society and its
culture and values.

5.  He believed that the means of
production (i.e., the basis of
power in society) should be
placed in the hands of those
who actually operated them.
That would call for a
revolution, to retrieve the
ownership of labour by the
labour.

6. Reading from a Marxist
Perspective
 To read a work from a Marxist perspective, one
must understand that Marxism asserts that
literature is a reflection of culture, and that
culture can be influenced by literature.
 Marxists believe literature can instigate
revolution. But literary critics like us , who are
not activists at all but literary analysts only,
see another more important thing: literature is
shaped by social forces, and to understand any
aspect of a text, we need to be informed by
the political economic and historical
contingency of that text.

7. 4 Main Areas of Study in
Marxist literary critic
1. Difference between NATURAL , MATERIAL
and SPIRITUAL
2. IDEOLOGY
3. Class Conflict
4. HEGEMONY

8. CLASS:
 A society is shaped by its forces of production.
Those who own the means of production dictate
what type of society it is.
 The two main classes of society are:
1. the bourgeoisie (who control the means of
production and wealth) and
2. the proletariat (who operate the means of
production and are controlled by the
bourgeoisie).

9. CLASS
 Since the bourgeoisie own the
means of production—and,
therefore, control the money—
they can manipulate politics,
government, education, art, and
media.
 Capitalism is flawed in that it
creates commodification of
everything (a desire for
possessions, not for their innate
OR SUBSTANTIAL usefulness, but
for their ATTRACTIVE social value
OR FETISH). Display of material
objects is the most common way
of showing off one’s wealth.

10. Class
 Commodification is one
way the bourgeoisie
keep the proletariat
oppressed. Whenever
the proletariat manages
to acquire some sort of
status symbol, the
bourgeoisie concocts a
new one; thus, the
proletariat continues to
struggle, never able to
“catch up.”

11. Class Conflict
 A Capitalist society will inevitably experience
conflict between its social classes.
 The owners and the workers will have different
ideas about the division of the wealth
generated, and the owners will ultimately
make the decision.
 This constant conflict, or dialectic in the
MATERIAL domain, is what instigates change.

12. Class Conflict AND Ideology
 Marx called on the proletariat to reject the social
structure engineered by the bourgeoisie, the rules
that would keep the proletariat subservient forever,
and form their own values. Such a course would be
the only way to escape the oppression, for the
proletariat could never defeat the bourgeoisie on its
own terms. For the workers to win, they must
establish new terms.
THAT WOULD IMPLY A REPLACEMENT OF EXISTING
IDEOLOGY BY A NEW IDEOLOGY.

13. Ideology
 The bourgeoisie present their political, economic,
and social structures as the only reasonable values.
 To stay in a society and subscribe to its values is
therefore like a guaranteed obedience.This generates
the docile worker.
 The only real social division is class according to classic
Marxism. Any other group identity like race, gender,
nationality etc are, created by the ideology of the
bourgeois to distract and confuse the proletariat.

14. Art, Literature, &
Ideologies
• Art and literature are among the vehicles by
which the bourgeoisie impose their value system
on the proletariat.The arts can make the current
system seem attractive and logical, thus lulling
the workers into an acceptance of it.
• Works of art and literature are enjoyable, so the
audience is unaware of being manipulated.

15. Art, Literature, &
Ideologies
•The bourgeoisie control most artistic output
because, whether through patronage or
sponsorship, they are the entity that funds the
arts and entertainment. Since the bourgeoisie
materially support the writers and the painters—
owning the means of production as well as
serving as primary consumers—the artist must
be careful not to offend bourgeois values.
• Any artist who wishes to criticize the bourgeoisie
must do so in a subtle way (satire, irony, etc.).

16. Characteristics of Marxism
 Workers' revolution: the means of achieving
human emancipation and enlightenment
 The actual mechanism through which such a
revolution might occur and succeed

17. Hegemony: reminding what has been
taught in the class-room
 Coined by the Italian theorist Antonio
Gramsci, this “refers to the pervasive system
of assumptions, meanings, and values—the
web of ideologies, in other words, that
shapes the way things look, what they mean,
and therefore what reality is for the majority
of people within a given culture.”
 It creates a strategic and indirect mastery
of the dominant section of society over the
mass, through seductive methods like
cultural leadership .

18. Recurrent Terms in Marxism
Reification
 Often used to describe the way in which people
are turned into commodities useful in market
exchange.
 For example, some would argue that the media’s
obsession with tragedy (e.g. the deaths of Jon
Benet Ramsay, Princess Diana, JFK Jr., the
murders at Columbine High School in Colorado
and Newtown Connecticut) make commodities
out of grieving people. The media expresses
sympathy but economically thrives on these
events through ratings boosts.

19. Ideology
 By its very nature, ideology is silent. Like the
water in the aquarium breathed by the fish,
ideology is virtually invisible. Its invisibility gives
it greater power.
 Ideology—defined in general as the shared
beliefs and values held in an unquestioning
manner by a culture—exerts a powerful
influence upon a culture.

20. Main Ideas in Marxism
 Ideology:
 Consciousness and perceptions within a society
 Often controlled by the ruling class
 Determined according to what is in the ruling
class's best interests
 Confuses the alienated groups
 Creates false consciousness
 Example: commodity fetishism (perceiving labor
as capital ~ a degradation of human life) as a form
of ALIENATION

21. Marxist Literary Criticism
 A loose term describing literary criticism
informed by the philosophy or the politics of
Marxism
 Terry Eagleton (Marxism and Literary Criticism,
1976)
 Not merely a 'sociology of literature', concerned with
how novels get published and whether they mention
the working class
 Aim:
 To explain the literary work more fully
 A ensitive attention to its forms, styles and meanings
 Grasping those forms, styles and meanings as the product of a
particular history

22. Marxist Literary Criticism
 Goals:
 An assessment of the political "tendency" of a
literary work (determining whether its social
content or its literary form are "progressive“)
 Applying lessons drawn from the realm of
aesthetics to the realm of politics

23. Marxist Film Theory
 Sergei Eisenstein:
 Shunning narrative structure by eliminating the
individual protagonist
 Telling stories where the action is moved by the group
 Story told through a clash of one image against the
next (whether in composition, motion, or idea)
 The audience is never lulled into believing that they
are watching something that has not been worked
over

24. DISCLAIMER: THIS IS NOTAN ENTIRELY ORIGINALWORK, RATHER
A STUDY MATERIAL IN LIEUOFTHE LECTURESOF CLASSROOM
THAT ARE NOW SUSPENDED DUETO CORONA PANDEMIC.
Dear students, for your academic inquiry related to this lecture, contact
me at suanakaengello@rediffmail.com