Marxism theory by karl Marx in Literary theory presented by Ata ul ghafer &shoiba sabir GCUF Pakistan

1. MARXIST CRITICISM

2. OUTLINE
• Beginning and basics of Marxism
• Marxist Criticism: general
• Marxist Criticism: Main Streams
• Leninist-Marxist criticism
• Engelsian-Marxist criticism
• Marxist criticism: Louis Althusser's influence
• What Marxist critics do?

3. INTRODUCTION
• Marxist criticism is the literary theory based on the socialist - dialectic doctrine of
the German philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883) and sociologist Friedrich Engels
(1820-1895).
• They called their economic theories 'Communism', according to their believe in the
state ownership of industry, transport. Rather than private ownership. Marx and
Engels proclaimed the advent of Communism in their work Communist Manifesto,
published in 1848.
• The aim of Marxism is to bring about a classless society, based on the common
ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Marxism is a
materialist philosophy: that is, it tries to explain things without assuming the
existence of a world or of forces beyond the natural world around us, and the
society we live in. It looks for concrete, scientific, logical explanations of the world of
observable fact.

4. •Religion is a tablet of opium

5. • Different to other philosophies which only try to understand the world
Marxism both: intends to transform it and fore see the advent of the
progress as a fruit of the different social class struggle.
• analyses and combat the modern industrial Capitalism, a system
which allows the exploitation of the man for another man, or the
of a social class for another.
• A result of this unfair system is the laborers are in a state of alienation,
means that they are dishonored and obligated to do monotonous tasks
which don’t allow them to improve their situation.
• But also, alienated workers have suffered the process of reification, which
according to Marx's main work, Das Kapitalis related to the way the owners
of the capital think about the workers: people without any dignity, working
force or simple labor things.
• This is also one of the main claims to the economist, that they see people
cold facts and numbers.

6. .
MARXIST LITERARY CRITICISM: GENERAL POINT OF
VIEW
• Even though, Marx and Engels did not produce a theory of
literature. Nevertheless, their perspective toward literature and
art is evidently undogmatic. Namely, they preferred the good
art, free from economic circumstances.
• As cultured and highly-educated Germans, they felt reverence
for 'great' art and literature typical of their class, and desire to
highlight the difference between art and propaganda.
• Nonetheless, Marxist literary critics, holds that the author's
social class and predominant ideology (values, tacit
assumptions, viewpoint, half realized allegiances, and so on)are
more influent on what is written by a member of that class.

7. •
Therefore, the authors are no seen as autonomous-inspired beings, whose talent
and creativity allow them to produce original and timeless art oeuvres, rather,
Marxist perspective seems authors as determined by their social contexts.
• Traditional Marxist criticism usually deals with history in a very generalized way.
Namely, it discusses both: clashes of large historical forces and conflicts between
social classes.
CONTI…

8. LENINIST-MARXIST CRITICISM
• Is the result of 1930s Soviet society's reaction, where the State started to control cultural
manifestations such as art, literature and so forth. As a result, liberal views were considered
illegal and Lenin's writing point of view was imposed.
• According to Lenin's outlook, literature must become a Party tool, or a Party literature. To
put it simply, Literature must become in an element of the democratic party labors.
• As a consequence, any type of literary experimentation or innovation was forbidden.
• Authors inside or abroad the soviet government and who had an affective position toward
communist ideas, intended to follow the Moscow line, Leninist perspective or vulgar
Marxism. As a consequence, literature and economy were considered elements in a closed
relationship, or cause and effect and writers were trapped in the intellectual limits of their
social-class position.
• Caudwell's Illusion and Reality (written in the 1930s and published in 1946). Caudwell's
writing is both very generalised, in the sense that there is little detailed textual reference to
the works under discussion, and very specific, in the sense that every facet of a writer is
linked to some aspect of her or his social status

9. ENGELSIAN-MARXIST CRITICISM
• Emerged from 1930 in the exile of some authors, under suppressed works or
underground form.
• These writers were denominated the Russian Formalist criticism, nevertheless their
work is not Marxist in all the sense of the work.
• The most main representatives of these authors are Victor Shklovsky, Boris
Tomashevsky, and Boris Eichenbaum.
• Their main concepts about literary criticism involve the needing for close formal
approach of the literary work. Namely, they believed that the language of literature
has its own and specific procedures and effects, and is not just a version of
ordinary language.

10. • .
• Shklovsky's concept of 'defamiliarisation' or 'making strange' (expounded in the
essay 'Art as Technique', holds that one of the main effects of the language in
literature is the achievement of making the familiar world, to look as a world totally
new for us.
• A world which we are seeing for the first time and therefore we can reevaluate.
• Shklovsky's Defamiliarization, therefore, makes a clear distinction between the
reality and the literary work verbal representation.
• As a consequence, the literary work is not conceived as a copy of the reality in a
documentary way.

11. MARXIST CRITICISM LOUIS ALTHUSSER
• The French theorist Louis Althusser (1918-1990) is one of the Marxist critic who has
exerted more influence in the contemporary Marxist literary thinking.
• His contribution is evident in a number key terms, notions and concepts that he
has made known.
• For instance: overdeterminism,repressive structures , relative autonomy,
decentering, ideological structures, etc.
• His Engelsian announcements, do not censure Marxist tendency to imprison art
and literature with economics. Nevertheless, it is intended to release literature in a
high degree.
• Due to both: his innovative perspective and reformulation of the Marxist vision of
literature, Althusser could be considered a revisionist of Marxism.

12. Main Althusser concepts
• Ideology:
Ideology is a system (possessing its logic and proper rigour) of representations (images,
myths, ideas or concepts according to the case) endowed with an existence and an historical
role at the heart of a given society.
• Decentring
• The notion of decentering implies that there is no overall unity: art has a relative autonomy
and is determined by the economic level only 'in the last instance‘
• Overdeterminism:
• , a word borrowed from Freud, which designates an effect which arises from a variety of
causes, that is, from several causes acting together, rather than from a single (in this case,
economic) factor.

13. • Relative autonomy:
• which is the view that in spite of the connections between culture and economics, art has a
degree of independence from economic forces.
• repressive structures,
• Althusser makes a useful distinction between what we might call state power and state
control. State power is maintained by what Althusser terms repressive structures, which are
institutions like the law courts, prisons, the police force, and the army, which operate, in the
last analysis, by external force.
• ideological structures or State ideological apparatuses
• These are such groupings as political parties, schools, the media, churches, the family, and
art (including literature) which foster an ideology - a set of ideas and attitudes - which is
sympathetic to the aims of the state and the political status quo.

14. • Interpellation
• is Althusser's term for the way the individual is encouraged to see herself or himself
as an entity free and independent of social forces. It accounts for the operation of
control structures not maintained by physical force, and hence for the perpetuation
of a social set-up which concentrates wealth and power in the hands of the few.

15. WHAT MARXIST CRITICS DO?
• They divide the literary work content in: Then
they make a relation between the hidden subject of the literary work with
elemental Marxist topics such as class struggle, clashes of large historical forces,
conflicts between social classes and so forth.
• They make a relation between the literary work context and the social-class status
of the writer, supposing (similar to psychoanalysts) that the author is not conscious
of what he or she is saying in the text.
• They also try to explain the fundamental qualities of a whole literary genre, based
on the main social issues of the époque in which the text was produced. For
instance: they can state that a novel is a the speaking of a certain social class, the
tragedy is the way of expression of the monarchy, whereas ballad speak for the
rular and working class.

16. • Similarly, they make a relation between the text and the social assumptions of the
time in which it is consumed.
• 5. Marxist critics also tend to politicize the literary form. Namely, they state that the
political circumstances are the determiners of the distinct literary forms. For
example: For some critics, the sonnet formal and metrical form, is a counterpart of
social stability, order and good manners.

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