Marxism 3: Methodologies and Marxist Literary Theorists

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Marxism 3 Methodologies and Marxist Literary
Theorists

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Marxism Focuses

• Dialectic Materialism -- Marx and Vulgar Marxism
• Literature,Society Ideology Althusser and
  Gramsci
• Marxist Literary Theorists Macherey, Jameson
  and Eagleton
• Foucault ????????????

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Althusser and Gramsci Q A

• How does Althusser revise traditional marxism?
• How are Althusser and Gramsci similar to and
  different from each other in their views of
  ideology/hegemony?
• How do they help us understand literature more?

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Methodologies Some Suggestions

• (Ref. Chap 5 p. 222)
• Class relations, economic determinism and the
  influences of (literary) relations of production
  in or of the texts
• Art and ideology contradictions within some
  ideologies or between ideologies and reality in a
  text or a group of texts.
• Pierre Macherey the Textual Unsaid
• Eagletons Materialist Criticism
• Jameson Three horisons of interpretation
• Their views on History

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Pierre Macherey the split text the textual
unsaid

• A text is as split as a Lacanian subject.
• Split between its overt (or intended) meaning and
  its unconscious or the hidden (and unintended)
  meaning caused by
• literary form
• contradictions ideology
• the material conditions of production in the
  society in which the text is produced and
  consumed.

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Pierre Macherey the textual unsaid/unconscious

• Is constructed in the moment of its entry into
  literary form.
• ? literary genre as a constraint
• the critics do not look for unity, but for
  the multiplicity and diversity of its possible
  meanings, its incompleteness, the omissions which
  it displays but cannot describe, and above all
  its contradictions. (Belsey 109)

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the textual unsaid example 1

• Sherlock Holmes ????
• Its pattern enigma followed by disclosure (with
  total explicitness and scientific spirit)
• The stories are haunted by shadowy, mysterious
  and silent women.

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the textual unsaid example 2

• 1999 Notting hill -- cultural
  stereotypes(source http//www.scholars.nus.edu.sg
  /literature/althusserandmacherey.html ) Hugh
  Grant's repressed British mannerisms are
  contrasted to Julia Roberts' more laid-back
  American behaviour Grant as an underdoga mere
  second-hand bookstoore owner hoping to have a
  relationship with a movie star.

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the textual unsaidNotting hill

• Notting Hill, has a large population of Caribbean
  immigrants. Most Londoners would associate
  Notting Hill with its yearly carnival, a
  celebration of Black British culture.
• The film the only black -- an American movie
  producer. Race is an unconscious element of
  the movie, and at the same time "what it cannot
  say."
• ? the film subscribes to the ideology of
  Englishness.

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Pierre Macherey (for reference)

• We should question the work as to what it does
  not and cannot say, in those silences for which
  it has been made. The concealed order of the work
  is thus less significant than its real
  determinant disorder (its disarray). The order
  which it professes is merely an imagined order,
  projected onto disorder, the fictive resolution
  of ideological conflicts, a resolution so
  precarious that it is obvious in the very letter
  of the text where incoherence and incompleteness
  burst forth This distance which separates the
  work from the ideology which it transforms is
  rediscovered in the very letter of the work it
  is fissured, unmade even in its making. (Pierre
  Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production 115)

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Terry Eagletons Materialist Criticism

• General Ideology (GI)
• Authorial Ideology (AuI)
  Aesthetic Ideology (AI)
• Literary Mode of Production (LMP)
• General Mode of Production (GMP)

The Text
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Modes of production General and Literary

• General Mode of Production (GMP) and Literary
  Mode of Production (LMP)
• Every LMP is constituted by structure of
  production, distribution, exchange, and
  consumption
• It's important to analyse the complex
  articulations of these various LMPs with the
  'general' mode of production of a social
  formation. For instance, how oral LMP can keep
  its traces in a written text.
• E.g. circulating library in the Victorian age,
  oral traces in novel and dramatic monologue
  traditional novel vs. hypterfiction web page.

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General Ideology (GI), Authorial Ideology (AuI)
and Aesthetic Ideology (AI)

• GI is not an "ideal type of ideology in
  general," but the dominant ensemble of ideologies
  in social formation (54). (e.g. Modernist
  Ideology alienation, individualism, liberal
  humanism, elitism, etc. )
• AuI is the effect of the author's mode of
  biographical insertion into GI. (elitism ?
  Eliots emphasis on individual talents and
  tradition his critique of capitalist society)
• Aesthetic ideology
• (e.g. of dramatic monologue, stream of
  consciousness)

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T. S. Eliots The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock

• What is the poem about? How do you characterize
  Prufrock? What stages does he go through in
  this poem?
• How does dramatic monologue help present the
  ideas of this poem? What ideologies does the
  poem criticize, support and/or embody?

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T. S. Eliots The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock

• Five parts
• 1. Decision Let us go then (other city)
• 2. Procrastination And indeed there will be
  time. (other living room rituals self
  questions)
• 3. Destination described For I have known them
  all . . . (other formulas and ornaments self
  crab, etc.)
• 4. Doubt And would it have been worth it. . .
• 5. Self-Rejection No, I am not Prince Hamlet
  (self the Fool other mermaid)

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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock --dramatic
monologue

• A genre in which self-centeredness is both
  foregrounded and critiqued.

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Prufrock Self vs. Society

• Self-aware
• speaks to himself
• worries about his reputation (like the man from
  the inferno)
• of his appearance (prepare a face)
• Indecisive there will be time.
• Good-intentioned (with love)

• The city
• Sick and dirty, (evening, back street, sawdust
  restaurant, fog smoke,)
• 2. The polite society
• good-mannered, ritualistic (plate, toast, tea,
  etc.), but superficial and judgmental (the eyes
  that fix you).

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Prufrock Self-Pity vs. Self-Love

• Self-centered projects his spiritual malaise on
  his physical environment
• John the baptist Lazerus
• Self-rejection

• The city
• --working class invisible
• -- etherize evening
• 2. The Universe turned into a ball
• 3. The other mermaid something mythically
  remote and romantic. ? anticipate Eliots
  interest in classical culture.

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T. S. Eliots authorial ideologies

• Son of an aristocratic St. Louis family
• A poet must take as his material his own
  language as it is actually spoken around him.
  --Correlatively, the duty of the poet, as Eliot
  emphasized in a 1943 lecture, is only indirectly
  to the people his direct duty is to his
  language, first to preserve, and second to extend
  and improve.--Thus he dismisses the so-called
  social function of poetry.

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Eagleton on Eliot

• Goes to Europe with a mission of re-defining the
  organic unity of its cultural traditions, and
  reinserting provincial England into that
  totality.
• The organic unity of late Romanticism
  classicism the surrender of personality to
  order, reason, authority and tradition.
• A latent contradiction between Eliots concern
  for art as organic order and his insistence on
  the sensuously mimetic properties of poetic
  language. (e.g. Traditional and Individual
  Talent vs. Love Song)
• The metaphysical poets as a solution.
• The Waste Land Cultures collapse, but Culture
  survies, and its form is The Waste Land.

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Eliots views of culture and tradition (for
reference)

• Culture - that which makes life worth living'
  one's total way of life, including art and
  education, but also cooking and sports.
• By tradition, also, Eliot means both a conscious
  and an unconscious life in a social continuum....
  He speaks of culture metaphorically as the
  incarnation' of a religion, the human
  manifestation of a superhuman reality. A
  culture's religion should mean for the
  individual and for the group something toward
  which they strive, not merely something which
  they possess. (Contemporary Authors Online,
  Gale, 2003. )

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Jamesons three horizons of criticism

• from immanent analysis to transcendent one
• 1. a level of immanent analysis, text as a
  symbolic act
• 2. a level of socio-discourse analysis, text as
  class discourse
• 3. an epochal level of Historical reading text
  as being embedded in a field of forces of the
  dynamic of various sign systems. (The textual
  heterogeneity can only be understood only as it
  relates to social and cultural heterogeneity
  outside the text.)

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Tony Harrison

• Born on 30 April 1937 in Leeds, a metropolis of
  Englands industrial North. His father --a
  baker, and his mother, a housewife.
• Harrison reads his own childhood education as a
  fall--perhaps fortunate, perhaps not--from the
  paradise of his familys love, brought about by
  eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
  (British Writers)
• His concerns bridge the gap between his
  working-class origins and his upper-class
  education.
• His style usages of rimes and puns.

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Tony Harrison Marked with D

• Questions
• 1. ? What does "D" mean in this poem? How is
  this poem a parody of the original nursery rime?
• 2. What is "heaven" for this baker, and for the
  speaker?
• 3. Why does the speaker feel sorry for the baker?
  Why is the baker turned into a dough or "smoke
  . . . and ash for one small loaf"?

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Marked with D Rimes, Puns and Parody

• The poems puns
• D- death, duty,
• Dough for death or uniform identity (oaf).
• Flame passion/death
• Rise rise from grave to heaven
• Rimes
• over/heaven
• daily bread (? The Lords Prayer) / lead
• Oaf/loaf

• The nursery rime
• B baby
• Cake ? for nourishment
• The unsaid (Ref. Chap 5)
• B? bourgeoisie
• as fast as you can ? the bakers productivity.

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Marked with D Rimes, Puns and Parody

• The poems puns
• D- death, duty,
• Dough for death or uniform identity (oaf).
• Flame passion/death
• Rise rise from grave to heaven
• Rimes
• over/heaven
• daily bread (? The Lords Prayer) / lead
• Oaf/loaf

• The nursery rime
• B baby
• Cake ? for nourishment
• The unsaid (Ref. Chap 5)
• B? bourgeoisie
• as fast as you can ? the bakers productivity.

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Marked with D as a symbolic act Critique of
capitalist society

• Three kinds of ideological control
• Heaven as a reward after death ? religion
  serving capitalism.
• mortal speech
• England the state which controls the worker.
• A disguise of, but not a release from mortal
  speech that kept him down, the tongue that
  weighed like lead ? ideologies which control the
  workers and hide materialist reality (mortal
  speech mortality tongue eating for survival)
  
• The speakers position
• sympathy
• Empowerment smoke no one see rise, stings
  ones eyes

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The Student paper

• Thesis paragraph the first one.
• The poem records and evaluates the bakers life
  
• Revolution is the solution to social inequality.

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The Student paper Development of ideas

• 1. Capitalist implications of the nursery rime
• 2. The bakers life and desire.
• The bakers work as a parallel to his cremation
• The title and the metaphor of flesh as dough
• Fire ? the bakers desire for heaven
• Heaven as part of a capitalist ideology of
  productivity
• 3. The speakers views of the ideological
  control.
• He gets it all from Earth
• the workers hunger for release from mortal
  speech
• ? The worker will not rise
• England
• Solution revolution the small loaf not marked
  with D ?

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The Student paper improvement

• Are there enough clues for revolution in this
  poem?
• Should have clearer topic sentences with logical
  transitions.

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Marked with D 2nd level

• a level of socio-discourse analysis
• The poem as represent Harrisons troubled
  relations with his own working-class background.
  (different but not completely unlike that of
  Lawrences position in relation to his miner
  background.)
• In "Punchline", Harrison writes movingly, but
  with his customary patronising tone, of his
  father's political allegiances
• No! Revolution never crossed your mind! For the
  kids who never made it through the schools the
  Northern working class escaped the grind as
  boxers or comedians, or won the pools.
• (http//www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m0FQP/4430_129
  /54682687/p1/article.jhtml )

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Marked with D 2nd level

• a level of socio-discourse analysis
• His later works criticized for being dogmatic
  or unconvincing.
• The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (1990) the play
  ends with a supposedly climactic scene where the
  dispossessed rise up in rebellion against their
  masters. The scene is embarrassing rather than
  inspiring, though, for Harrison fails to make the
  audience believe that this is the scorned
  proletariat that exists in society today.
• His filmed poem "v." (1987)-- the poet meeting a
  skinhead in the cemetery where his parents were
  buried was hailed as a masterpiece by the liberal
  establishment and vilified by the right. The
  poem seems both dated and unrealistic now. (The
  aggressive skinhead ? questioned as a symbol for
  the disaffected youth of today)

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Marked with D 3nd level

• As part of the struggle of working classes for
  equality.
• How do we understand history, which is twice
  removed from us?

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Macherey on History

• the work is the writers response to a situation
  it is an answer to a problem/question he sets
  himself and he can be ideologically aware of
  what this question is. The real problem, however,
  is the question of that question the first
  question is already an answer to another question
  the first question (the one the writer might be
  aware of) is an ideologically conditioned
  question posed by the writers historical
  situation.

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Macherey on History

• work response to ideological question
• ideological
  response
• to
  history
• (the question behind the question).

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Eagleton on history

• Text Signifier Signification
• Signified
• IDEOLOGY
  Signifier
• 
  Signified
• 
  History
• The relation between text and ideology like that
  between theatric performance and a play.

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Jameson on History

• History as an absent cause
• "it History is inaccessible except through
  textual forms. and . . . our approach to it and
  to the Real itself necessarily passes through its
  prior textualization, its narrativization in the
  political unconscious." (33)

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References

• British Writers. Supplement 5. George Stade and
  Sarah Hannah Goldstein, editors. Charles
  Scribners Sons, 1999.
• Terry Eagleton Criticism and Ideology.
• Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (New York
  Methuen, 1980)